Dhole

Dholes hunt in cover thick enough that visual contact fails within metres, so the pack stays together acoustically. The contact call is a rising whistle, clean and carrying, unlike anything else in the canid repertoire — enough to coordinate a spread-out group through bamboo and sal without alerting the prey to a single approaching animal.

Their fate is tied almost entirely to ungulate numbers. Dholes need a dense prey base of chital, sambar and wild pig, and they disappear from forests where that base has been hunted out even when the trees remain standing. Protected areas in southern and central India now hold much of what is left; outside them the species has largely gone quiet.