The Dog is known as Man’s Best Friend, yet we have little scientific understanding of their behaviour, ecology and evolutionary history. Dogs and humans share a long and closely bonded history of coevolution, such that their natural habitats are almost interwoven.
A range of dog breeds have emerged through artificial selection. They live with humans, in their houses as pets, and are under their direct supervision. However, our research interest lies in those domestic dogs who primarily live on the streets, and although they depend on humans for their sustenance, they are not directly supervised or ‘owned’ – the free-ranging dogs.
These dogs typically have mongrel characteristics, with pointed ears, very short fur, wolf-like pointed faces and often have patch baldness in their coats. In India, as in several other developing countries, they are an important component of the ecology, in urban and semi-urban areas, villages and even in forest fringes. Hence, they are a very good model system for studies of urban eco-ethology and for testing models of social organization.
In the Dog Lab, we delve into the private lives of such dogs on the streets of India, armed with nothing more than notebooks, pens, and at times, cameras. Our focus is to understand the evolutionary history of dogs, through long-term observational studies, choice-tests, cognitive tests and other manipulative experiments. Our research is curiosity-driven and we conduct our studies through simple but elegant experiment design and asking fundamental questions.