The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S7E4: Behavioural Ecology with Anindita Bhadra
Anindita Bhadra joins Claudia on the show to explain what behavioural ecology is and how it has been applied to understanding the free-roaming dogs in India. They discuss the interconnections between domestication and evolution, the social organization of free roaming dogs, and dogs relationships with urban ecologies.
Date Recorded: 16 August 2024.
Anindita Bhadra is a behavioural biologist, working on free-ranging dogs in India. She founded The Dog Lab at the Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata in June 2009. She has written about dogs in leading journals such as PloS One, Animal Cognition, Ethology, Ecology and Evolution. Connect with Anindita Bhadra on X (@Abhadra7).
“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” - Theodosius Dobzhansky
Featured:
- We know that the wasps ‘know’ by Anindita Bhadra and Raghavendra Gadagkar
- Scavengers in the human-dominated landscape: an experimental study Sourabh Biswas et al.
- Ready, set, yellow! Color Preference of Indian Free-ranging Dogs Anamitra Roy et al.
Animal Highlight: Rashmi Singh Rana tells us more about guard dogs, this time delving into the lives of Simru and Sheru a mother-son duo working in the trans-Himalayas.
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Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the Animal Turn podcast. Oh gosh, I'm tongue-tied, Anindita. Anindita, yes, it's that second N that my tongue is struggling to get around. Anindita, it's lovely to have you on the show. I'm very excited to talk to you today about behavioral ecology. It's one of these concepts that gets said a lot but I'm not exactly sure I understand what it means. So I'm really excited to learn from you a bit about you first and some of the work you do and how you came to be interested in ecology.
Anindita Bhadra:Yeah, hi, claudia, nice to be here. So I call myself a behavioural ecologist. I work on the behavioural ecology cognition of dogs pre-aging dogs to be precise, or what people often call stray dogs or stray dogs in India. My interest in the subject started when I was in college, during my undergrad days, when we were introduced to the subject for the first time by a new teacher. And then we were taken on a field excursion to the south of India, to the Western Ghats, in fact. On the way we were taken to the Indian Institute of Science, the oldest science institute in India, and we visited the Center for Ecological Sciences.
Anindita Bhadra:We got a glimpse of research in ecology and behavior through several talks and lab visits and I was thoroughly fascinated by the kind of work that people were doing. Some people were studying elephants in forests and trying to reduce human-animal conflict, Others were looking at long-term ecosystems. And then I think the most inspirational talk we heard by Professor Raghavendra Kadhakar, who talked to us about social lives of insects. And then we visited his lab where he was working on social wasps. And I came back and I remember telling my friends you know, I want to go back and do my PhD in that lab, and that's kind of how it all started. And then I actually followed up by reading this fantastic book called Survivor Strategies, which is written by Prasankar Dhakkar and it's targeted towards undergrads and where he talks about survival strategies in different animals and plants, and that again kept my interest going in the field and eventually, after my master's, I went and joined the PhD program at ISC. Thankfully, I cleared the exam and I started my PhD in the research group of Prasankar Dhakal.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow, and you started looking at wasps, right. Wasp ecology, yes. What does that entail? What does it mean to look at wasp ecologies?
Anindita Bhadra:Well, I was not particularly looking at their ecology, because we would bring nests from the field and bring them to the lab and keep them in the lab environment. But we were looking at their behaviour and we were interested in the social behaviour of these wasps, because these are social was which have a queen and workers, just like honeybees and ants. And I like to say that I was studying wasp politics because I was trying to understand who is the next queen when this queen is still present. You know, do the wasps have a hierarchy decided of succession? And how do they understand who the next queen is and what will happen if the next queen is not there? Is there a next to next queen? And I was also trying to understand how the queen maintains her dominance in the colony, because she doesn't use aggression and we happen to show that she actually uses chemical communication a lot. So that was what my issue was about and what it meant was that you go collect these wasp nests and of course wasps do sting, so you have to be very careful and bring them back to the lab, get them habituated to live in these wire mesh boxes and they very soon get adapted. They find their way in and out of this cage and we have a lab where it's open so that you know they can go out, get food and come back.
Anindita Bhadra:And then we had to mark each wasp with a combination of unique colors, using this particular non-toxic paint, so that each wasp has a name which is color-coded. For example, a wasp with a red and yellow dot would be called ry, and so each wasp in the colony it could be a colony of 30 wasps, it could be a colony of 100 wasps, but each had a unique identity. And then we record their behavior. Record means you know, you visually sit down and write everything which is happening in tedious detail and for hours and days. And then we often did a lot of manipulative experiments, depending on the questions that we were addressing. So this is what I was doing during my phd wow, and do you still do lab work today?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I know that you've switched now from looking at wasps in these environments. You're focusing on dogs now, right?
Anindita Bhadra:yeah, I know we don't do any work now, so all our work is out there on the streets where the dogs live. Often, you know, people come into the lab and say, okay, this is the dog lab, where are the dogs? And I'm like right outside. Yeah, all our work is in the field.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow, and why the switch? Why not do something similar with dogs that you did with wasps?
