A dog's life in the human jungle

Anindita Bhadra Author

04/26/2022 Added

216 Plays

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This is a recording of Dr. Anindita Bhadra's presentation for the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation given on April 22, 2022.

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[00:00:00.240]Jeffrey Stevens: Excuse me, our first speaker is Dr. Anindita Bhadra.
[00:00:05.040]Jeffrey Stevens: Dr Bhadra is a behavioral biologist at the Department of biological sciences at the Indian Institute of science and education and research kolkata.
[00:00:15.900]Jeffrey Stevens: She received her master's in zoology from Calcutta university and a PhD in ecological sciences from Indian Institute of science Bangalore.
[00:00:24.540]Jeffrey Stevens: She founded the dog lab in kolkata where she studies, the behavior ecology and cognitive abilities of dogs using the free ranging dogs in India as a model system.
[00:00:34.770]Jeffrey Stevens: she's particularly interested in understanding evolution of dog human relationships.
[00:00:39.510]Jeffrey Stevens: Dr Barbara is the recipient of the Indian National Science academy young scientist award the science and engineering research board women excellence that will work and the Inter academy partnership young scientist award.
[00:00:52.110]Jeffrey Stevens: Dr dre was the founding Chair of the Indian national young Academy of science and the co Chair of the global young academy she's currently the associate dean of the international relations and outreach at Indian Institute of science, education and research kolkata.
[00:01:08.220]Jeffrey Stevens: Dr Barbara is actively engaged in various outreach activities, including popular scientific writing and fun fact.
[00:01:16.110]Jeffrey Stevens: This is great it's like like to know these kinds of little personal details she's a professional thespian and is leads a theater group actually along with her husband, which I think is really cool to know, so please join me in welcoming Dr Bob draft.
[00:01:32.700]Anindita Bhadra: In queue check for the very kind introduction I hope i'm clearly audible to everyone.
[00:01:43.710]Anindita Bhadra: Just could you let me know if i'm clearly audible so that I can get started.
[00:01:48.540]Jeffrey Stevens: everything's great Thank you.
[00:01:50.340]Anindita Bhadra: Thank you so yeah, so I would be I guess the only speaker here talking completely about dogs on streets and their lives and, as I call it the urban jungle.
[00:02:05.490]Anindita Bhadra: So be with me, as I take you through a journey of 12 and a half years of the dog lab at as a kolkata.
[00:02:13.650]Anindita Bhadra: I like to say that we study the private lives of dogs on the streets of India.
[00:02:18.630]Anindita Bhadra: And typically people tank the research group at the end of the talk, but I thought i'll begin with this by introducing you to the group that does all the hard work.
[00:02:29.820]Anindita Bhadra: And then we tell people that we study dogs that typical question that I face is all dogs which breeds, and you know what kind of dogs are looking at and what What about dogs that we don't know yet, and when I tell them, you know dogs, I think the images that people have in mind our.
[00:02:54.630]Anindita Bhadra: stuff like this, where we are thinking of our best friends the pets that we are also fond of.
[00:03:02.730]Anindita Bhadra: However, what most people not working on dogs don't know and don't realize as that talks that have evolved from.
[00:03:15.060]Anindita Bhadra: Was ancestors like worlds and have gone through domestication with humans majority of the world's population of these talks, even today are really in the fury aging populations across the world.
[00:03:28.740]Anindita Bhadra: And these free ranging tags are perhaps the earlier conditions in which dogs coexisted with humans before we started.
[00:03:37.830]Anindita Bhadra: You know, artificially selecting traits breeding them for certain traits keeping them in our homes and sleeping with them in our beds and considering them as parts of our family so.
[00:03:49.950]Anindita Bhadra: If you look at the global distribution of dogs, then the entire global South almost has free ranging populations, and then there are some countries also belong into the global not which have a free ranging populations of dogs.
[00:04:06.060]Anindita Bhadra: When I looked at the lives of dogs just give me a second because I want to just tell us this if I possibly can.
[00:04:16.800]Anindita Bhadra: Anyone can tell me how to remove the speck from the top.
[00:04:27.390]Anindita Bhadra: No, I can't okay anyway, so if i'm looking at the life of Doc then above, for example, born on the street experiences complex interactions but that's mother, with a semblance all that other dogs and the group mostly adults and with humans with humans.
[00:04:51.120]Anindita Bhadra: Whether we like it or not, talks and streets, at least in India have a very complex relationship, it is a mixture of love and hate so, on the one hand humans are a source of food and, at least in India, they are also the major source where they talks find shelter.
[00:05:13.470]Anindita Bhadra: Especially when they are giving bought and I will show you data and support of this very soon.
[00:05:20.820]Anindita Bhadra: Of course, a lot of people love talks they show a lot of care, you know pet random dogs on streets three dogs give them medication even adopt them as pets.
[00:05:33.330]Anindita Bhadra: But then there are also a lot of people in the population, who are dog heaters, and this particular image is something which has remained with me for the last four years or so.
[00:05:44.340]Anindita Bhadra: of puppies which were poisoned and a hospital provides and kolkata simply because somebody thought that dogs should not give Bob and the prices of the outskirts of the hospital.
[00:06:00.780]Anindita Bhadra: And of course we in this country have this specific problem of rabies and India has a really big burden of rabies, it says.
[00:06:10.590]Anindita Bhadra: Like 36% of the world's rabies debts are happening in India and there's, of course, a lot of conflict between the two populations of humans and dogs because of dog bites and rabies.
[00:06:27.750]Anindita Bhadra: Interestingly, when I look back at human history this particular image is of course an illustration of a story which goes back hundreds of years.
[00:06:43.110]Anindita Bhadra: More than 1000 years in fact in Britain history, and this is the epic from India, known as the mahabharata and this ends with the story of a dog.
[00:06:54.870]Anindita Bhadra: A stray dog which followed the protagonists up the Himalayas the mountains and, finally, the last surviving provider who reached heaven reach there with the dog and.
[00:07:11.100]Anindita Bhadra: The story goes like this that the dog was just following them and they bonded with the dog and one after another, the brothers fell and died until the eldest reach heaven and when.
[00:07:24.930]Anindita Bhadra: He reached the doors of heaven, he said that I will enter heaven, only a few also allow me to take this dog in, and this is a beautiful story because.
[00:07:36.660]Anindita Bhadra: Not because of heaven or the kings but because it always reminds me that dogs in this ecosystem has not really changed much because even today.
[00:07:47.070]Anindita Bhadra: stray dogs would suddenly find you and follow you around and actually they can cross territories are following a human they have bonded with and attempts get into a lot of trouble with dogs and other territories, so if I look at 3D engine dogs and India.
[00:08:05.700]Anindita Bhadra: They are of course a very interesting model system for studying dog human evolution, we in this population and the subcontinent have a long shared history.
[00:08:15.750]Anindita Bhadra: And, of course, what I tell people when I need to sell my idea to get across and, especially, and still.
[00:08:23.070]Anindita Bhadra: Try to make people understand why we need to understand behavior and ecology of dogs, I always say that only if you know the ecology and behavior of a species, can you even think of reducing conflict and managing the population.
