The benefits of group living
In nature there are two fundamental explanations for why animals might live in groups: to improve the amount or quality of what they eat and/or to decrease the probability of being eaten. In the past, speculation about the ultimate function of group living for African wild dogs has focused predominantly on benefits associated with enhanced access to food through co-operative hunting. However, single dogs are able to capture prey as efficiently as groups of dogs and, in Botswana, breeding pairs without helpers have been observed successfully whelping litters of pups while provisioning them from their kills in exactly the same way that a larger pack does. However, most of these packs eventually failed, not because the pair could not feed the pups, but because either the adults or the pups were killed by lions before the pups reached an age where they could contribute as adults to their own and their parents' protection.

The fact that African wild dogs commonly fall prey to lions makes it plausible that wild dogs live in packs primarily in response to intense lion predation pressure. Wild dogs in packs can more effectively avoid predation by lions as a result of the increased probability of detecting a predator. Therefore, as with most social species, increased vigilance is an extremely important function of the social organisation of wild dogs. All dogs, unless physically compromised, are constantly attentive to noises and activities around them, even when they are resting. The wild dog pack also provides an important buffer against predation by the principle of dilution - the theory that being in a group lowers the probability of being captured since a predator can only capture a single individual at a time. From the perspective of any individual in the pack, the probability of its being the one captured decreases the more members there are in the group. From the perspective of an average wild dog pack and its collective reproductive success, the loss of a single individual does not usually translate into total reproductive failure, as it usually does for just a pair of wild dogs.