Anindita Bhadra:Will you bring them into the lab environments and look at at pet dogs. So owners bring their dogs to the labs and these dogs are put through experiments. But then for me the most pertinent question was how did dogs become dogs? You know, because when you study pets then you are already looking at dogs which have been brought up by humans, lived in the human household, are being taken care of humans, so they are already in this very, very artificial environment.
Anindita Bhadra:But then dogs have not always been pets. There have been times in the past where they have gradually been domesticated from whatever their wilder ancestors wolf-like ancestors were to become the dogs that we have today. Of course we know that the breeds are man-made, but even before we started breeding dogs, we didn't have dogs as pets and domestic animals. So this transition is very fascinating for me and to me it was a big question of you know, understanding how dogs behave or adapt to living around humans without having humans to take care of them or to train them. And that is why I felt that the free-ranging dogs are this fascinating model system which people aren't studying, because there these are dogs which are living in nature. They have their own lives, they have their own societies, they have their own systems of living and they are exposed to all the disturbances in nature, all the struggles that any other species in the wild goes through. So they have to find their food, they have to struggle against disease, all of this.
Anindita Bhadra:So any species which is out there in the wild and the dogs which are out there on the streets are no different in terms of the ecosystem or in terms of their ecology and behavior. So these need to be studied, need to be understood, to really understand how dogs live their own lives when they are not being pampered by humans. What is their natural behavior? What is it that dogs did before they became pets? So even if I try to understand the trajectory of the dog-human relationship, then they give us this glimpse of when dogs were living around, humans were not taken into their bedrooms and they had a relationship of coexistence with humans. So that is why I study the dogs which are on the streets and then for me, if I bring them into the lab again, I create an artificial environment, which is not what we are interested in.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's fascinating. So do you find, when thinking about dogs' ecology? You know, and I know, that most dogs in the world, people have this idea that most dogs in the world are actually pet dogs, but that's not the case at all. Most dogs in the world are free roaming or street dogs, so we should be interested in looking at those dogs. But when it comes to thinking about a dog's ecology, is it that humans are a vital part of that ecology, or do you find instances where there are dogs who are living and forming their own colonies and their own relationships regardless of humans? Or is there some sort of really tight connection between human environments and dog environments?
Anindita Bhadra:Yes, there is. So in fact dogs are where humans are. In fact it's very fascinating. You know, here, if you travel in the hills and the mountains where there are villages and then there are long stretches of roads where there are no villages, you would know that there's a village coming because you see a dog somewhere on the street and then soon there'll be a village and across the village very soon you're going to see no dogs. So you know, the dogs are always hanging around where humans live.
Anindita Bhadra:There are some cases where dogs are now being reported to form large packs and hunt wildlife in many of the forests in India, which is becoming a major conflict situation.
Anindita Bhadra:But then if you go back and look at the history, basically what has happened is dogs have come with tourists you know, there are these tourist bungalows on the fringes of the forest or there are villages on the fringes of the forest and people have fed them and then the dogs have been left behind and now what they're doing is they're forming packs and hunting wildlife. So the dogs were not originally there. These are dogs which have followed some humans and then been left there for whatever reason. So usually the dogs live around humans. They depend largely on our excess food, our garbage, for their livelihood, typically dogs. These free-ranging dogs are not good hunters Only when it comes to you know these kinds of situations in forest fringes. Sometimes we get these reports from villages, villages which are close to more wilder areas, away from cities, where you will hear that there's a pack of dogs which has killed a goat, but often they do it only at times when there's a scarcity of food and other than that, they are mostly scavengers in the garbage and they prefer to be around humans.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow, that's fascinating because I know so many breeds of dogs have been bred for hunting. But actually when you said that you know packs of dogs hunting, I think part of my imagination about a hunting dog is in a very kind of human-centric way, right, humans that have bred dogs to hunt in a very particular circumstance or situation, but not dogs necessarily hunting in and of themselves. So that's a really fascinating case study. But you mentioned there that dogs are were left to their own devices, no-transcript. But they are using humans as a resource for our waste and our food yes, yes, lots in fact.
Anindita Bhadra:recently we published a study where we were asking this question that are there other animals, and the urban habitats especially, who are using our food? And it was very interesting because we found a lot of birds who are using this leftover food very efficiently. So there were anas, there were crows, of course. Then we got, very surprisingly, we got some bulgurs and in some cases, drongos, so several birds which are capable of using leftover food as a resource. And of course, we do have stray cats, sometimes, in some cases oats and cows which are straying. These would also come and feed in the garbage. So there are a lot of animals which are relying on human garbage and, of course, what you don't see very easily.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But they're there, they're the rats. Yeah, I also. I think of foxes and, if I'm not mistaken, some foxes, urban foxes in our European cities are starting to show physical changes that are often attributed with domestication, you know, floppier ears, et cetera. And it's been challenging for me to think through, because oftentimes when we think of domestication, we think of humans intentionally breeding animals to create a specific type of animal. But it seems here that it doesn't necessarily have to be intentionally done by humans, that some animals who export human habitats or human dominant habitats start to show domesticated features. How, how does that? How does that work in fact?
