We help the world’s greatest scientists save endangered animals

We’re absolutely convinced though that those markings apart from being an exceptional camouflage, they also the dogs will identify each others by their markings. And then they have this white tail which obviously serves as a communication. And they have a they have a long distance call which we call the who call that most people hear which is a says help help and at the end it’s got the name of the dog at the end will be a little I’m Greg. So not only will they recognize on the coat patterns but they’ll also recognize on the individual voice animals. You know, the more we realize, the more fascinating some of these pieces become.

And in fact, when they sleep, they sleep in what we call sleep heaps where every single dog is just piled on top of each other. And and what it is, it’s reinforcing bonds. Well, they haven’t got just one they want to be close to. They want to be close to everybody. So, the best thing to do is just to lie in a big heap. And it seems that the dog on the bottom’s the happiest. But bottom line is every single day every dog wakes up, he greets everybody else and meaningfully greeting, not just kind of howdy.

Hey, howdy. He would actually physically go and and like yeah touch and say hello to every other dog in the pet and every other dog doing the same. So you can imagine it’s chaos. It’s, you know, hello. It’s an enormous number of greetings, but it’s stops them. it it stops the conflict because later on in the day they’re more likely to be forgiven and it’s preemptive conflict resolution. It’s very neat.

But interestingly, painted dog females do not choose the males based on the biggest and the strongest. And I’ve even seen, you know, one female chosen male, he had half an ear. They’re choosing for brains clearly and and leadership qualities, which is quite neat, actually. And they’re not all squabbbling for leadership position. And if Alpha male gets injured, he’s not all immediately pushed over in a coup. And as soon as he’s better again, they’ll say, “Oh, good. Here’s the here’s your job back.” It’s exceptional society.