[00:08:39.660]Anindita Bhadra: In India, no matter where you go if there are humans, there are dogs be at a CB be at the top most mountain village be at the fringe of a forest or in the middle of the most populous city, there are dogs in every possible microhabitats.
[00:09:02.610]Anindita Bhadra: I try to put this work in a global perspective and today on Earth Day, I could not help mentioning that.
[00:09:10.860]Anindita Bhadra: We need to look at how our research everything that we do fits into the Sustainable Development Goals, and I think our work follows or fits into three calls out of the 17 that one health or well being human health approach sustainable cities and communities and, of course, life on land.
[00:09:36.840]Anindita Bhadra: So what do we do at the dog lab.
[00:09:39.750]Anindita Bhadra: We try to understand how dogs interact with each other, we have been working on different aspects of dog dog interactions are beat meeting behavior parents will care.
[00:09:51.750]Anindita Bhadra: interactions between siblings in a group territorial interactions competition over food space and meets we try to understand how dogs interact with humans on the streets, looking at humans as resources, looking at humans as threats.
[00:10:08.190]Anindita Bhadra: We also do a lot of cognitive experiments trying to understand how smart these dogs really are and how they compare repair dogs.
[00:10:17.250]Anindita Bhadra: Are we look at their ability to solve physical cognition tasks we have looked at their ability to distinguish quantities.
[00:10:25.650]Anindita Bhadra: And we look at food preference, especially in the context of scavenging and then doing all of this we are trying to put together small puzzle pieces of the puzzle in the big picture, to understand how talks became man's best friend.
[00:10:42.930]Anindita Bhadra: So I begin with some very basic work that we have done and built on this to come to the last part of my talk, where I talk about dog human interactions.
[00:10:54.360]Anindita Bhadra: So what does a dog still look like how much active our dogs when humans are active on the streets was one kind of question that we started asking many years back.
[00:11:06.000]Anindita Bhadra: And my last graduate students already that did a very comprehensive study to understand the time activity budgets of dogs around the clock with.
[00:11:18.060]Anindita Bhadra: More than 5600 sightings of dogs spread spread out over a year and we found that if you look at the time activity budget and look at resting or inactive behaviors and active behaviors.
[00:11:33.480]Anindita Bhadra: And then, if you look at active behaviors and different categories of interactive and self and then for the divide all of these into.
[00:11:42.090]Anindita Bhadra: postures gates maintenance feeding foraging vocalizations and any other things that you see individual dogs doing as opposed to interactive behaviors related to meeting play.
[00:11:53.700]Anindita Bhadra: between my interactions between mothers and POPs interactions and dogs and humans, and of course interactions between POPs and does, as I mentioned the beginning.
[00:12:04.140]Anindita Bhadra: Then, looking at the time activity budget be find that, if you look at around the clock, starting from midnight to midnight talks are most active during the period 9am.
[00:12:18.360]Anindita Bhadra: To about about 11pm, and this is also the time of the day and night when there are people on the streets of course people are on the streets even earlier but dog activity.
[00:12:31.650]Anindita Bhadra: Primarily, is speaking it within this time and they're more than 50% active and actually peaks happen more towards starting around four o'clock to around.
[00:12:43.710]Anindita Bhadra: Nine o'clock so they were actually more active during the time of human activities on the streets, which also makes sense if humans are their source of food.
[00:12:56.640]Anindita Bhadra: If I look at the lives of dogs, we started initially asking if there is a seasonality of birth and they found.
[00:13:06.180]Anindita Bhadra: The graph goes from September to August and we found that there is definitely a peak and the number of POPs in the population.
[00:13:15.720]Anindita Bhadra: And the speed happens during December January, which is winter season here, and this data comes from hundred and eight mother letter units covering for 30 bucks over the span of five years.
[00:13:28.320]Anindita Bhadra: Now, the point is not that there is a peak but the point that we were concerned about this after this there is a sharp decline.
[00:13:35.730]Anindita Bhadra: So if dogs are being born in the winter, where are they going by the time it's summer and why are the vanishing from the population, so we started looking at causes of mortality.
[00:13:51.540]Anindita Bhadra: And we also looked at survivorship data and we found that survivorship actually decreases constantly as the pups grow older the data here is plotted and survivorship for every month of pop age until seven months, which is when in this population they start attaining sexual maturity.
[00:14:12.450]Anindita Bhadra: Where we looked at the causes of death, we found that.
[00:14:18.660]Anindita Bhadra: Human influence that directly humans, causing death as 32% which could be either because they're people are beating up pups or killing them in some way or because of accidents, natural debts which are causes like disease or.
[00:14:37.380]Anindita Bhadra: The mother being dead and the pups not being able to find enough food or because another adult dog has killed the pups in a territorial fight.
[00:14:47.550]Anindita Bhadra: natural causes of death are only 32% 31% popsicle missing from the population and when we try to look at this qualitatively, we find that often children.
[00:15:00.000]Anindita Bhadra: Primarily children would pick up a cute looking puppy and take it home, but unfortunately most families.
[00:15:08.340]Anindita Bhadra: drive the POPs out when they grow older they don't want the talks to grow into adults in these households they don't want to keep them as pets.
[00:15:17.010]Anindita Bhadra: And these POPs and juveniles cannot survive on their own and they mostly get killed.
[00:15:23.370]Anindita Bhadra: So we found that the highest mortality actually occurs in the fourth month of page and very soon, I will show you why this fourth month of puppet is very, very significant.
[00:15:36.030]Anindita Bhadra: And if I looked at all the contributions that humans had and the mortality of dogs then human influenced and missing together was the human induced debt which added up to a higher percentage of 63 which was quite alarming.
[00:15:55.050]Anindita Bhadra: No fee qualitatively knew that mothers sure, a lot of character POPs and we wanted to quantify the maternal care levels.
[00:16:05.760]Anindita Bhadra: And we realized that because the pups are being born in winter having a good training site might be the first level of care that a mother might.
[00:16:16.740]Anindita Bhadra: Provide to her puppies so we tried to ask is the mother finding a good suitable 10 when she is about to give birth.
[00:16:28.920]Anindita Bhadra: Because when you are looking at pets, we are the caregivers But then when you're looking at the free ranging dog puppies then from birth to.
[00:16:42.150]Anindita Bhadra: Our the juvenile period everything that ensure survival has to be given by the model, so this this made us think that maybe even before, but the mother is actually providing care to her pups so we looked at dancing behavior and the affiliation talks.
[00:17:04.410]Anindita Bhadra: My students region, he actually went around looking for dense and which births had happened, and we had a total of 148 10 sites.
[00:17:14.730]Anindita Bhadra: Which we've measured in terms of their physical features land Brett hite or whether a does.
[00:17:22.230]Anindita Bhadra: underground above ground whether it's in a shaded place because sometimes there's rain in the winter and then it gets very cold whether it's close to resources What are those resources.
[00:17:33.720]Anindita Bhadra: Whether it's a, it is a site where there's high human disturbance or not, and we also looked at all when each.