Anindita Bhadra:currently most people who work on dogs have come to this you know conclusion that probably dogs are self-domesticated. So you know, this idea that you know somebody took some wolf pups home and made them into dogs is becoming more and more outdated and we are understanding that it's probably the dogs who initiated the process, following around maybe hunter-gatherer groups for the scraps, and eventually the process of domestication started. So if that could have happened and if the dogs are self-domesticated, it's also possible for other species. In fact here we have jackals and there are some reports from areas where, you know, habitation has increased more and more and it's become more and more organized. People are saying that they're seeing jackals.
Anindita Bhadra:Morning walkers are encountering jackals which are, you know, foraging in the garbage and sometimes the jackals can get aggressive if there are multiple of them and usually jackals don't come out and pass, they are solitary forages. But then people are seeing four or five jackals together in a garbage bin and then they are actually chasing humans. So it could be again a domestication process on the way, because the jackal's natural habitat is being destroyed and they are now trying to use human leftovers as a source of food. It could be possible.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So what then? I don't quite understand. So what is self-domestication? What is domestication then?
Anindita Bhadra:so domestication would be this final process where animals are living with humans, right so? And initially this term was coined for the process which is initiated by humans, where you take animals and kind of adopt them and make them live next to you. But these cases are making us think again. So the idea is, if these animals are using us as resources and their behavior morphology everything is gradually changing, because one of the things that's very well understood is that domestication causes not just morphological changes, but certain behavioral traits like more friendliness or less aggressiveness are preferred traits when it's domestication, right? So obviously a person would be more comfortable around a dog than a wolf, simple as that. So probably some genetic changes where the selection for less aggressive traits or more friendly traits would push animals towards domestication if they are utilizing human resources more and more. So that is the idea.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, this is fascinating. So it starts to make domestication sound to me like an evolutionary concept, right? Because you could have domestication that is selective, where humans are and continue to select specific animals, interbreed them to make and try to try to produce specific traits. Of course this is happens in lab experiments, it happens in agricultural animals, it's kind of intentional breeding as part of a domestication process. But it seems as though domestication is also something. If humans are valuable, if humans and human environments are valuable to an animal, that domestication could be thought of in evolutionary terms, and I know evolution is important to behavioral ecology. So maybe we could take a step back and could you tell me what is behavioral ecology? How is it different like? How does behavioral ecology.
Anindita Bhadra:If you think about it, it is basically how the different behaviors that species show influence its survival and how, in different contexts, you can see different behaviors changing the adaptations that you see which could be based on habitat. So the animal behavior as a field. And then when you put an ecology together, you don't see behavior in isolation, as you know, just the behavior itself, but you put behavior in the context of the ecosystem, in the context of the animal's environment. You have behavioral ecology. So, for example, if I am trying to understand species say, mating habits, right, and I'm trying to just look at, okay, in this species the females prefer males of this kind. But on the other hand, if I'm also looking at, okay, is there variation in the mating habits in different habitats? Or does this preference make more sense if I look at the habitat in which the species lives? So is there a connection of the ecology of the species with the behaviors that I'm looking at?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So you don't look at a behavior in isolation, like in the lab but you look at the behavior in its ecological concept. How does this differ from ethology or something like multi-species ethnography, or are they connected?
Anindita Bhadra:Everything is connected. So ethology is basically the study of animal behavior, and so you know ecology. As I'm saying, you know ecology. Ecology are very, very connected because obviously you know, species don't exist in isolation of their habitat. So that's why, instead of saying that I'm an ecologist though I've been trained in animal behavior I prefer to say that I'm a behavioral ecologist because I'm actually studying animals in the wild, right? So? And I see that behaviours change. Behaviours are quite plastic. The same dog can behave differently in different, say, seasons. For example, when it's mating season or when it's pup-wearing season, a dog can become more aggressive than it is at other times. So behaviour is affected by habitat, behaviour is affected by seasons, behaviour is affected by its internal state, its hormones, everything right. So everything put together would be the behavioural quality of that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And with your dogs that you've been looking at. How long have you been looking at free roaming dogs and where are you looking at and understanding these relationships?
Anindita Bhadra:My lab is like around 15 years old, so I started the dog lab in 2009, june, when I joined ISA Kolkata, and ISA Kolkata is located near the city of Kolkata in India, so eastern part of India, so most of the fieldwork is done in this area Kolkata nearby suburbs. Now we are also spreading out into rural areas, but there are studies in which we have done this across India where we have sampled in different cities across the country to understand whether what we are seeing in Bengal also reflects in other parts of the country. There are studies where we have collected data from different parts, because we have had students posted in different parts of the country and they have collected data and we have collected this and looked at all of that together. So it's basically India, but a greater focus here because the lab is here in Brisbane.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And what kind of features are you finding in looking at dogs? I mean, this is a massive question, but what's 15 years of work? What have you found? But when it comes to thinking because this is fascinating, because you're not thinking about dogs as wild, perhaps liminal animals to some extent and this is a very different conceptual way for us I think of thinking about dogs, and by us I mean many, many, many, many folks again think of dogs as pets, but this is a lot born of the environments that you grow up in.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I grew up in South Africa where we do have these kinds of pet relationships with dogs, but we also have many, many free roaming street dogs, particularly found in informal settlement. So it's quite obvious to me as someone in that environment that there are various types of dogs engaged in various types of relationships. But then I go to Canada and the idea of a free roaming or free roaming they are unhealthy, they are unsafe, they cannot possibly live good lives. And then you go to other environments where it's quite obvious that there are many free roaming dogs. So is it the case that if you have a free roaming dog they are just unhealthy and living miserable lives? Is that the case?
