So here’s a pop quiz, or perhaps a trick question: Can dogs climb trees?
A week ago, I went to an all-day seminar for zoo volunteers. In her part of the presentation, Northern Trail supervisor Diana Weinhardt told us several, or perhaps all seven, of the zoo’s Asian wild dogs — a highly social species also known as dholes — have been climbing a tree in their exhibit. We knew she wouldn’t lie to us, but I envisioned something short and shrubby. Thursday was finally warm enough to make the half-hour Northern Trail hike tolerable, and in the dhole-viewing gazebo, I gazed fondly at a pile of five napping Asian wild dogs before lifting my eyes and jumping half out of my skin. I mean, this tree is really pretty tall, is it not? The dhole looks as if it were photoshopped up there, but I swear it wasn’t.
My online exploration of canine tree-climbing led me to this excellent website on canids, which mentions more species of wild dog than I’d previously heard of and divides them into doglike vs. foxlike canids. There’s general agreement that only the gray fox, thanks to its curvy claws, can climb trees. But dholes, while their redness makes them look very foxlike, fall into the doglike category with wolves. Scientifically they have their own genus, Cuon. The preceding website says they’re so agile that they can pee while doing a handstand on their forelegs (not sure why they’d enjoy that). My zoo lit describes them as excellent jumpers, able to cover 10 feet in a single leap and 2o feet with a running start. Those two facts explain how the dhole got up in this tree, with its many thick, level branches, but I still wanted to see how he got down. And it took only another 10 minutes or so for that to happen.
The dhole made a cautious, clumsy descent, paw-testing each branch to see if it would support about 40 pounds of dog-weight and glancing frequently at the service road behind the exhibit. (The tree made an excellent lookout post for passing vehicles, and the dhole was fascinated by one when I first saw him.) The process didn’t look like one that would necessarily end well, and I felt a little worried. But he wasn’t much lower than this when he made his graceful leap to the ground, landing as lightly and securely as an Olympic figure skater after a basic lutz jump. I resisted the urge to applaud before I moved on.