[00:17:41.130]Anindita Bhadra: letter was born and then we put together all of these parameters.
[00:17:46.110]Anindita Bhadra: And yeah so This just shows you some of the dating sites are on our campus you can see here they pretty much give birth everywhere, but all of these are places.
[00:17:57.210]Anindita Bhadra: Where there is human activity, this is just a garbage dump somewhere or this used to be a campus we had an agricultural University, which was a transit campus or it was a semi rural habitat.
[00:18:08.760]Anindita Bhadra: And here, you see, this is my favorite somebody abandoned SOFA said became the den for these pups to be born in.
[00:18:17.070]Anindita Bhadra: And these are dense which humans have enhanced after the birth of the pups so when we looked at the data if I look at this graph this is count on the y axis.
[00:18:29.340]Anindita Bhadra: On this axis of the qualitative data we converted into scores, and then scores increased in this direction and litter size in the den increased in this direction.
[00:18:42.360]Anindita Bhadra: What this graph sums up in terms of the data and also through the statistics is that the combination of the size of the den and access to resources significant contributor to attend being selected by the mother.
[00:18:59.100]Anindita Bhadra: And you found that unlike many animals which avoid humans, when they are giving birth pregnant females were.
[00:19:07.050]Anindita Bhadra: Typically, begging more and relying on human provided food and they were telling close to humans in instead of avoiding them because humans, provide them protection, as well as food when there are puppies around in spite of the generally high level of mortality in the population.
[00:19:29.070]Anindita Bhadra: Nobody asked is the mother really putting in an effort to find the den or is it just a pattern that we are seeing which does not require any inputs our efforts from the side of the mother.
[00:19:42.960]Anindita Bhadra: So three journey actually followed around of famous which looked like they were pregnant for a bond or until they gave birth.
[00:19:53.820]Anindita Bhadra: To ask rather mothers are selecting dense randomly or is that really a choice, so there were 25 pregnant females that total data which finally ended.
[00:20:05.910]Anindita Bhadra: Enough number of days for the tracking our and we found that mothers were resting and digging on making.
[00:20:15.120]Anindita Bhadra: kind of space in two to six intermediate dense So the first place where we see them we call it the first and.
[00:20:23.250]Anindita Bhadra: The last place where the final give birth is called the final Dan and in between these every other place where the mother is resting for prolonged periods of time or she is digging a hole.
[00:20:34.260]Anindita Bhadra: And resting and trying to go inside it we call it a den or an intermediate them and they found that.
[00:20:42.270]Anindita Bhadra: The final 10 high the higher than score compared to the first 10 and the average of the intermediate dense, which means that the mother was selecting dance.
[00:20:54.630]Anindita Bhadra: rejecting them when the found better options so obviously they were putting in an effort to find the right den before they gave birth.
[00:21:03.840]Anindita Bhadra: So this is definitely included and care provided by the mother to her unborn pumps now what happens when the pub sub one.
[00:21:15.120]Anindita Bhadra: Again, just to show you cleansers of mothers and their pups, incidentally, these are all images from my own garden and backyard.
[00:21:26.940]Anindita Bhadra: This is finally one of the grown juveniles, unfortunately, all of these pups have died in this is really something I i'm very thrilled about this particular female whom we call porky.
[00:21:42.630]Anindita Bhadra: was born to this mother in our garden, and this was last year when we were right there when she was popping out one after another, so you can see how much.
[00:21:54.780]Anindita Bhadra: They trust humans, they know and how close they let you come if you are their friends and those were pookie sparks, unfortunately, all of them are passed away.
[00:22:06.810]Anindita Bhadra: Because polka died when these pups will really small and we could not make the pub survive.
[00:22:16.560]Anindita Bhadra: Now we look at maternal care post but.
[00:22:20.940]Anindita Bhadra: My graduate student first graduate student mine up Paul or she did all of this work she followed 22 mothers and their letters.
[00:22:31.110]Anindita Bhadra: which belong to 15 dog groups, because some groups had two mothers and again this is extensive observation from third week of the.
[00:22:40.680]Anindita Bhadra: box age to 17th week, the first two weeks we don't start the mothers that typically in the den.
[00:22:47.250]Anindita Bhadra: cuddled around the pups most of the time and they get very upset if you look very close, and these are of course not dogs familiar to us, so we started observation at the third week and the mother starts coming out.
[00:22:59.040]Anindita Bhadra: and leaving the pups alone for some time and we continued until the 17th week wherever possible.
[00:23:07.680]Anindita Bhadra: event eventually we got.
[00:23:09.900]Anindita Bhadra: More than 1400 dollars of data from which we looked at first, the proportion of active care which each individual pop receives So how do we do it.
[00:23:21.930]Anindita Bhadra: We look at the age of the pups in weeks we look at the letter size here and for each model we estimate the time spent giving care to her pups as a litter and divide this by the letter size and we found that.
[00:23:37.650]Anindita Bhadra: There is a negative correlation between letter size and the proportion of active care received by a pub.
[00:23:45.150]Anindita Bhadra: And between age of the proportion of active care and the age of the box so as the pups grow older the mother decreases her care.
[00:23:54.060]Anindita Bhadra: As the POPs on the number of POPs in a little increase the mother decreases her care, so there is definitely a competition between the siblings for maternal care so from from the perspective of the siblings or the pups.
[00:24:10.050]Anindita Bhadra: It is better if they have fewer siblings so that they can receive more care.
[00:24:16.500]Anindita Bhadra: So the mothers were regulating the level of active care, according to the number of pubs that they had to nurture but, after a point it's saturated and did not grow with every incremental the number of hops.
[00:24:30.750]Anindita Bhadra: So, having too many siblings is not very good for the pups but then having more pups and the letter is good for the mother, because with the same care she can, in principle, nurture more pups and given the high rate of mortality.
[00:24:45.960]Anindita Bhadra: It might actually be beneficial to have larger larger sizes for the model.
[00:24:51.810]Anindita Bhadra: We looked at proportion of time that the mother spends an active care versus passive care like just guarding the pups or line with them in a pile and keeping them warm.
[00:25:03.210]Anindita Bhadra: So we found that as the pups are growing older the time spent in passive care marked in green is increasing the time spent in active care and marked in red is drastically decreasing and passive care was not impacted.
[00:25:19.230]Anindita Bhadra: By the size of the little so the mother could spend as much time caring for them in directly, where it was low energy expensive but, when it came to energy expensive behaviors she was really rationing her time spent in these behaviors.
[00:25:37.740]Anindita Bhadra: We also looked at the distribution of different kinds of behaviors shown by the mother and care as the POPs for growing older.
[00:25:45.210]Anindita Bhadra: And you could see that the distribution if we just follow the color patterns definitely changes with pop ah, the pink showing suckling behavior which reduces drastically after 13 weeks the Gray here marking sleeping in a pile the green here marking protective behavior etc.
[00:26:06.120]Anindita Bhadra: be focused more closely on the most important maternal care behavior which is nursing and we found that 14 weeks of page onwards, that nursing completely stops.
[00:26:19.380]Anindita Bhadra: Moreover, nursing actually decreases constantly as pups grow older and mothers spend about 18% of their total time and the third week and then.