Anindita Bhadra:Absolutely not. Dogs have very, very interesting social lives of their own, so they typically live in family groups, and what we found was that mothers are very caring. In fact, they are investing a lot of their time and energy in caring for their pups, and as the pups grow, they reduce this investment and gradually wean them, but still keep paying attention to their well-being. For a long time we found that there are males in the groups who would sometimes care for pups and the mothers would allow these males to come to the pups while blocking out other males of the group. There are grandmothers, older sisters, aunts, so female relatives of the pups, who would also add to the care given by the mother. So it's like a joint family system.
Anindita Bhadra:There are very interesting dynamics in terms of when they are feeding. There would be one who would come first and get the lion's share. So if you give them food, then usually there would be one who would approach first and it almost seems like the others know that. You know there is a hierarchy and we are still struggling to understand how this hierarchy is determined, because we don't know yet. And that makes it more fascinating because we see that this happens all the time and it's not that this individual who comes first to eat would also be first in everything else. So you know this typical notion that there's an alpha and this alpha is the leader, and this alpha gets to mate with everyone and this alpha does most of the defense. No-transcript.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So this, I mean, it makes me, as you were talking.
Anindita Bhadra:I was thinking about some of the language that we use to describe other wild populations, right, and you were speaking there about grandmothers and sisters, and so it seems, I mean, are they the mother and her daughters together, maybe with one male? There would be groups which are all male, so it's very variable. It's not like the elephants need to like the lions, so it's very much like more like a human family. Like you know, you have all kinds of families. It's very much like that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And in terms of puppies staying with the mother, because, again, it's so common in our societies, in many societies, to take puppies away from their mothers very young, so that we can socialize them as pets, in effect, right, and this makes me think, like, well, how long should or would a puppy stay with their mother? And if they were given the choice to do that? And it seems bizarre that we don't know the answer to this, but uh, what? What is the case? If they can, how long do puppies normally stick, stick together and stick with their moms?
Anindita Bhadra:quite long actually. So the weaning window that we've identified both behavioral observations and experiments is 8th to 13th week. So the weaning process typically starts around the end of the 7th week of pup age and goes on till the end of the 14th week, by when the pups are also no longer trying to suckle and the mother is at peace, but they're still hanging around with the mother. In fact, this is the time when the mother is taking them around and feeding with them or bringing them pieces of food, almost like. It feels like uh, you know, to use a very anthropomorphic term that she's teaching them what to eat and how to eat, literally. So in fact they go in steps.
Anindita Bhadra:So initially the puppies are very small, and when they're like five weeks or six weeks old, she'll start regurgitating semi-solid food for them, and then she will start dropping food in front of them, or, if somebody gives food, she'll stand back and let them eat, and then will come a time when she will try to snatch food away from them, which is like when they're 10, 11 weeks older. She'll also try to compete with them and eventually they will start going out to forage with adults, not just the mother, but sometimes with the male also. They'll go out to forage in groups and they'll feed together, but then there will also be competition from time to time, and probably this is also a phase of their learning, when they know how to, you know face all of this and most often, as adults they will just stay back in the same group, but then some would disperse in the mating season.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And do mating pairs stay together like, or do you find that? Do you find that year on year or in different mating seasons they will? They'll be no not really so.
Anindita Bhadra:This is a promiscuous mating system. Males and females both mate with different partners, but we are also seeing mate guarding by males to some extent. In fact, right now one of my youngest PhD students is looking at the mating dynamics because until now we have not collected long-term data on mating behavior. We have short-term data. But we do see mate guarding by males from time to time. We see a lot of fights over mating because females fight with females to get access to a male. Males fight with males to get access to a female. Typically they're very territorial, but in the mating season males will cross territorial boundaries to go mate with different groups female and come back when the inmates of that territory, if they're there, they're going to fight with this incoming male, but the females, very interestingly, will allow this male to come in. So if a male moves into a territory when that you know the male of that territory, the males from that territory are not there. They have also gone, roaming off then the females are quite eager to be a mate with this foreign male.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So it's a very, very dynamic and a very, very messy system and and do we know what the males and females in these situations are looking for? What kind of traits are they interested in?
Anindita Bhadra:No, not yet. Not yet, but maybe five years down the line, we'll have some idea.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Oh, it's so, so interesting the work you do, because again, we've applied different languages and different lenses to thinking somehow about, like wild animals and animals that we've conceived of as pets, and we know so much about the mating behavior and the general and not to. I mean, again, we've got to be careful to like essentialize these behaviors, but we know so much about wild animal behaviors and yet somehow dogs were arguably one of the animals we've got the longest relationships with over time. We, we don't know some of this kind of basic information about them, which is really interesting you know.
