section_path: Ecology/Competitors
section_name: Competitors
paragraph_text: Competitors
  
  Feral and free-ranging dogs ' potential to compete with other large carnivores is limited by their strong association with humans. Although wolves are known to kill dogs, they tend to live in pairs in areas where they are highly persecuted, giving them a disadvantage when facing large dog groups. In some instances, wolves have displayed an uncharacteristic fearlessness of humans and buildings when attacking dogs, to the extent that they have to be beaten off or killed. Although the numbers of dogs killed each year are relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves entering villages and farmyards to take dogs, and losses of dogs to wolves have led to demands for more liberal wolf hunting regulations.
  
  Coyotes and big cats have also been known to attack dogs. In particular, leopards are known to have a preference for dogs and have been recorded to kill and consume them, no matter their size. Siberian tigers in the Amur River region have killed dogs in the middle of villages. Amur tigers will not tolerate wolves as competitors within their territories, and the tigers could be considering dogs in the same way. Striped hyenas are known to kill dogs in their range.
  
  Dogs as introduced predator mammals have affected the ecology of New Zealand, which lacked indigenous land-based mammals before human settlement. Dogs have made 11 vertebrate species extinct and are identified as a 'potential threat' to at least 188 threatened species worldwide; another figure is that dogs have also been linked to the extinction of 156 animal species. Dogs have been documented to have killed a few birds of the endangered species, the kagu, in New Caledonia.