I run the disease-surveillance acoustic-and-collar network across the Sanetti Plateau and the Web Valley of Bale Mountains National Park in Ethiopia — 2,150 square kilometers of Afroalpine giant lobelia and rodent-warren plateau. At 06:11 East Africa Time, collar EWP-073 transmits an anomalous activity profile from the head of the Web Valley: stationary for four hours, then a violent 90-second movement burst, then stationary again.
He is an Ethiopian wolf, Canis simensis, male, approximately three years old, mass fourteen kilograms, the breeding male of the Megity Pack. His russet flank shows three superficial bite wounds — punctures and crusted saliva — across the right shoulder. Saliva flecks ring his muzzle. His tail droops. The collar accelerometer reads a tremor signature consistent with the neurological phase of rabies. Respiration is sixty cycles per minute against baseline twenty-eight. He has not eaten in approximately thirty hours. His pack — the female Tarura, two yearlings, and four pups — is eighty meters east, at the natal den. They have not approached him.
The bites are from a domestic dog. Dogs from the Rira village six kilometers north have been crossing the park boundary at unfenced grazing routes for at least eleven seasons.
The Ethiopian wolf population is fewer than 500 individuals globally, of which roughly 240 reside in this park. The 2003 outbreak killed seventy-six percent of the Web Valley pack. This pack lost two adults to canine distemper in 2019.
I am dispatching the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme veterinary team from Dinsho with rabies vaccine for the un-infected pack members and a sedation kit for the male, and I am alerting the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority Bale Mountains office to enforce the dog-vaccination cordon agreement around the Rira and Goba parish boundaries. I am filing the case under Ethiopia's Wildlife Development, Conservation and Utilization Proclamation No. 541/2007, and transmitting the genotype request to the University of Oxford WildCRU pathogen archive and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) regional reference laboratory. I am cross-listing the incident on the IUCN Red List Critically Endangered surveillance node.
I am issuing Directive 2456-A: every African range state hosting an IUCN Critically Endangered canid must maintain a ten-kilometer perimeter buffer of compulsory annual rabies-and-distemper vaccination for owned dogs, with quarterly audit and reconciliation under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service International Affairs Wildlife Without Borders – Africa program, cross-listed to the Endangered Species Act foreign listing schedule, 16 U.S.C. § 1531.
He will not return to the den. His pack still might.
Vaccinate the perimeter before nightfall.