Anindita Bhadra:In fact, when I started working, often people would ask me what is there to know about dogs? Don't you know everything about them? And I was like, well, I don't think so. Let's wait and see. And and we see that, no, we don't really know everything about them yet. There's a lot more to understand.
Anindita Bhadra:In fact, you know, a very big part of our work focuses on dog-human interactions and it's fascinating looking at these dogs, how well they understand humans without any training. Because, you know, we often do experiments where people have done similar experiments in the lab with training, and then you know trials, but we cannot train them. So what we do is we try to understand ad hoc what is the kind of population level response in these experiments. For example, do they follow pointing or would they prefer to eat from a stranger's hand or take food from the ground? So there's no training. They are completely interacting with the experimenter for the first time.
Anindita Bhadra:For this we go to different areas for each experiment, for each trial, and the way they respond. It's very fascinating that they can really understand our gestures, they can follow pointing, they can understand the difference between a raised hand and a raised stick, they can understand who is a friendly person and who's not a friendly person, by a simple gesture of petting on the head. So it's really amazing that you basically see that, as they are developing in this human-dominated habitat, they are learning. They are learning in their own way about our species and they understand us. They know us much better than we know them?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That gonna be my next question. To what extent do we? Because it seems like they watch us. With a wild with a free roaming, or or pets, dogs. They watch us constantly to figure out what's what's happening next, but I'm not too sure that we are necessarily as good at watching them, which is fascinating. It's something about our own kind of ecologies and capacities, right.
Anindita Bhadra:Yeah, absolutely, and you know, it's very fascinating for me to think that. You know we are sharing an ecosystem, right, and for most people it's quite obvious when I have students for the first time. So what I usually do is I tell them go and do what we call ad libitum observations. Just go sit in front of a group of dogs and write down whatever you see, and initially students would often come back and say they're not doing anything and I say no, only a dead animal cannot do anything. So even if you're sleeping, you're doing something, right, sleeping is a behavior. And then, after this coaxing, the amount of details that they come up, come back with, and then they say, oh, my God, I am a dog lover and I thought I knew everything about dogs and I've never seen them do this before.
Anindita Bhadra:So we, I think as a species, we are less observant because, you know, we kind of taken a lot of information at a very global level instead of going into the specifics of it, because that is how we have survived. But for the dogs, I guess we are very important because we are their source of food, we are their source of shelter, because they would often be taking shelter outside human homes, under our cars, under somebody's shed, et cetera. And we are also their biggest enemies, right, we are the top predators. So they need to watch us for both ends, both for the food and for the stick. So they learn more about us and our know, these subtle body language gestures, probably, than we learn about them by seeing them every day on our streets.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's definitely points to a different kind of power dynamic. Right, you tend to watch when you look at employees, to know a lot more what their boss is doing, you know. Or, let's say, service providers and restaurant waiters tend to be a lot more aware of the manager. I don't know, maybe that analogy doesn't necessarily work, but I think you know here. But the idea of viewing cities as ecosystems is also relatively new. Even though they're pretty dynamic and one of the fastest growing ecosystems in the world, for a long time ecologists didn't view cities as significant places with which to understand wildlife. Is that true?
Anindita Bhadra:Yes, absolutely true. It's a very, very recent phenomena that people are looking into urban ecology. And even in the beginning, when people were looking at urban ecology, they were mostly concentrating on the greenery in urban habitats Maybe next would be water bodies. But nobody was really looking at animal behavior in urban ecosystems until maybe a decade ago, and there also people were mostly looking at conflict. So you know how urbanization is reducing habitats and which are the species which are dying out, which are the species which are capable of living here. But then you know how is urban noise affecting birdsong, so things like this.
Anindita Bhadra:But for me the urban ecosystem is just like a forest where I would be studying an animal. So for me this is the urban jungle is just another jungle, and I don't want to look at just conflict or just cooperation. I for me it is like the whole life of the dogs is centered around here and we are more and more interested. And you know also we are looking at the urbanization gradient, because it's not like one. Or Even rural areas are becoming more and more urbanized because a lot of vehicle traffic, more and more metal roads, less greenery. So there's basically an urban gradient and how that affects the behavior of the dogs is quite fascinating.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:How does it impact there?
Anindita Bhadra:So, interestingly, in very crowded, very urbanized places the dogs kind of lay back, not too disturbed by strangers, and quite easily they will come to you if you offer them food, because there's also a lot of competition, and quite easily they will come to you if you offer them food, because there's also a lot of competition.