[00:26:32.160]Anindita Bhadra: In nursing and then this time investment decreases gradually as the pups are growing older.
[00:26:40.260]Anindita Bhadra: Now reading we would all know, is a very, very important behavior from an evolutionary as well as behavioral perspective because the mother has to regain her so reserves before she can invest in the next letter and this.
[00:26:57.930]Anindita Bhadra: This is why behavioral biologists and evolutionary biologists like to understand, meaning behavior in mammals, they looked at the proportion of suckling boats which were initiated by mothers marked in red triangles and pups marked as open circuits notice third, fourth, fifth week.
[00:27:20.820]Anindita Bhadra: You will see 50% or so initiation by mothers, as well as POPs however six week onwards, you would see more initiations by the pups than by the mothers.
[00:27:35.310]Anindita Bhadra: And eight weeks on eight week on words you would see that majority or most of the initiations are by the pups which basically shows that the interest in nursing is reducing from the side of the mother, but the pups are demanding to sucker.
[00:27:53.940]Anindita Bhadra: And this window of eight to 13 week the behavior very nicely fitted with the classic predictions of parent aspirin conflict theory given by Robert rivers.
[00:28:06.750]Anindita Bhadra: The also looked at the duration of each suckling nursing bout.
[00:28:13.200]Anindita Bhadra: The boats are marked in red when their mother initiated marked and blue when their puppy initiated.
[00:28:19.830]Anindita Bhadra: And the data revealed that the duration of mother in each initiated nursing radios drastically from the eighth week.
[00:28:28.530]Anindita Bhadra: And again, this window matched perfectly the previous window, where we saw that initiation of nursing by the mother was decreasing.
[00:28:39.060]Anindita Bhadra: So using both of these we say that it to 13th we can be identified as the reading period and docs and why is this so important from the perspective of US understanding.
[00:28:51.690]Anindita Bhadra: dogs, because I tried telling people if you are going to adopt a puppy wait at least till the eighth or 10th week when have entered this meeting period before that they really need their mothers, please don't take them away from their mothers at this time.
[00:29:11.130]Anindita Bhadra: So we created a timeline of maternal care until seven weeks of age, there is very high level of actual maternal care.
[00:29:19.890]Anindita Bhadra: Eight to 13 weeks marks parent aspirin conflict beyond 13 weeks there is mostly passive care when they are being called juveniles and until they attain sexual maturity which could be a six months or seven months or eight months there is some variation of the level of the population.
[00:29:40.440]Anindita Bhadra: Interestingly, when we were looking at maternal care we also realized that sometimes there are other adults in the group who show care to the puppies.
[00:29:52.920]Anindita Bhadra: And we wanted to really understand what was happening, and I call this the great Indian child families, because an Indian tradition giant family systems have.
[00:30:06.330]Anindita Bhadra: been very well known, where there are grandmothers uncles on everybody taking care of children and the family and the dogs reminded me of this tradition of great let's try and families in the Indian culture.
[00:30:20.700]Anindita Bhadra: So who are these kid and relatives from this data we had 19 mother literary units are from these 15 groups where we found Allah care or care by an adult other than the model, if you look at the distribution that are five groups where there is only maternal care.
[00:30:41.370]Anindita Bhadra: There are three groups where there are females, other than the model showing care to the puppies, there are three grooms other were males are showing calf.
[00:30:54.120]Anindita Bhadra: And then there are 10 in which there are both kinds of Allah care by female and male and maternal care and there is an outlier marked here and pale yellow because in this case the mother died when the pups war one day old.
[00:31:10.710]Anindita Bhadra: The clan mother mother's mother, who was heavily pregnant started.
[00:31:17.640]Anindita Bhadra: nursing these pups and had a miscarriage herself and then she raised these pups which were actually or grandpa.
[00:31:28.230]Anindita Bhadra: So when we looked at the time spent an active care by mothers and.
[00:31:46.620]Anindita Bhadra: Please receive higher care from the mothers than they do from other mothers.
[00:31:52.920]Anindita Bhadra: I will take a minute to play this video.
[00:32:00.300]Anindita Bhadra: Is the video playing Can somebody just confirm.
[00:32:05.070]Jeffrey Stevens: Yes, it's playing thanks.
[00:32:08.790]Anindita Bhadra: So these are all meals.
[00:32:17.370]Anindita Bhadra: that's regurgitation something that mothers do quite often.
[00:32:21.600]Anindita Bhadra: Starting from five weeks of page.
[00:32:53.100]Anindita Bhadra: So.
[00:32:54.750]Anindita Bhadra: We call these males who show care to data father's This is because.
[00:33:00.750]Anindita Bhadra: We knew that these meals had mated but the mothers, but these are promiscuous limiting animals both males and females mate multiply.
[00:33:10.770]Anindita Bhadra: So we had no way to say whether these world really the biological fathers, but they were behaving like father, so we call them mutated fathers.
[00:33:19.860]Anindita Bhadra: And when we looked at this graph which we had shown you for the mothers distribution of care behaviors and compared it with the fathers.
[00:33:29.790]Anindita Bhadra: Of course, fathers could not nurse but Father strode behaviors like piling up they showed behavior like protection and play.
[00:33:39.720]Anindita Bhadra: And then we looked at the data to statistics, the conclusion could be the broad conclusion could be mothers are mostly engaged in feeding while fathers are mostly engaged in place.
[00:33:51.480]Anindita Bhadra: which was very interesting and when we actually compared the levels of care given by disputed fathers, they were quite comparable to the levels by.
[00:34:01.530]Anindita Bhadra: levels of care given by the mothers, no friends, we had seen aloe mothers, we had expected that alone mothers would show care like grooming or pain or protection.
[00:34:14.370]Anindita Bhadra: But we also found cases when Allah mothers were nursing, which is the most expensive maternal care behavior and we wanted to know what on earth is happening Why are these females nursing aloe pups.
[00:34:29.760]Anindita Bhadra: So why do our mothers nurse non Filial pups was the big question that we asked, and in order to address this question, we started looking at each bout of Allah nursing very, very closely.
[00:34:44.040]Anindita Bhadra: So the same graph which i've shown you in terms of mother initiated and pop initiated suckling boats now has another.
[00:34:52.950]Anindita Bhadra: Point added to it, which is Allah mother initiated nursing boats and they all of this is sitting on the X axis, that is why they are hard livers.
[00:35:02.640]Anindita Bhadra: So basically all boats of aloe nursing was out of the interest of the pups the aloe mothers were never initiating nursing towards non Filial pups and this comes from data of almost 600 volts of Allah circling across 11 letters.
[00:35:23.160]Anindita Bhadra: We looked at termination so what proportion of aloe suckling was being terminated by the aloe mothers, and that is 100% and here is just a nice image of this female actually turning back and showing aggression to a pop which was trying to.
[00:35:44.190]Anindita Bhadra: sucker from her so the smaller one as her pop this larger one is actually her siblings from the next letter.
