Basket Donate search. A severe drought in Kenya is putting giraffes, zebras and other animals at extreme risk. Can you help get water and food to these starving animals? Find out more here or donate to help the grazing wildlife here. Protecting Africa's most threatened carnivore and world's rarest canid dog, wolf and fox family. Immediately, wolf populations are threatened by disease outbreaks, particularly rabies, which has the potential to wipe out entire populations of the species.
Domestic dogs accompanying people and livestock into the Afroalpine bring with them the danger of disease and a significant reservoir of hosts in which to maintain epidemics. IEWCP is acknowledged as being the longest running conservation programme in Ethiopia, and the only programme that is concerned with saving the Ethiopian wolf from extinction. Based out of the Bale Mountains National Park in south-eastern Ethiopia, we promote sustainable solutions for the conservation of Ethiopian wolves by addressing the most serious threats affecting their populations.
Our work is centered on capacity building within the Ethiopian conservation community, the monitoring of wolves and Afroalpine resources, disease prevention and control, community education and awareness, and habitat protection support.
AWF supports the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme, which administers rabies and distemper vaccines to the wolves, but also to area domestic dogs, who can carry rabies and pose a significant disease threat if not vaccinated. To date, the program has vaccinated tens of thousands of dogs. Adults measure —1, mm Adult males weigh Or, it could be the wolves blend in with the scattered geladas, and the rodents simply do not notice them.
With numbers so small, Ethiopian wolves are highly vulnerable to disease outbreaks, and in the past few years, they have experienced devastating rabies and distemper outbreaks. AWF also has invested in high-end eco-lodges in the Simiens and Bale Mountains parks that help create jobs from nature-based tourism.
As we have seen with other rare species such as Florida panthers , Tasmanian devils and great Indian bustards , low genetic diversity can result in inbreeding, impaired birth rates and the inability to adapt to diseases or other ecological threats. The danger for Ethiopian wolves is not theoretical—rabies outbreaks in —92 and each killed several hundred wolves. The year study, conducted by researchers from the Zoological Society of London and other organizations, examined the genetics of 72 wild Ethiopian wolves from seven different populations.
One of those populations, at Mount Choke, died out over the course of the study. The researchers found very little gene flow between the populations and conclude that restoring this flow—possibly by relocating some males or restoring migration corridors—could help increase the number of wolves while reducing the likelihood of inbreeding.
The animals aren't likely to travel between populations on their own. Ethiopian wolves, which arrived in the region , years ago during glacial times, have adapted to grassy, mountainous ecosystems 3, meters above sea level, where they prey almost exclusively on high-altitude rodents such as the big-headed mole rat Tachyoryctes macrocephalus.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia's human population continues to expand , from 48 million in to Travel barriers and fragmentation aren't the only threats the wolves face. The animals are legally protected in Ethiopia but according to the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme they still face persecution by farmers afraid of potential livestock predation. Overgrazing by cattle has also damaged existing habitats and reduced the rodent populations that the wolves depend on for food.
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