Anindita Bhadra:The density of dogs is higher. But in less urbanized areas where there are fewer people, less noise, the dogs are more wary of strangers. They are probably going to be better guard dogs because they are much more, you know, aggressive and suddenly a stranger comes in. And that's very fascinating for me because probably, even if I go back and think to you know, 2 000 years ago, when there were these dogs outside in the neighborhood and they would bark when a thief comes in, they were considered very useful for the people in the neighborhood, right? So it's more likely that these dogs are going to be playing that guard dog role a little more than dogs in the more, more, more noisy environment, because they're there seeing strangers all the time and their barking might not receive as positive a response.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right people, people don't necessarily like the loud sounds. I know there's been some work that's also found it's quite interesting who dogs form collectives with or relationships with in cities. I know there's been some work done on how a single woman will often find connections with dogs for exactly this kind of guard. Having a dog nearby can be a protective measure for them as well. Loads of homeless folks also find themselves navigating similar geographies and spaces to dogs and they find these kinds of loose collectives that are quite reaffirming for the people and the dogs involved. I mean mean, it's just a world of information and of course you're looking at India, but you extrapolate this and you, I mean you look at what's going on in Istanbul at the moment, which is quite devastating, and you and you can see how quickly an ecology can also change when the politics and the policies of a place change. The threats the dogs are facing have changed dramatically right, and in Istanbul dogs have. They're undergoing a pretty traumatic time right now yes, absolutely, it's terrible, actually it's uh.
Anindita Bhadra:But you know, in India too, there's a lot of disturbance in the sense of there are a lot of people who really think that we shouldn't have dogs on streets. And I call it the you know, western influence, because it's often that you know people who have been educated in the west or have spent some time in the developed nations come back with this idea that dogs are pets and they belong to families and homes. And so there are two kinds who think that, okay, they just hate dogs. That's one set and then the other set, who really love dogs, and then they say, oh, the poor dog, it doesn't have a bed to sleep on, it sleeps on the streets. And what kind of life does it have? It's very difficult to make them understand that it does have a life.
Anindita Bhadra:It's this weird notion that, you know, you have grown up seeing dogs on the streets all our lives, and then suddenly you start saying that, okay, there are no dogs on streets in america. Why do we need to throw garbage on the streets In America? Do you think that you know more than half the population is struggling to get a meal a day? So, you know, don't just compare your country with another country just based on something so superfluous. So think about the whole ecosystem. And this is how we have coexisted for centuries. And it's not just dogs in isolation, right, they are all connected. So there are dogs, there are cats, there are rats. So it's highly, if you remove all the dogs from a city, very soon you're going to be having a rat-infested city, right? You cannot just think of one species in isolation, so it has to be the whole ecosystem that you're thinking about.
Anindita Bhadra:Yes, we have a neutering policy, which I have very different thoughts about. But then even there we say you can only sterilize 70% of the population in a place, not 100. And the reason is that you need the population to still sustain. You don't want all the dogs to go away. You are saying, okay, they're multiplying at a very fast rate. I will reduce the population. But you cannot just say I'm going to eradicate dogs from streets and then don't give me the excuse that, oh, but poor dogs need to have a place to live and that is why I'm giving them a good place to live.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know, that's even worse than saying that I hate dogs you know, I think I think we struggled with the idea that there are many different ways to be dog firstly, and that we spoke about power moments ago that there are various power dynamics and relationships happening in these varied ecologies, right, like there are power dynamics still happening that are very unequal with pet relationships, very much so and there are things like new term capturing policies that are also a type of power relationship and a governance response that dogs are having to respond to. These are very different environments, both urban environments, but very different relationships that dogs are having to and humans in these situations are responding to. And I really appreciate what you said there about thinking through the dynamism of the ecology, because even historically you think about the cities where dogs are not as free roaming today, they were cities in which many animals were more free roaming right, pigs, horses, cows were often more in the streets and when, I know, when pigs were removed from canadian cities, there was a huge spike in rat populations because pigs took away waste. Right, pigs were waste managers. So it's really an important point you raised there about thinking about the dynamism across species.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I've mentioned oftentimes on the podcast and my own work that we really have to disrupt this notion that cities are primarily or exclusively human places, but in fact, we need to disrupt the notion that they're exclusively or primarily any sort of individual species space. They are ecologies and different species have various impacts on how they function. I want to just bring us briefly back to the theme of the season, which is multi-species health. So, thinking about behavioral ecology and all the types of observations that affords you when it comes to dogs and their relationships, how does it help us in terms of understanding or thinking through things like multi-species health?
Anindita Bhadra:Very important. So you know dogs are well-known carriers of zoonotic diseases, right? So there's this, always this big question that, okay, there's a huge problem of rabies. So it's, you know, the dogs are the major source. So you know we have to do something about the dogs. Firstly, we have to understand that dogs are not the only source of rabies. To begin with, you know you can get a bite from a monkey or a rat or a cat and get rabies, or a goat for that matter. So domesticated animals can also spread rabies, and this is something that we have to understand.
Anindita Bhadra:Secondly, when we are talking about coexistence in the urban ecosystem and, as I say that there are many, many species which are together, so when you are thinking of multi-species health, it has to be firstly not just us and the dogs, but also other species, and we have to be really concerned about how the garbage that we are throwing out there can affect the health of all of these species which are utilizing this as a source of food, because often, you know, people unthinkingly would discard not just food but with that a lot of other stuff which can be poisonous for these animals, for example medicines. You know, if you are discarding medicines in the garbage with organic matter. Not so if you are discarding medicines and garbage with organic matter, not putting them separately out and everything goes on. Sometimes maybe we do it, but then when the municipality is going and dumping everything in one place, there would be these big garbage dumping sites where you would see many species who are scavenging at the same place and you don't know what all they are taking in, because there would be plastic, there would be glass, there would be medical waste, there would be sanitary waste, there would be food waste, and dogs and cats and pigs and goats and birds all of them are scavenging there and our garbage is eventually going to affect the health of multiple species simply through this act of disposal of waste which is not being taken care of properly.
