I was delighted to be invited along by my wonderful local charity IWCT to their amazing fundraiser in aid of African Wild Dogs. I have supported IWCT before due to their wonderful work surrounding their ongoing campaigning against the dog meat trade in the Philippines.

Their equally important Wild Dog Campaign is just up my street, as I adore all wild canids; wolves, wild dogs, foxes, dingoes etc and this evening was particularly special as it was to raise funds for new tracking collars for a lovely pack of Wild Dogs they have been breeding for re-release in Tanzania.

I attended with my animal loving good friend Kate Snowdon. We met up with the talented and compassionate Judi Dench was present along with Peter Egan who was hosting the night for IWCT, as well as the fabulous IWCT Trustee David Mills who donated his ground breaking British Wildlife Centre as a wonderful venue for the evening’s entertainment. Other notable guests included Trustee John Hawkridge, conservationist David Shepherd and charismatic presenter and journalist Robin Page from TV hit series ‘One Man and his Dog’. The evening was arranged by the wonderful Kaytie Grant who is a fellow mum at my son Kai’s school. It was so lovely to attend a completely local charity event a stone’s throw from my village. I even bumped into my daughter’s delightful retired headmistress Margaret Cook.

As well as a lovely vegan / vegetarian meal, guests were treated to a wonderful auction and raffle before being entertained by a local Tanzanian acrobat troop.

Here is some information surrounding the Wild Dog Project:

Mkomazi National Park is in the north of Tanzania along the Kenyan border. It covers an area of nearly 3,300 square kilometers. Together with Tsavo National Park in Kenya to the north of the border, it forms one of the largest and most important protected ecosystems in Africa and is now a trans-frontier national park.

The African Wild Dog is an extremely endangered species. Diseases, large predators and man threaten their existence. At the beginning of the last century there were approximately 500,000 wild dogs across 39 countries and in the early 1990’s this number reduced to only 3,000!

African Wild Dogs are the wolves of Africa, a vanishing species, mysterious, elusive and constantly moving packs, they possess no territories; only when the alpha female whelps does the pack settle down for a few months until the pups are old enough to travel.

For years they were despised as vermin, shot and poisoned by farmers, hunters and game wardens. Condemned as livestock killers, they became fugitives, their numbers gradually depleting. In areas where game has become scarce, wild dogs tend to get close to human settlements. As a consequence, they are poisoned and may come into close contact with domestic dogs. As the African Wild Dog is susceptible to diseases also found in domestic dogs, such as canine distemper and rabies, cross infection can occur, leading in some cases to high mortality.

In 1995 GAWPT began a captive breeding and translocation programme for the African Wild Dog, in order to restore their rapidly diminishing numbers and has now been breeding wild dogs successfully for the past 20 years in 6 breeding compounds at the base camp.

To find out more about the wonderful work that IWCT does, please visit their website: https://www.iwct-uk.org/#home