Donate Renew Join Facebook. Dog Feeding Strategies for a Hunting Day. Pheasants Forever. How you feed your hard-working hunting dog leading up to, during and after a hunt is critical for top performance By Tom Carpenter Every hunting dog owner has his or her own routine for feeding their companion year-in and year-out.
Purina Pro Plan Performance dog food has calories in one cup of its chicken-rice formula. Without a doubt. No questions. The protein, fat and calories can become available to burn. Depending on where they live, the season, the size of the pack, the available prey and other factors, they may eat as infrequently as every second or third day or even longer without suffering any ill effect.
A healthy dog can go a week without food. Dogs meet their nutritional requirements over time. They will eat what they need or seek it out if their body is telling them they need it. It is crucial to the way dogs should be fed because there is evidence that dogs fed all the ingredients they need in proportion at every meal suffer increased health problems.
There are some subtle differences between the diets of the various types of wild dogs we identify above. However, the vast majority eat the same thing: whatever they can find that is edible and readily available. Carrion dead animal carcasses is an important food source for many wild carnivores and omnivores.
Wild-living dogs may stumble across a delicious-looking corpse just about anywhere, but roadkill is likely the most consistent source for this type of food in the developed world. This surely includes large, relatively slow and therefore easy-to-catch bugs, such as roaches, caterpillars, and beetles. But wild dogs also consume the flying bugs foolish enough to fly within snout-snapping range.
Many of us have surely seen this happen with our own dogs, and it is likely a semi-automatic, predatory reflex, rather than an attempt to satiate their hunger. Of course, we should also point out that some dogs seem better-suited for battling bugs than others.
Coyotes, for example, subsist in large part on rats, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, and similar critters , and it appears that wild-living dogs do the same. Slightly larger animals, such as geese and ducks, also end up looking down the business end of a hungry wild canine on occasion.
This includes animals like deer, but farm animals — including sheep, goats, and small pigs — are likely the most common large animals wild or feral dogs eat. In fact, wildlife management officials must learn to distinguish between livestock who were killed by dogs, versus those that were killed by coyotes or wolves. Many times, ranchers are shocked to discover that many supposed coyote or wolf kills were actually caused by stray or feral dogs. This should be expected, as dogs are omnivores, who enjoy a variety of different food types, including vegetables.
For example, a dog may accidentally pick up a mouthful of grass or tree leaves when it picks a dead squirrel carcass off the ground. Many fruits are popular with wild-living dogs as well as truly wild canines, such as coyotes and foxes. This includes everything from the mangoes, peaches, and pears that homeowners cultivate deliberately, as well as common wild fruits, such as blackberries, raspberries, persimmons, and cherries.
All of the above-discussed items show up in the diets of wild dogs with regularity. However, there is one overwhelmingly common food source that just about every wild pooch enjoys: Garbage. After all, human foods make up a large portion of the garbage we throw out on a daily basis, and the dogs living in human homes essentially subsist on leftovers.
Different wolf populations focus on different prey species, but generally speaking, wolves eat large, hoofed herbivores. Wolves also eat smaller prey, such as rabbits and waterfowl, especially when hunting without a pack. Coyotes eat the same types of foods that many wild dogs do, which is to say that they eat a little of everything. They get a lot of their calories by scavenging trash, roadkill, and pet foods left outdoors.
Coyotes are also fond of fruits and vegetables, and some individuals will pilfer the produce homeowners grow. But coyotes also capture and eat living prey. And unfortunately, coyotes occasionally catch and consume small domestic dogs.
African wild dogs are some of the most formidable predators on the savanna, so they eat just about anything they like. Some of their most common targets include zebras, wildebeests, warthogs, antelopes, and gazelles.
Some specimens lack the white tip entirely or may have black fur below the white tip. These coat patterns can be asymmetrical, with the left side of the body often having different markings from that of the right. African wild dogs are native to sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the species' population occurs in Southern Africa and southern East Africa. African wild dogs are mostly found in savanna, and arid zones, open plains, shrubland, and semi-desert, generally avoiding forested areas.
This preference is likely linked to their hunting habits, which require open areas that do not obstruct vision or impede pursuit. Nevertheless, they will travel through the scrub, woodland and montane areas in pursuit of prey.
Forest-dwelling populations of African wild dogs occur in the Harenna Forest, a wet montane forest in the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia.
At least one record exists of a pack being sighted on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. African wild dogs are very social animals, living in packs with separate dominance hierarchies for males and females.
Packs consist of 2 to 27 adults and yearling pups. Uniquely among social carnivores, the females rather than the males disperse from the natal pack once sexually mature.
Males rarely disperse, and when they do, they are invariably rejected by other packs already containing males. They have a higher success rate when it comes to killing prey even though they are smaller than lions and leopards. Their hunting strategies differ according to prey, with wildebeest being rushed at to panic the herd and isolate a vulnerable individual, whereas territorial antelopes, which defend themselves by running in wide circles, are captured by cutting off their escape routes.
Medium-sized prey is often killed in minutes, whereas larger prey such as wildebeest may take half an hour to pull down. Unlike most social predators, African wild dogs will regurgitate food for adult as well as young family members. They are not aggressive creatures and don't fight over food.
Pups old enough to eat solid food are given first priority at kills, eating even before the dominant pair; subordinate adult dogs help feed and protect the pups. African wild dogs are highly specialized for a carnivorous diet. They hunt gazelles and other antelopes, warthogs, wildebeest and their calves, ostrich, and calves of African buffalo. They also hunt smaller prey such as dik-dik, hares, spring hares, insects, birds, and cane rats. African wild dogs rarely scavenge, but have on occasion been observed to appropriate carcasses from Spotted hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, and lions, as well as animals caught in snares.
African wild dogs are monogamous. Every pack has a dominant breeding pair that mates for life. Populations in East Africa have no fixed breeding season, whereas those in Southern Africa usually breed during the April-July period. During this period, the female is closely accompanied by a single male, which keeps other members of the same sex at bay.
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