[00:35:55.020]Anindita Bhadra: So Allah does did not volunteer to nurse non affiliated pups they were victims of male theft, this was a very interesting finding because my path as known in a hard living animals like giraffes and deal but has never been studied in keynotes before.
[00:36:16.530]Anindita Bhadra: So now, if I looked at pumps life, it has increased chances of survival, because it has very caring mothers.
[00:36:23.520]Anindita Bhadra: Helping on sisters grandmother's Those are all the genetic relatives who act as a new mothers and they have attentive pure data fathers, in spite of that only about one in five up survive until adulthood, and the population.
[00:36:42.720]Anindita Bhadra: The other aspect of behavior that we are currently looking into is how efficient are these dogs as scavengers because they again have a history of hunting.
[00:36:54.420]Anindita Bhadra: And in fact dogs they of course are being fed by us, but then free ranging dogs have to rely on whatever food they can get mostly from human generated resources, so they are acting as scavengers the population.
[00:37:09.750]Anindita Bhadra: i'm going to look at tell you about two kinds of work that we are doing.
[00:37:13.530]Anindita Bhadra: One is to actually look at who are the competitors in the urban habitat for the dogs and for this we are looking at what we call the scavenging Guild or community.
[00:37:25.410]Anindita Bhadra: And this is an ongoing piece of work very we have seen that dogs are competing with a large number of species of birds quitters cats goats and now even close.
[00:37:37.050]Anindita Bhadra: So what do we do we give them food and we video record whoever comes to feed at the site.
[00:37:44.910]Anindita Bhadra: For one are and from this, we tried to estimate diversity we did this work in different kinds of microhabitats rural or urban, suburban and we tried both vegetarian food and non vegetarian food because India people eat both kinds of food and feed both kinds of food two dogs.
[00:38:05.160]Anindita Bhadra: let's just to show you some preliminary data when we looked at diversity of scavengers within each session of one are.
[00:38:13.260]Anindita Bhadra: We found that there is higher diversity even vegetarian food is given, which is basically rice mixed with either lentils, or some gravy from vegetable dishes and as opposed to non vegetarian food, where the same rises mixed with gravy from either a chicken dish or chicken Curry or efficient.
[00:38:36.570]Anindita Bhadra: When we looked at the diversity across rural urban and semi urban habitats, we find rural habitats have higher diversity of scavengers, which is expected because cities would definitely not.
[00:38:50.100]Anindita Bhadra: sustain all kinds of species and this increasing diversity is mostly because of increasing number of bird species which come to feed at the sites.
[00:39:00.000]Anindita Bhadra: So session diversity was higher for vetch food in the rural habitat.
[00:39:05.340]Anindita Bhadra: Then we looked at a combination of the habitat type and the food type that we were giving at.
[00:39:12.690]Anindita Bhadra: different locations and looked at diversity, we found that the combinations together significantly explain the different kinds of diversity is that we get.
[00:39:23.100]Anindita Bhadra: And in all kinds of habitats, irrespective of whatever food, we were given we were always getting dogs so dogs are present in rural, as well as urban habitats.
[00:39:36.540]Anindita Bhadra: Interestingly, we found just to briefly explain what this graph says frs first responder and our is non responder rr is rest of the responders of sequence of response.
[00:39:48.600]Anindita Bhadra: Second responder third responding so we are trying to see how the diversity is affected when the dog is the first to reach the food.
[00:39:57.750]Anindita Bhadra: or dog dogs do not respond in one R and R the second to reach the food third to reach the food and so on, and we see basically that dogs have a significant influence on the diversity of the scavengers which.
[00:40:15.420]Anindita Bhadra: Is our first responders diversity is low because dogs are finish it off, most of the food when they come last or they don't come at all, then BC high diversity, irrespective of the habitat and the food type so dogs do have a major major influence on the scavenging community in all habitats.
[00:40:36.210]Anindita Bhadra: Now i'm going to tell you about some experiments that we did when we tried to see food preferences and, in this first set of experiments, we gave really small pieces of bread, salt and chicken broth diluted chicken broth and water.
[00:40:52.680]Anindita Bhadra: And we tried to see if dogs will actually show a preference or whether they will act as general as probe scavengers and eat anything that the get because they really are constrained by resources.
[00:41:05.460]Anindita Bhadra: So we found that when they sniff anything which smells of chicken they show what we call a sniff and snatch strategy, so they sniff chicken that grab it.
[00:41:14.910]Anindita Bhadra: And we showed that dogs are using a rule of thumb which can be read as if it smells like meat eat it and juveniles did not have a preference for as adults had a strong food preference.
[00:41:29.970]Anindita Bhadra: Now, this was a very artificial scenario in which the student uninterrupted done the experiment, so the next student row one who came about saying.
[00:41:38.460]Anindita Bhadra: let's try and mimic a more realistic situation we call this the dustbin experiment and rowan has done a series of these experiments i'm going to tell you about only two of them, so we have these past.
[00:41:50.880]Anindita Bhadra: baskets with legs, in which row and mixers real garbage riley's plastic packets ball, you know.
[00:42:00.480]Anindita Bhadra: Broken bottles not glass plastic bottles paper all kinds of stuff which is non edible garbage and in that he heights.
[00:42:09.690]Anindita Bhadra: One basket has 10 pieces of raw chicken mixed with garbage another has five pieces of chicken and five pieces of bread, a third has only 10 pieces of bread.
[00:42:21.270]Anindita Bhadra: And the dogs are given one minute to find the food and eat it and.
[00:42:26.550]Anindita Bhadra: rowan did this first experiment that 96 or does on the streets, and you can imagine it's not very easy to single out a dog from a group and do an experiment like this.
[00:42:36.030]Anindita Bhadra: And what we found was protein as the protein box is the most eaten from.
[00:42:43.110]Anindita Bhadra: And when they looked at sniffing there is no difference, so the dogs are coming sniffing out the boxes finding where the meters and eating it.
[00:42:52.890]Anindita Bhadra: So they clearly showed a preference for me, even when within a span of one minute, they had to sniff out find the food and eat it.
[00:43:01.950]Anindita Bhadra: No one said, but then yes they're using the rule of thumb, but we are you know serving the food still in a platter to an individual job, what if we give this starts to a group of dogs.
[00:43:15.240]Anindita Bhadra: Now he has done a large number of experiments with groups and collect compared the data with solitary dogs and we are right now preparing the.
[00:43:22.980]Anindita Bhadra: first draft of the paper, so the first data set i'm showing you, we have the group data and solitary data, and we are looking at the latency or the time to respond to the task and we find that, when they are in groups, they respond faster as compared to when they are solitary.
[00:43:43.500]Anindita Bhadra: So competition does impact decision making, because here a dog is competing with its own crew members.
[00:43:51.630]Anindita Bhadra: Then we compared the proportion of times the sea carbohydrate em mixed and pea protein boxes are sample from then we see that the proportion of time.
[00:44:06.000]Anindita Bhadra: spent in handling the carbohydrate box, as compared to protein and mit's box is lower, so when it's a combo box they're not really spending too much time.
[00:44:16.470]Anindita Bhadra: Whereas for the solitary dogs they spend equal amount of time between the mixed and the car.
