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b'This week we\\u2019re looking at some strange and mysterious canids from around the world!\\n\\nThe African wild dog:\\n\\n\\n\\nA dhole:\\n\\n\\n\\nAn old photo of the ringdocus and a newer photo of the ringdocus:\\n\\n \\n\\nA coyote:\\n\\n\\n\\nSri Lankan golden jackal:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe maned wolf MONEY SHOT:\\n\\n\\n\\nA bush dog:\\n\\n\\n\\nA stuffed Honshu wolf, dramatically lit:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week let\\u2019s look at a bunch of mystery doggos from around the world! I really like dogs, but for some reason dogs and their relations don\\u2019t come up much on the podcast. When I started looking into mystery canids, though, I found so much information that there\\u2019s no way I can stuff even half of it into one episode. So we\\u2019ll definitely be revisiting mystery dogs in the future.\\n\\nThe family Canidae includes dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, and foxes. Yes, foxes are canids, but not closely related to more dog-like canids. We\\u2019re going to skip the foxes this week, since foxes deserve an episode all their own eventually.\\n\\nDogs were domesticated at least 9,500 years ago, possibly as long as 14,700 years ago, maybe even as long as 36,000 years ago. Dogs and humans go way back. The closest living relative of the dog is the gray wolf, which is still alive today, but the wild ancestor of the domestic dog was a different species of wolf that has gone extinct.\\n\\nThere are canids called wild dogs, but they\\u2019re not the same species as domestic dogs. The African wild dog, for instance, is not very closely related to dogs and wolves\\u2014in fact, it\\u2019s the only species in its own genus. It\\u2019s a tall, lean canid with large ears and no dewclaws. It has a yellowish coat with black blotches and some white spots, including a white tail tip, although some subspecies have darker coats. As the dog ages, it loses its fur until old dogs are nearly bald. It hunts in packs and mostly preys on antelopes, warthogs, ostriches, hares, and rodents.\\n\\nThe nomadic Tuareg people who live in northern parts of Africa around the Sahara have stories of a supernatural creature called the Adjule, among other names. The Adjule\\u2019s description makes it sound a lot like the African wild dog, including its lack of a dew claw. Since the African wild dog is rare in that part of Africa, it\\u2019s possible that rare sightings of what is a distinctively odd-looking animal may have given rise to the stories.\\n\\nAnother so-called wild dog is the dhole, also called the Indian wild dog, which is closely related to the African wild dog. It used to be common throughout Eurasia and North America, but these days it\\u2019s restricted to parts of Asia and is endangered. It looks something like a fox and something like a wolf, but is neither. Like many other canids in this episode, the dhole has its own genus. Because it tends to be easily tamed and is sometimes kept as a pet, researchers once believed domestic dogs might have descended from the dhole or an ancestral species of dhole, but genetic evidence shows that the dhole isn\\u2019t closely related to domestic dogs or to wolves.\\n\\nThere are three subspecies of dhole, two of them reddish-brown in color and one with fur that\\u2019s pale brown in winter. But there is a mystery animal called the gray dhole that may turn out to be a fourth subspecies or something else.\\n\\nThe gray dhole supposedly lives in the forests and mountains of Myanmar. It\\u2019s dark gray with a black muzzle and small, round ears, and is supposed to be smaller than the other dhole species. In 1913 a Major E.G. Phythian-Adams wrote about the grey dhole after he saw one that year, and in 1933 E.H. Peacock mentioned it in his book A Game Book for Bhurma and Adjoining Territories. In 1936 an explorer named Tsaing reported seeing one in Burma. But after these reports, the Bombay Natural History Society tried to find physical evidence of the animal in the 1950s, but couldn\\u2019t track down anything. They only found one person who even reported seeing the grey dhole...'