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Painted Wolf

Lycaon pictus

Status: Endangered, population declining due to destruction of their habitat in Africa. In Zimbabwe, the country's political and economic climate has resulted in collapse of much of the eco-tourism that supported these animals, and conservation efforts.

The oldest breed of canines is the painted lycaon. They stalk through the savannas of Africa in highly social and familial packs, hunting antelope. They have lived alongside humans for thousands of years but remain undomesticated, avoiding human contact.

In Egypt's Pre-dynastic period, lycaon were found engraved and carved on objects and jewelry. By contrast, in later Ancient Egyptian imagery, domesticated dogs and wild wolves were instead depicted. It is thought that the lycaon imagery symbolized the chaos of the wild, that later was replaced by the tamed and domesticated canine partners of humanity.

In Enno Littmann's Publications of the Princeton Expedition to Abyssinia he recounts a "Tale of the Debbi". The debbi is described as a wild animal, smaller than a dog, and the story he relates is of a man who goes down to a river to fetch water. Before he reached the river, he noticed a great number of animals gathered around, drinking. Suddenly, the debbi approached, and there was a wild scrambling as all the animals, great and small, fled, leaving the debbi to drink alone, and eventually leave.

The man was puzzled by this, and when he wandered down to the river at last, he found a hair of the debbi, which he tucked into his cloak. When he returned to his village, just as the animals had fled from the debbi, his fellow men and women fled from him, and he was frightened and puzzled. At last, a brave man purchased the strange hair from him and created a talisman of it.

It is said that when a man is a great warrior whose enemies fear him, that "he must have the hair of a debbi about him."

 

References:
Littmann, Enno. "Publications of the Princeton Expedition to the Abyssinia" Volume 2. Late E.J.Brill Ltd. Publishers and Printers, Leyden, 1910.

Baines, J (1993). "Symbolic roles of canine figures on early monuments". Archeo-Nil: Revue de la societe pour l'etude des cultures prepharaoniques de la vallee du Nil.

Hendrickx, S. (2006). The dog, the Lycaon pictus and order over chaos in Predynastic Egypt. [in:] Kroeper, K.; Chodnicki, M. & Kobusiewicz, M. (eds.), Archaeology of Early Northeastern Africa. Studies in African Archaeology 9. Pozna?: Poznan Archaeological Museum