A Coorg planter who has had opportunities of observing the habits of those dogs, tells me that when hunting a deer they do not run in a body, but spread out rather widely, so as to catch the deer on the turn if it moved to right or left. Some of the dogs hang behind to rest themselves, so as to take up the running when other dogs, which have pressed the deer hard, get tired. He once had a bitch the product of a cross between a Pariah and a jungle dog. When she had pups she concealed them in the jungle, and in order to find them she had to be carefully watched and followed up. She went through many manoeuvres to prevent the discovery of her pups, and pottered about in the neighbourhood of the spot where she had concealed them, as if bent on nothing in particular. Then she made a sudden rush into the jungle and disappeared. After much search her pups were found in a hole about three feet deep, which she had dug on the side of a rising piece of ground. The bitch did not bark--the jungle dog does not--and the pups barked but slightly, but the next generation barked as domestic dogs do.
Many years ago I met with a very singular and puzzling circumstance in connection with jungle dogs. I had offered a reward of five rupees for a pup, and one day several natives from a village some three or four miles away, brought me a pup--apparently about six or eight months old. This, it appears, they had caught by placing some nets near the carcase of a tiger I had killed, and on which a pack of these dogs was feeding. They drove the dogs towards the nets, which they jumped, but the pup in question was caught in the net. My cook now appeared on the scene and declared that the pup belonged to him, and that he had brought it from Bangalore, and on hearing this I declined, of course, to pay the reward. As I had never, and have never, seen a jungle dog pup, I neither could then, nor can now, undertake to say whether the pup was a wild one or not, though it seemed to me that it might have been a kind of mongrel animal with a good deal of the pariah dog in it. The natives then requested the cook to take the pup and pay them five rupees for their trouble. This he declined to do, and they then said they would take it back to the carcase of the tiger and let it go. This they did, and the pup was never heard of again, and I assume that it must have rejoined the wild dogs. As my cook had no conceivable motive for falsely asserting that the dog was his, I can only assume that the animal had strayed away and joined the pack of wild dogs.