The biological starting point is the rabies virus itself, a member of the Lyssavirus genus with a remarkable host range. Although the virus can infect virtually all mammals, phylogenetic adaptations and transmission ecology mean that only species within the orders Carnivora and Chiroptera are thought to sustain independent transmission cycles, and the rabies virus is the only lyssavirus maintained within Carnivora. Some species act as maintenance hosts, or reservoirs, in which the virus persists without outside input, while others are non-maintenance hosts that depend on spillover from reservoirs. Across sub-Saharan Africa, side-striped and black-backed jackals (Lupulella adusta and Lupulella mesomelas), bat-eared foxes (Otocyon megalotis) and mongooses (Cynictis penicillata and Herpestes sanguineus) have all been identified as potential maintenance hosts, and molecular studies have suggested species-specific viral strains related to those circulating in domestic dogs in some South African populations.

Whether such host-specific adaptation is actually required for a wildlife reservoir to emerge remains an open question, and the review highlights a striking natural experiment from Namibia. In the country’s eastern communal areas, rabies cases in domestic dogs are rare, yet canid-biotype rabies virus is detected frequently in black-backed jackals, suggesting that a strain that originally came from dogs is now being maintained by the jackal population without continued input from its ancestral host. This raises the possibility that ecological and behavioural factors, rather than viral adaptation alone, determine whether a new host species can sustain transmission. The practical consequence is sobering: in 2016, an outbreak of rabies in domestic dogs and cattle in South Africa was linked to black-backed jackals, and in Namibia jackals appear to play a significant role in transmitting the virus to livestock each year. Livestock losses to rabies are estimated at 512 million US dollars annually, with African countries bearing the greatest burden.

The conservation stakes are equally severe. Rabies outbreaks in endangered, non-maintenance carnivores such as African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), Ethiopian wolves (Canis simensis) and Blanford’s foxes (Vulpes cana) have crashed populations and contributed to local extinctions. The most cited example comes from Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains National Park, where a 1990 outbreak reduced the Ethiopian wolf population from roughly 450 animals to between 100 and 150 within five years. Because these small, socially structured populations are highly vulnerable to any pathogen that spreads through close contact, rabies control in wild carnivores is framed by the review’s authors as inseparable from food security, public health and biodiversity conservation.

Among the preventive strategies assessed, the review finds a mixed picture. Landscape features matter: Bayesian phylogeographic analyses of rabies in domestic dogs in Tanzania’s Serengeti district showed that rivers disrupted viral spread while roads facilitated it, meaning natural barriers should inform the design of targeted vaccination campaigns. Manmade fencing can also reduce contact between infected and susceptible animals; studies in Sierra Leone found that unvaccinated dogs kept within fences had significantly lower rabies antibody titres, and upgrading fences around a South African reserve reduced the number of rabid dogs entering Kruger National Park. But the authors caution that fencing at the scale needed to separate wildlife reservoirs would demand intensive surveillance to locate infected populations, enormous resources, and could fragment habitats, disrupt migration, cause inbreeding and even trigger mass mortality if animals lose access to water. Carcass disposal, meanwhile, may be a prudent precaution since scavenging carnivores could ingest virus from rabid livestock, though experimental work in skunks suggests oral transmission may require abrasions in the mouth, and no studies have quantified how long the virus persists in carcasses. Translocation control is another priority: the accidental movement of raccoons in the United States ignited an East Coast raccoon rabies epidemic, and sub-Saharan Africa’s extensive conservation translocations and seasonal pastoral movements make rigorous vaccination and antibody testing before animal movement essential, even where regulations formally exist.

Population control has a darker history. Culling and habitat destruction were once used across Europe and North America on the assumption that rabies is density dependent, and jackals were poisoned in South Africa in the 1950s for the same purpose. The evidence, however, shows these approaches were largely ineffective and may even worsen transmission by destabilising social structures and prompting animal movement. They also raise serious ethical and ecological concerns, and are no longer recommended by the World Organisation for Animal Health. A more surgical option, point infection control, which culls high-risk individuals around an outbreak focus and combines this with trap-vaccinate-release and oral vaccination, successfully helped prevent raccoon rabies spreading from New York into Ontario, Canada. But it is labour-intensive, depends on active surveillance, cost roughly 616 dollars per square kilometre in Canada in 2008, and has never been attempted in sub-Saharan Africa, so the review treats it as a drastic short-term tool to be evaluated case by case.

