Dholes live across parts of South, Southeast, and Central Asia, but they’ve vanished from more than 82% of their historic range. Today, an estimated 4,500 to 10,500 individuals remain in the wild, scattered across fragmented forests from India to Indonesia. The species is classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.
Current Range Across Asia
Historically, dholes roamed from the Altai Mountains in Central Asia all the way south through India, Myanmar, and the islands of Southeast Asia. That range has contracted dramatically. They’ve disappeared entirely from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Singapore, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
The remaining populations cluster in two broad regions. India is considered the species’ stronghold, home to three recognized races: Trans-Himalayan, Himalayan, and Peninsular. Southeast Asia supports roughly half the global dhole population, spread across Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia. Smaller, more isolated populations persist in China, primarily in the central-western and northwestern provinces where mountain forests still offer connected habitat. Bhutan also supports dholes across all 20 of its districts, from lowland foothills to high alpine terrain.
India’s Western Ghats: The Global Stronghold
The Western Ghats mountain chain running along India’s southwestern coast holds the largest connected dhole population in the world. This network of protected forests, including tiger reserves and wildlife sanctuaries, provides the prey density and forest cover dholes need. Central Indian forests form a second major population hub, connected by corridors of relatively intact habitat. Both areas benefit from a well-established system of protected areas and reasonable densities of wild prey like deer and wild boar, which help sustain pack-hunting predators.
Forests at Middle Elevations
Dholes are forest animals. They rely on wooded landscapes with enough cover and prey to support a social pack, and the habitat modeling reflects this clearly. The most suitable dhole habitat sits at elevations between 2,000 and 3,000 meters, where mountain forests tend to be dense and wildlife diversity is high. But dholes are flexible. In Bhutan, camera traps have recorded them as low as 110 meters above sea level in the southern foothills and as high as 4,980 meters in the upper Himalayas, an elevation where they overlap with snow leopards. That 4,980-meter record is the highest ever documented for the species.
Climate plays a major role in determining where dholes can thrive. They do best in areas where the temperature difference between day and night stays moderate (around 4 to 5°C), where the coldest winter month doesn’t drop below 10 to 20°C, and where annual rainfall falls between 1,700 and 2,500 millimeters. In practical terms, that describes moist, relatively stable forest environments, not arid plains or extreme alpine zones. Temperature variation and extreme cold are the biggest climate-related limits on their distribution.
What Dholes Need From Their Habitat
Prey availability is the single most important factor beyond climate and forest cover. In Southeast Asia, dholes depend heavily on muntjac, a small deer weighing 20 to 28 kilograms. Muntjac was the dominant prey item across both evergreen and deciduous forests in Laos and Cambodia, and dholes selected it over other available species in every season. Sambar deer, wild pigs, and banteng (a large wild cattle) round out the diet depending on what’s locally available. Where wild prey has been depleted by poaching, dholes turn to livestock, which creates conflict with people and further threatens their survival.
A dhole pack’s territory size depends on how much food is available. In Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in southern India, packs living in natural forest with wild prey maintained home ranges of 36 to 40 square kilometers. Packs living closer to human settlements, where they supplemented their diet with livestock and garbage, used much smaller areas of just 7 to 14 square kilometers. The average across all studied packs was about 24 square kilometers, but that number varies enormously based on habitat quality.
Why the Range Keeps Shrinking
Widespread land-use change across Asia is the primary driver of dhole decline. Forests have been converted to agriculture, fragmented by roads, and degraded by logging. The remaining populations are increasingly isolated from one another, which makes it harder for packs to find mates, establish new territories, and maintain genetic diversity. Prey depletion from snaring and hunting compounds the problem: even where forest still stands, if the deer and wild pigs have been poached out, dholes can’t persist.
Of the estimated 4,500 to 10,500 dholes remaining worldwide, only 949 to 2,215 are thought to be mature breeding adults. That low number of reproductively active animals is a key reason the species carries its Endangered classification. Most remaining populations are fragmented and still declining, and basic information about population size and distribution remains patchy in many parts of the range, particularly in Southeast Asia and China.