[00:44:23.010]Anindita Bhadra: box, the mixed and a protein box, but protein box is higher handled and a carbohydrate box, so there is the patterns and scavenging start differing when you look at an individual dog versus stocks in a group.
[00:44:39.150]Anindita Bhadra: When we look at the pre eating sampling time and the post eating the first time to eat and then, if they're going and sampling again, we find that the dogs, who have sampled all the boxes before eating.
[00:44:52.770]Anindita Bhadra: They are less likely to sample post eating, so if they have sniffed and eaten from a box, they are less likely to go and sample again from another box, so they are spending their time and eating model, rather than changing the decision.
[00:45:09.600]Anindita Bhadra: So, competition is actually impacting the handling of choices available to the talks.
[00:45:16.830]Anindita Bhadra: When we looked at sampling across the three boxes, adding sniffing and eating all put together this was not different for the groups, which basically.
[00:45:28.680]Anindita Bhadra: translates into the fact that when competition happens it really reduces choices available.
[00:45:35.640]Anindita Bhadra: And what we really see when we break down the data is that the first responders and the second responders from the group are really picky.
[00:45:42.750]Anindita Bhadra: The rest just eat whatever they can get which means they will not waste the food it, even if it is not their preferred food.
[00:45:51.000]Anindita Bhadra: So when we look at all of this, together, we find that dogs are dominant scavengers the Community they follow a rule of thumb if it smells like need eat it and preference can be set aside in the face of competition.
[00:46:06.810]Anindita Bhadra: i've come to the last section of the talk, which is how well dogs understand humans.
[00:46:13.440]Anindita Bhadra: So humans, as I mentioned at the beginning, are a source of food here, you see juveniles actively begging from a person who's sitting and eating at a roadside eatery.
[00:46:25.950]Anindita Bhadra: And people, of course, feed dogs actively like, in this case, literally being fed on a platter.
[00:46:34.080]Anindita Bhadra: and
[00:46:35.850]Anindita Bhadra: Then, of course, they do gaze at you, and make eye contact, which means there might be a role of oxytocin and all of these interactions so all of this work was done by my boss graduate student they bought them.
[00:46:48.840]Anindita Bhadra: So the first experiment and here, these are all sets of experiments, where we have.
[00:46:54.210]Anindita Bhadra: Used paradigms from literature on pet dogs and adapted them to work on the streets, the first set of experiments were to ask whether dogs, who have never been trained.
[00:47:05.520]Anindita Bhadra: can follow pointing gestures of humans, and these are humans they're not familiar with, so you walk out on the street find a group of dogs, which you have never met before and do these experiments.
[00:47:16.200]Anindita Bhadra: So the test condition is the responding control condition is no point in looking straight ahead, we have plastic balls one has a piece of food and the other is Chan baited by Robin chicken and both are covered.
[00:47:29.820]Anindita Bhadra: Somebody does this sets it up and then the experimenter goins goes and then either points or does not point.
[00:47:38.070]Anindita Bhadra: We did this with a large number of pups juveniles and adults and fed we looked at the data we found that pups are very, very good at following pointing.
[00:47:50.460]Anindita Bhadra: So 80% of the pups and the population followed the pointing gesture, whereas for juveniles and adults, the results were not different from.
[00:47:59.340]Anindita Bhadra: 50 interestingly, for the adults, for each dog we had done three trials of the experiment.
[00:48:08.730]Anindita Bhadra: What we found is when they follow pointing and get a reward they show positive reinforcement and tend to follow pointing again.
[00:48:18.150]Anindita Bhadra: When they follow pointing and to not get a reward issue negative reinforcement and don't follow pointing and the next trial.
[00:48:25.560]Anindita Bhadra: This is shown only by the adults, not by the juveniles, not by the puppies so obviously there is some degree of learning with age, which is involved, because remember these are unfamiliar humans are the dogs are needed for the first time.
[00:48:41.880]Anindita Bhadra: We also tried to test how good they are at following complex pointing gestures like momentary pointing and dynamic just pointing.
[00:48:51.540]Anindita Bhadra: are both cases we tested 60 unique a does, and both cases we actually found results which were an improvement from the dynamic proximal choose so both cases or does followed the complex pointing.
[00:49:06.960]Anindita Bhadra: More than they had followed the simple pointing and we realized that this might be, because they are more used to people throwing them a piece of food.
[00:49:17.850]Anindita Bhadra: And not really people feeding them from a bowl and they might actually consider a person bending low in front of them a threat because people might bend low and pick up a stone or a stick to shoo them away rather than give them food.
[00:49:33.900]Anindita Bhadra: They also tested their ability to understand friendly low threatening gestures and high threatening gestures so friendly gesture is when a person bends a little puts out his hands and calls out to the dog usually using gestures that we typically use here in India are low.
[00:49:54.300]Anindita Bhadra: Low impact right, as you just raise a hand standing away from the dog high impact read, as you have one foot piece of steak which you raise you don't do anything else just show the stance and after each of these, then the dog is given.
[00:50:10.830]Anindita Bhadra: A piece of food which is.
[00:50:11.910]Anindita Bhadra: known as the food provisioning face and after every social view of what provisioning phases done and that dogs are tested randomly for one of the social few phases.
[00:50:23.430]Anindita Bhadra: And what we found is that dogs will not approach humans who have shown high threatening to even when a piece of chicken is offered, whereas for low threatening you.
[00:50:36.240]Anindita Bhadra: know they can actually approach, but this approach is lower than in case of the friendly gesture, or the nutrient.
[00:50:43.320]Anindita Bhadra: So dogs to understand human postures and gestures, which I now used to tell people you know if you are scared of dogs, please don't you know.
[00:50:52.980]Anindita Bhadra: chase them away don't throw a stone at them, just because a dog is looking at you are barking at you just raising a steak not doing anything to the dog really can be enough to shoo them away.
[00:51:05.430]Anindita Bhadra: Now, again, this was tests that we did with solitary dogs, so we asked what can happen when you do the same with a group of dogs and.
[00:51:15.870]Anindita Bhadra: In order to save time I just sum up the result which showed that dogs in groups are bolder because.
[00:51:23.220]Anindita Bhadra: In high impact threatening us there is significantly higher response in the food provisioning phase in the group condition than in the solitary condition, but still, this is much lower than the friendly gesture, or the low impact gesture.
[00:51:41.190]Anindita Bhadra: We asked how dogs build trust humans, and this is my absolute favorite experiment a dog is offered a piece of chicken on the ground and a piece of chicken and the hand.
[00:51:51.600]Anindita Bhadra: The dog makes a choice to feed either from the hand or from the ground and then for half the dogs, it has offered another piece of food for half the dogs, it is better price on the head.
[00:52:04.620]Anindita Bhadra: And we found that and we do the trial again and we found that most docs prefer to take the food for the first time on from the ground without making body contact.
[00:52:14.910]Anindita Bhadra: And, irrespective of whether you have given them the social rewards condition marked in Gray, or the.
[00:52:21.420]Anindita Bhadra: No social target condition marked in black most dogs do not change their first choice and do not just start feeding from your hand just because you've Patrick them or giving them food.
