Three brothers from a single litter in Zambia set off on an adventure so long it rewrote the record books — and revealed just how far Africa's wild dogs will roam to find a home.
Meet the Mayukuyuku males, three endangered African wild dogs that left their birth pack in Kafue National Park in mid-2025. Over nine months, they walked more than 4,000 kilometers — about 2,500 miles, nearly half the distance between Cairo and Cape Town — in search of new territory and mates. Scientists say it is the longest mammal movement ever recorded in Africa, and the longest wild dog dispersal on record.
"The biggest surprise may be that the trio survived the journey at all," researchers note, since their path was no straight line. The brothers travelled east out of Kafue, looped north toward the industrial cities of Kitwe and Ndola, doubled back, and then headed east toward the Luangwa River Valley and its population of around 400 wild dogs. By April 2026, the pack had covered 4,126 kilometers to settle in a game management area — a partially protected buffer zone between the national parks of South Luangwa and Lower Zambezi.
"We think they've actually established a territorial range, but we haven't quantified who they're with and how many dogs there are," said Matt Becker, chief executive of the Zambian Carnivore Programme and co-author of the study.
The Mayukuyuku males were among 19 wild dog groups tracked with GPS collars. Not every journey ended well. A female nicknamed EWD-1355 set off from a pack in South Luangwa in 2021 with her two sisters, travelling more than 2,300 kilometers through Zambia and into Mozambique — until she was killed by a hunter's snare set in a game management area in southern Zambia to catch antelope for meat. Snare lines often catch several animals at once.
Still, the tracking revealed a surprisingly connected continent. All 19 groups moved within or around seven national parks in Zambia, and four groups came within a few kilometers of neighboring Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. Combined with earlier studies in Botswana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, the findings suggest wild dog populations across Southern and Eastern Africa remain linked.
That connectivity is exactly what conservationists want to protect.
"If we conserve and continue to improve these connections, a lot of species like wild dogs can make the rest happen," said Nyambe Nyambe, executive director of the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area secretariat, who wasn't involved in the study.
The wild dog ranges are changing, and Becker argues for models that help people and animals share the land — economic benefits through nature-based tourism, or meat produced sustainably through game ranching.
"We don't need to separate people from nature," he said. "We can have these large landscapes, large, connected areas, beneficial to both."
For three wandering brothers, that connected world just got a little bit wider.