Jackals consist of three species of small- to medium-sized carnivores, namely, the black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) and the side-striped jackal (Canis adustus) of sub-Saharan Africa, and the golden jackal (Canis aureus) of northern Africa and south-central Eurasia.
There is virtually nothing in the peer-reviewed published literature about the clinical presentation of rabies in jackals. At the level of the local population, case occurrences support a pattern of maintaining independent epizootics and then being free of rabies for periods of time is essentially similar in domestic dogs, jackals, and other canids. As such, some studies have questioned the ability of jackals to support rabies virus cycles (Cleaveland & Dye, 1995; Rhodes, Atkinson, Anderson, & Macdonald, 1998). Based on the study of discrete local dog populations, domestic dogs appear to support rabies virus infection endemically, whereas it is thought that local populations of jackals do not (Rhodes et al., 1998). At least some authors exert that the jackal populations of Zimbabwe and the rabies viruses they support should not be considered metapopulations because they do not have, as dog populations do, the spatial separation or interpopulation migration that would be necessary for them to be considered metapopulations.
If population structure is viewed as a nested hierarchy of subpopulations, many smaller epidemics may occur in different subpopulations, where most transmission occurs at this local level, and broader spreading of a disease is driven by occasional long-range individual transport. An absence of a metapopulation structure may explain the failure of rabies persistence in jackal populations. This absence, rather than their inability to maintain virus, is proposed to distinguish jackals from dogs as hosts of rabies virus variants, particularly in Zimbabwe. But, as stated in the opening sentence of this section, there is an obvious lack of descriptive and research studies about the pathogenesis and clinical presentation of rabies in jackals, irrespective of rabies virus variant.
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