[00:52:33.390]Anindita Bhadra: They did a low long term experiment asking the same question so in this case 21 randomly chosen dogs were followed for a period of 15 days at increasing intervals.
[00:52:45.420]Anindita Bhadra: They were tested, with the same experiment and again they were given a piece of food as a reward irrespective of what choice they made.
[00:52:52.830]Anindita Bhadra: The dots show dogs which have taken the food from the hand crosses show the ones which haven't and 11 out of 25 individuals were obtaining the food reward from the ground.
[00:53:07.260]Anindita Bhadra: fans I did this for social reward we saw that just after one day of social reward there was a huge change just looking at this, you can see, the number of dots have increased so on day 07 dogs took food from the hand on day 1515 dogs were.
[00:53:24.780]Anindita Bhadra: Taking food from the hand and we concluded that dogs will respond to a social reward rather than a future what.
[00:53:33.750]Anindita Bhadra: We did a longer term experiment, combining this and the previous experiment so in the control condition on day one dogs were tested.
[00:53:42.990]Anindita Bhadra: For following of pointing gesture, then half the dogs were given food reward half the dogs were given social reward for three consecutive days on the fifth day they were again tested for point following.
[00:53:57.600]Anindita Bhadra: And we did not see.
[00:53:58.680]Anindita Bhadra: Any change for the dogs, which were in the control condition, which is the future was.
[00:54:03.030]Anindita Bhadra: Very as tops which were tested for social reward showed a huge increase in fact all dogs followed pointing on day five even more interesting is these dogs, which will receiving.
[00:54:18.240]Anindita Bhadra: betting stopped showing negative reinforcement So even if you showed them the wrong food they would still follow you're pointing because they trust you as a friend.
[00:54:31.500]Anindita Bhadra: Last.
[00:54:33.300]Anindita Bhadra: set of work that i'm going to talk to you about how in the ecosystem humans might be impacting the lives of docs so we studied dogs and areas of very high human.
[00:54:45.630]Anindita Bhadra: flux, which is measured by number of people and vehicles passing one point in one minute intermediate human flux like neighborhoods.
[00:54:55.080]Anindita Bhadra: With some shops or business and low or human flags which are like really quiet neighborhoods with large large parks and empty spaces.
[00:55:04.800]Anindita Bhadra: And in all of these areas we documented dogs and be tested approachability of the dog, so you put out a hand and call a dog and see what percentage of dan's approach what percentage of dogs are show aggression to you show affiliation to you so.
[00:55:22.800]Anindita Bhadra: Human flux, of course, high intermediate and low and approachability was high in the high end intermediate human flood zones by dogs, which did not see strangers all the time in the law human flux areas were more reluctant to approach strangers.
[00:55:42.960]Anindita Bhadra: And this study was done in nine cities across India covering 200 Allah talks a very interesting piece of work that we have done recently was during the time of or festival when.
[00:55:56.940]Anindita Bhadra: You know the city of kolkata and nearby areas undergoes a complete change, and this is now declared as an international.
[00:56:06.780]Anindita Bhadra: Cultural Heritage in Bengali, so there are these you know public displays of the goddess durga and you can see that our people thronging these areas 24 hours round the clock for about a week, and there is always a lot of food because whenever this festival, there has to be food.
[00:56:27.660]Anindita Bhadra: So the question is, will the dogs be attracted by the really high intense resources which are being generated, or will the crowds be a detriment, for them to come and feed.
[00:56:40.860]Anindita Bhadra: So we went and sampled areas where we knew big bundles and packages are going to happen, because these are demarcated areas, but every year this happens for the spirit of seven to 10 days.
[00:56:54.540]Anindita Bhadra: So we looked at dog abundance pre event marketing black squares during the event marketing open circles and red triangles showing one month after the event and we see that abundance is comparable pre event and post event, whereas abundance reduces as flux increases in the event period.
[00:57:20.010]Anindita Bhadra: We found that during the event which is this dog show much higher fraudulent behavior and cluster less than they do in the pre and post event so human flux and sudden surge in human flux is really impacting their behavior.
[00:57:37.830]Anindita Bhadra: And ample food is not good enough to attract them to a crowded place so summing up free ranging dogs are very active and complex socialites.
[00:57:48.600]Anindita Bhadra: We humans are a threat to their survival, but also a major source of food and shelter and, of course, love.
[00:57:55.530]Anindita Bhadra: They have complex interactions but our species and are good at understanding our social gestures.
[00:58:01.140]Anindita Bhadra: lifetime experience with humans is likely to share personalities of rearranging dogs, and this is the latest project that we have embarked upon to test whether this hypothesis is true.
[00:58:11.190]Anindita Bhadra: They show a high degree of behavioral plasticity which I feel is the key towards their adjustment to living in the human jungle.
[00:58:20.550]Anindita Bhadra: So I would like to stop here, thank you for your attention, cans to Jeff and all organizers of the annual nebraska symposium for the invitation and thanks to the funders who have been supporting our work over the last 12 and a half years, thank you.
[00:58:47.400]Jeffrey Stevens: Thank you so much, Dr badra.
[00:58:49.920]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, come on come on up for questions folks.
[00:58:59.730]Jeffrey Stevens: Well, first I just like to say thank you so much for giving this talk usually I like write notes on what I don't know, and I was like furiously writing almost everything down, so I really.
[00:59:07.680]Jeffrey Stevens: appreciate, I have a bunch of questions, but I don't want to take a lifetime so i'll just pick one one thing that I thought was really curious was based on.
[00:59:16.650]Jeffrey Stevens: At least what I understood, based on the active and passive care that these pups are receiving from their parents, it seems like it's best that you don't actually take a pup between eight and 13 weeks is what you said.
[00:59:30.360]Jeffrey Stevens: And so I was wondering, the colloquial knowledge at least of the western tradition is that eight weeks is like you're good you're set grab that pop take it anywhere you like.
[00:59:38.340]Jeffrey Stevens: And I was wondering if you could just speak to that if you think oh yeah that's totally fine or if you're like you think you would actually be more beneficial to wait those 13 weeks.
[00:59:48.900]Anindita Bhadra: yeah so actually There is more work that we have done, and we are constantly gathering information, which shows that this eight to 13 weeks is not just the reading time.
[00:59:59.580]Anindita Bhadra: This is also when the adults are taking the pups around teaching them what to eat what not to eat, so this is also very active learning time.
[01:00:09.960]Anindita Bhadra: And this is at least for the free ranging dogs, this is a time when being around and the group with other adults playing with the siblings playing with other you know non letter mates all of these are active.
[01:00:25.980]Anindita Bhadra: You know, learning phases, for the dogs and it would probably a good idea to let them be until they are at least 10.
[01:00:36.000]Anindita Bhadra: weeks old left not 13 because I after 13 it might be too difficult for them to adjust, though we know that even our dogs dogs are completely fine to be taken as pets, they can adjust will easily.
[01:00:53.100]Jeffrey Stevens: Thank you so much.
[01:00:55.650]Thank you.
[01:00:57.600]Jeffrey Stevens: So I have a question about individual differences in across dogs so that to me that was really kind of came.