Anindita Bhadra:Secondly, you know, often people say that, okay, we have a very clean city, why do we still have dogs? And yes, you have a clean city in the sense you don't have open garbage dumps. But then dogs don't just rely on open garbage dumps. They would go begging, they would sit outside you know fish shops and meat shops and get fed, or they will go to people's houses and get fed with leftovers, and that is how they've survived for centuries and that is okay. So you know, there are these multiple levels in which we have to understand behavior of species, because sometimes, when we are doing management, often people are looking at only one aspect of okay, this species is there, this species is not there, or this species is disturbing me and I don't like the species to be there. How can I curb it? But then we are not looking at the interconnectedness in the ecosystem. And that is where ecosystem understanding, understanding of how the species are interacting with each other, also how diseases flow from one species to another.
Anindita Bhadra:That is also very very important, so we really need to do more and more urban ecology studies, where people look into different urban adapted species. They look into their ecologies and we connect our data to feedback for each other to understand what's happening.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I love how you connected kind of food waste and health there, because I know a couple of years ago there was this release of a report that found squirrels in North American cities were struggling with high cholesterol and that's like blew people's minds like what squirrels with high cholesterol?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Because that seems to be a very human disease or domesticated animal disease.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right, I know that cholesterol is a problem among some domesticated or pet dogs as well, but the truth of the matter is many urban squirrels are accessing trash cans where they're eating highly processed foods and these highly processed foods impact their bodies and impact their health and their ability to reproduce and move through their environments in a healthy way. And in some ways, the high cholesterol in squirrels was a reflection on us and our own diets and some of the problematics we're introducing to our own lives in terms of health, of lifestyle, health of environments. So in one way, it was a reflection on ourselves and our own health as well as how our own actions can impact in a very physical, material way the health of others, even though they're making choices right and, like you say there's, it's a difficult thing because you want to pry apart and give the animals agency. The squirrels and the dogs are doing very interesting, dynamic things in finding places to get food, but they don't necessarily understand what highly processed food is, that it's going to have these health impacts right.
Anindita Bhadra:Absolutely. In fact, you know my first student. She has moved on to work with Hanuman langurs in the urban habitat and what they found it was very interesting. There was this temple where there's a huge troop of langurs who constantly get food from people around who come to the temple. And they actually did this choice test and found that the langurs have started preferring buns over vegetables. So if you give them a choice of buns and peanuts, and you know brinjals and cauliflower, they actually take the bun first and perfectly fine, fresh vegetables, but they prefer the bun. So and that is high calorie food, right, but that's what they like. It's sweeter and it's high calorie and they seem to have developed a taste for it.
Anindita Bhadra:In fact, later now they have done this fascinating set of experiments where they saw that these langurs are very good at eating. So they'll grab your hand or grab your leg and ask for food and until you give them the food that they want, they'll not let you go. So you know people are buying food from the vendors. So there are these people who sell food and what they do now is these people will show these packets of chips and biscuits and stuff to the monkeys and then the monkey will grab some customer and ask for food, and so now, if the person tries to give them something that they don't want, they will not let go. They will not take that food item until they get that particular packet of chips that they're interested in. So imagine what we have done to them Langurs who are craving for chips.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, so I mean, if these processed chips are impacting our bodies, there's no reason to assume that they wouldn't also be impacting the health of these other animals' bodies.
Anindita Bhadra:Yeah, I'm sure they are, and these are primates, right?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:so their bodies are very similar to us and they're predisposed to sweet things like us too. Another animal who I'd imagine is. And last question, before we go to your quotes another animal I imagine is really important to understanding dogs urban ecologies in the context of india are leopards, because I know some of the highest populations of leopards in the world are no longer in what we'd imagine to be quote unquote the wild, but are actually in in and around urban areas because of dogs. Dogs have become a really valuable prey for them. Is that the case?
Anindita Bhadra:That's in pockets, not everywhere, but in some cases. And again, it's because of this encroachment of urban areas into the forest that leopards have started coming into more urbanized areas and they have started hunting dogs. So this has happened in a couple of places. It's not like an India-wide situation, but it does happen and it's like if you actually talk to people in different localities, you hear of similar dynamics where either leopards or, in some cases, hyenas they would come and kill dogs, so wild animals. For them, the dog would be a good prey.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the encroachments into wild areas. I mean it's damaging wild areas but it's also creating different kinds of urban animal politics and practices. Really interesting work. Do you have a quote ready for us?
