Study of the Hunting Behavior of Windhounds by Means of GPS Tracking: Quantitative Characteristics of Prey Search and Coursing

The use of GPS tracking (update rate 1 s) in a natural experiment has made it possible to analyze for the first time the behavior of windhounds dogs in searching and coursing a brown hare as a model of predator-prey interaction. The time course of changes in the coordinates, speed, and direction of movement have been described to characterize quantitatively the hunting behavior of windhounds. Ordered chains of events have been revealed in the seemingly stochastic pattern of field observations. Windhounds speed ranges during prey search and coursing under natural conditions have been determined after preliminary assessment of their dependence on training, breed, and sex-related and individual characteristics of the dogs. The results show that the effectiveness of coursing is not directly related to the speed of windhounds and provide evidence for the existence of differences in behavioral strategies between breeds, i.e., for the influence of genetic features on the patterns of movement, search, and prey coursing. Similarities and differences in the hunting behavior of windhounds and wild predators of the genus Canis are discussed.