[01:01:06.690]Jeffrey Stevens: To me, when you talked about the flux data right you're showing.
[01:01:09.930]Jeffrey Stevens: There are different levels of dogs and the different the different numbers of dogs in the different levels of flux i'm wondering if there's something about those dogs, like those are different kinds of dogs that tolerate or don't tolerate those levels of traffic, if you will.
[01:01:23.430]Anindita Bhadra: yeah so um our understanding is it's basically, the environment and just their exposure to strangers, the level at which they're exposed to strangers which matters.
[01:01:35.700]Anindita Bhadra: But that is actually a question that we are trying to explore now with a new student to really understand how you know lifetime experiences might influence these personalities and the dogs.
[01:01:48.210]Anindita Bhadra: Of course, you know the problem is getting long term data, even for 17 weeks was a real challenge, because you start with 30 groups you end up with 15.
[01:01:58.470]Anindita Bhadra: Because of the high mortality, so we have just started this we don't know how many will eventually get to the end of maybe three years.
[01:02:05.760]Anindita Bhadra: So yeah we need some more time to give you the precise answer, but my qualitative impression is that it's a combination of where they are growing up how much.
[01:02:16.050]Anindita Bhadra: Negative interactions and positive interactions they're receiving from humans and how often they're encountering strangers in their neighborhood.
[01:02:33.960]Jeffrey Stevens: hi so one of the things that you've been mentioning throughout the talk is this a really high rate of mortality and I was wondering if you've done any studies to just to look at when.
[01:02:45.060]Jeffrey Stevens: The types of ways, these dogs are dying like is it a lot of traffic violation like what is going on there.
[01:02:52.200]Anindita Bhadra: yeah so that was the pie chart which I had shown where I had you know with together human influence death and natural death and.
[01:03:02.160]Anindita Bhadra: missing from the population, so when I say human influence that it can be people actually kill puppies by passing them or beaten them.
[01:03:11.220]Anindita Bhadra: or they run Oh, they get run over by cars, and in fact part of the in the same paper we had seen you know we noticed that apparently more maybe puppies were dying and accidents than females, and we were like what's wrong in the data and then we realize that it's because of.
[01:03:32.340]Anindita Bhadra: No i'm sorry that's the other way around a female puppies were dying more and accidents that means, and we were trying to understand you know our famous dumbo or something they don't understand how to.
[01:03:42.510]Anindita Bhadra: navigate through traffic, but then we realized when people take puppies away as pets, or you know just because they're cute and cuddly and drop them somewhere else they typically take the mail POPs because they don't want to have.
[01:03:56.370]Anindita Bhadra: Mother giving birth in the next season so.
[01:04:00.420]Anindita Bhadra: When they are removed from the population it's the meals, which are going away so they are the ones who are going missing.
[01:04:06.600]Anindita Bhadra: And more females are remaining behind and the population and accidents are increasing in the fourth month fifth month when they are really mean and they are.
[01:04:15.120]Anindita Bhadra: You know juveniles and they're moving around without the mother, that is when most accidents happen fourth month is really when the depth of speaking because of this.
[01:04:33.660]Jeffrey Stevens: hi thanks again for the amazing talk and just on that last note, you mentioned, people are taking the males because they don't want to deal with the female and heat.
[01:04:42.960]Jeffrey Stevens: Here in western cultures it's really common for people to spay and neuter their dogs so that way they can't reproduce so I can have a two part question.
[01:04:52.230]Jeffrey Stevens: Is that a common thing in India, do you see people spay and neutering dogs and are there any effects that you can think of, if you spayed or neutered the free ranging dogs and then release them back out in the free range.
[01:05:05.550]Anindita Bhadra: yeah thanks for the question so yes in India, we have very strict laws against cruelty towards animals, especially dogs and actually the only.
[01:05:17.490]Anindita Bhadra: legal way to control our populations is by spaying and neutering and there are several NGOs and.
[01:05:25.290]Anindita Bhadra: For sometimes drives from the government to spay and neuter dogs, but as of now, this has never been very successful because people do these in pockets and then dogs migrate and take up these territories and.
[01:05:38.160]Anindita Bhadra: about the second question, and of course there are a lot of pet owners spay or neuter their dogs when people take our.
[01:05:45.780]Anindita Bhadra: dogs off the streets and actually make them pets, then they will often spay and neuter the second part of Question, in fact, we were very curious about you know the impact of.
[01:05:57.630]Anindita Bhadra: spaying and neutering on behavior so right now we are analyzing data from a two year long study which we carried out on our campus because there was a drive to sterilize.
[01:06:09.540]Anindita Bhadra: dogs and about 50 dogs over a span of two years were sterilized and we were trying to look at whether that has changed their behavior.
[01:06:18.660]Anindita Bhadra: impacted their interactions with group members and what we saw as that early on it's really the affiliate of behaviors which reduce a bit, but other than that.
[01:06:31.860]Anindita Bhadra: behavioral there is no change if you release them back in their own groups but and, interestingly, these sterilized dogs are also trying to meet.
[01:06:41.790]Anindita Bhadra: So obviously you know the hormones, so the feedback is not there, but the hormones are still there and body so it's it's actually given rise to more trouble than.
[01:06:52.440]Anindita Bhadra: Earlier, because these dogs are trying to meet and they're not able to of course copulate and then there are healthy dogs coming in from outside, because in the mating season, there is a lot of.
[01:07:04.200]Anindita Bhadra: flux of dogs happening, and they are meeting with the non sterilized dogs on campus and we still end up having.
[01:07:16.560]Jeffrey Stevens: We have one question from zoom so they say thank you for your work, I think it helps us all a lot and understanding dogs better.
[01:07:24.420]Jeffrey Stevens: And then their question is did you collect data on average duration of nursing interactions by biological mothers and by other females.
[01:07:33.330]Anindita Bhadra: Yes, it's so um I didn't show the data, but I had I had shown you one data, where I had shown a bout of for nursing.
[01:07:43.110]Anindita Bhadra: And we had divided into mother initiated and pop initiated, and we also have a similar graph for the boat of nursing by the aloe mothers.
[01:07:51.810]Anindita Bhadra: And these boats are really short and always terminated by the island mothers, so we have that data it's published, but I didn't show it because it's like a lot of data tissue.
[01:08:04.620]Jeffrey Stevens: Great well Thank you so much this This is like beautiful natural history work on free ranging dogs and it it kind of amazes me that you know we were studying chimpanzees and lions and baboons since the 1960s.
[01:08:17.280]Jeffrey Stevens: Those data and you're collecting these data in the 2010 seconds, let us understand the species that we live with.
[01:08:24.780]Jeffrey Stevens: that's really it's amazing to me, so thank you so much, please join me in thanking Dr Barbara.
[01:08:32.460]Thank you.
[01:08:36.150]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so we have a 20 minute.
[01:08:37.890]Anindita Bhadra: break we'll.
[01:08:38.700]Jeffrey Stevens: Have coffee and snacks out.

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canine
dog
human-animal interaction
India

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A dog's life in the human jungle

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