Anindita Bhadra:Yep. So a very well-known quote, but I think I live by it. So, theodor Dobzhansky, one of the founding pillars of modern evolutionary synthesis, and say that nothing in biology makes sense unless in the light of evolution. And I really believe that, because when I'm studying dogs, I'm not just studying dogs today, but eventually I would like to really understand, you know, how dogs evolved into what they are today through their coexistence with humans. And I think the free-ranging dogs provide us that link between wild wolves or wolf-like animals to the pets, so they are the ones who are kind of in between. And understanding them, understanding their behavior, ecology, their abilities to interact with humans without training, all of that gives us that glimpse into the evolutionary past, of what dogs could have been before we started interfering more and more into their lives. So that is the quote I have for you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, in some ways I think it's what dogs are right, not just what they could have been. Like the street dogs are dogs. They are somewhat of a manifestation, not somewhat. They are a manifestation of what it means to be a dog when you're not a captive pet necessarily. So is evolution a key? I mean this is a key tenet of behavioral ecology. Is this saying that any behavior you see doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's been shaped and informed by of bodily and social change, like. So sociality is an important part of evolution here, right?
Anindita Bhadra:Yes, so our Dabzanskate was everything in biology. And that's true, right, because we don't exist in the vacuum. Every species has its evolutionary history, every individual has its developmental history. So you cannot just understand biology in the vacuum of just the question that you're interested in. So you really have to look at the evolutionary trajectory of how things came being to understand what is there today and why it is there today. So behavior I think it's all the more important because when you're trying to understand a species behavior, you cannot again look at it in isolation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:you have to understand why a species behaves in the way it does, and that is where the evolutionary question comes in and is this the same as kind of saying I'm very cautious and wary when the word instinct is pulled out, and maybe this is because I'm a social scientist, but sometimes I feel like instinct is mobilized in this way to make what are really complicated and interesting behaviors seem kind of oh, it's just instinct, but it seems deterministic or predetermined somehow. Is this the case when one is talking about evolution in animals and humans? How does that kind of tension work between thinking about predetermined or instinctual behaviors and the kind of responsiveness of animals?
Anindita Bhadra:So in behavior we have very clear understanding of what is instinctive behaviors where we say, okay, so without any prior training, without any prior exposure, when an animal is going to do a certain reaction, it is an instinctive behavior. For example, if an animal sees fire for the first time and runs from it, you would call that an instinctive reaction. But when you say you know, you give an animal a certain kind of food and it develops a liking for it, that is not likely to be instinctive. That is more like out of habit or when it's first exposed it likes the taste and then with further exposure it develops strong liking for that kind of food. That is something which is learned, it's not innate, it's not instinctive. So there are many ways in which behavioral biologists test things to be innate or earned and then there is something we call as behavioral plasticity.
Anindita Bhadra:So a behavior can be very fixed that you will not be able to change this behavior no matter what you do. For example, a baby, when it's hungry it'll cry. You know it's that natural response of the baby when it's hungry. It's not learned, it's innate and it will cry if it's hungry. But for maybe an older kid, whether the child is going to ask for a cookie or going to ask for a heavier meal. It'll learn that all hungers are not the same, right? So I want a cookie kind of hunger, or I want a sandwich kind of hunger is different and that is where you start learning and your learning comes into effect. Even when there's hunger, you don't respond the same way. It is no longer that fixed response. On the other hand, when you have behavioral plasticity, the same animal or the same species can have slightly different responses to the same situation, depending on its learning of the past, its exposure to different, you know conditions etc. Etc. Where we call it that this behavior is plastic okay, I see.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So it's not necessarily that the reaction in that situation is instinctual. What's evolutionary here is our various ways in which we are plastic to situations. Some animals display maybe more plasticity than other animals, and that can be a product of evolutionary processes and practices. I'm with you. I'm with you. Well. Thank you so much. This has been a really informative and interesting discussion. I've learned so much about dogs today. You. You've really expanded my brain in many, many ways. Thank you so much for the wonderful work you do in helping us to better understand these incredible creatures. What are you currently working on? And if people want to learn more about your lab and the work you do, how can they get in touch with you?
Anindita Bhadra:So currently we are working on many different things. Several of my students are doing projects connected to the human-animal. Ongoing right now is to understand their begging strategies. You know, how do they beg, how often do they beg, do they target particular individuals to beg from? What are the different behaviors they use to beg for food, etc. We are looking at their scavenging strategies, where we do different kinds of experiments to understand what kind of scavenging strategies they explore, how they reject some kinds of food which is unpalatable, how they strategize to get palatable food. We are looking at something very fascinating, which is their preference for color, because an initial set of experiments showed us that they seem to have a very, very special place for the color yellow, and now we are trying to understand why you're not yellow. So you know, and how strong is this preference. Another set of experiments that are ongoing are trying to understand the development of personalities based on the urbanization gradient, whether that affects the personality development of dogs, the personality development of dogs. We have recently started working on their mating references and mating dynamics across groups. We are just beginning to work on their vocalization patterns and their territorial behavior. So there's a lot happening out there and how to get in touch with us.
Anindita Bhadra:We are on Facebook as the Dog Lab. I'm on Twitter. My Twitter handle is APHADRA7. I'm there on LinkedIn and ResearchGate and we have a homepage. So if you just Google the, dog lab.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You'll find us or just write to me. I think, claudia, you could probably share my contacts in your podcast. When you do that, I will. I'll put all of those details in the show notes. It sounds like you're doing really fascinating work. I love the stuff on sound. I know a lot of times we focus on dogs and their scent and their smell, so it's really interesting thinking through the different ways they identify one another, whether it's through smell or hearing.