Vaccination emerges as the backbone of any long-term strategy. Parenteral vaccination, delivered by trap-vaccinate-release, darting or during immobilisation, guarantees each animal receives a full dose and has repeatedly protected endangered canids: emergency campaigns in the Bale Mountains in 2003, 2008/9 and 2014/15 induced protective antibody titres in Ethiopian wolves, and mathematical modelling suggested that vaccinating just 20 to 40 percent of that population would prevent the extinction otherwise predicted without intervention. The approach carries baggage, however. After every member of a Serengeti African wild dog pack died following parenteral vaccination in the 1990s, conservationists feared immobilisation stress could reactivate latent virus, a hypothesis later disproven when another immobilised pack showed no excess mortality. Still, the cost, labour and technical difficulty of darting small or elusive species mean parenteral vaccination cannot achieve herd immunity in large reservoirs such as jackals; its role is safeguarding small, endangered populations.

That leaves oral rabies vaccination, developed for wild carnivores in the 1960s and now the only wildlife rabies management strategy with proven efficacy over wide areas, having helped much of Europe and North America toward rabies-free status. No ORV campaign has yet been run in sub-Saharan African wild carnivores, but small-scale trials have laid the groundwork. SAD (Berne), Raboral V-RG and RABIGEN SAG2 vaccines all elicited protective antibody titres in trials with side-striped and black-backed jackals, African wild dogs and Ethiopian wolves, though sample sizes were small, between 8 and 23 animals, and efficacy in mongooses and bat-eared foxes remains untested. Safety matters too: SAD (Berne), though highly immunogenic, is pathogenic to chacma baboons and thus unsuitable, whereas Raboral V-RG and SAG-2 have been distributed roughly 250 million and 20 million times respectively without safety concerns. Practical hurdles are formidable. SAG-2 baits lost significant titre within a day in direct sunlight but stayed stable for two to three days under grass or soil, and Raboral V-RG is stable only between 8 and 37 degrees Celsius, constraining campaign timing. Targeted hand distribution, guided by territory surveys, increased bait uptake in Ethiopian wolves compared with random distribution, but covering baits to protect them from sunlight limits scale and raises cost. Bait preference studies in wolves, wild dogs and jackals must be expanded, ideally identifying baits attractive to multiple co-occurring reservoir species.

Domestic dogs cannot be left out of the equation. Canine rabies variants, Africa 1a and 1b, dominate sequences from wild carnivore cases, and Ethiopian wolf and African wild dog outbreaks occur more often near high-density dog populations. Models suggest vaccinating 70 percent of dogs annually can eliminate canine rabies, and in Tanzania a 35 percent increase in dog vaccination coverage was associated with a 75.3 to 91.2 percent reduction in probable jackal cases. Yet outbreaks continued around the Serengeti despite large dog vaccination campaigns, and sylvatic cycles such as the herpestidae biotype appear to persist independently, so dog vaccination alone will not suffice. No modelling of wildlife-specific vaccination thresholds exists for the region, a gap the authors flag as critical. Every sub-Saharan country currently scores between 0 and 2.5 out of 5 on the WHO’s Stepwise Approach Towards Rabies Elimination, underscoring how far dog vaccination programmes have to go.

Underpinning everything is surveillance, which the review describes as the hinge on which all control strategies turn. WOAH identifies four core components: disease detection, pathogen identification, data analysis and communication, and information management. Direct fluorescent antibody testing remains the reference diagnostic, with 93 to 96 percent sensitivity and 96 to 99 percent specificity, but many sub-Saharan laboratories lack capacity, fewer than half the region’s countries report genomic sequencing ability, and underreporting, fragmented data platforms and donor-dependent funding undermine existing systems. Promisingly, lateral flow devices detecting rabies antigen in saliva could eventually enable non-invasive antemortem testing in low-resource field settings. The authors call for integrated active and passive surveillance, population monitoring, systems such as WAHIS-Wild, and a genuine One Health collaboration spanning governments, veterinarians, medics, ecologists, communities and neighbouring countries. Their verdict is clear: point infection control to contain initial outbreaks, mass oral vaccination of reservoirs, parenteral vaccination of endangered populations and optimised mass dog vaccination, all guided by strong surveillance, offer the only realistic path to controlling rabies in Africa’s wild carnivores, but delivering it will demand research, resources and interdisciplinary commitment on a scale the region has not yet seen.

Subject of Research: Rabies control strategies in wild carnivore reservoirs across sub-Saharan Africa

Article Title: A narrative review of rabies control strategies in wild carnivores across sub-Saharan Africa

Article References: Strawford-Sussmann, P., Rooney, N., Bueno, I., Marker, L., & Schmidt-Küntzel, A. (2026). A narrative review of rabies control strategies in wild carnivores across sub-Saharan Africa. Discover Animals, 3(1), Article 101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44338-026-00229-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00229-4

Keywords: rabies, wild carnivores, sub-Saharan Africa, oral vaccination, mass dog vaccination, jackals, Ethiopian wolves, surveillance, One Health, zoonotic disease, wildlife conservation, lyssavirus