Themes

Natural History

Natural history is an area of research involving organisms, in their natural environment, leaning largely towards observational than experimental methods of study. It involves the systematic study of any category of natural organisms. Fleischner pointed out natural history as "a reliance on direct observation as the most trustworthy tool for learning.
Natural history studies primarily focus on the following questions - What animal is it? Where does the animal live? How many animals are there? How does the animal survive? How did the animal come to be like it is and live where it does? Therefore, natural history studies can generate vast amounts of data regarding the ecology of a species, its interaction with other species, and the overall dynamics.

Distribution and Time-activity budgets

We are studying the natural history of free-ranging dogs by collecting data from different geographic locations in India. We aim to understand the activity levels of free-ranging dogs throughout the day by estimating their Time-Activity Budget. We are also interested in understanding the distribution of dogs and the availability of their potential food resources throughout India, varying geographic locations of India with regard to human flux or movement.

Group dynamics

We have conducted long-term studies in the past to understand social behaviour of dogs with respect to con-specifics and others, and we continue to do so. Our results have revealed interesting behaviours pertaining to kinship, allocare of pups by adults (both by males and females), denning habits, existence of a ruthless parent-offspring conflict, sibling rivalry, milk theft by pups and more. We continue to explore further into the inter- and intra- group dynamics of these animals through studies on territorial demarcation and maintenance, usage of myriad vocalizations for the same, dynamic variations in the choice of resting places and dominance hierarchies.

Cognition

Physical Cognition

Physical cognition refers to how animals use and acquire information about the physical world. In order to survive, animals perform varying tasks that need extensive physical abilities (e.g. tool-use). Free-ranging dogs are accustomed to scavenging from open garbage dumps or closed plastic bags carrying food. Therefore, physical cognition is crucial for these dogs for survival. We are looking at dogs’ physical cognitive abilities towards familiar and unfamiliar solvable tasks.

Social Cognition

Social cognition is an umbrella term used to describe cognitive processes related to theperception, understanding, and implementation of linguistic, auditory, visual, and physicalcues that communicate emotional and interpersonal information. We are conducting a range of studies to understand the socio-cognitive skills of free-ranging dogs. These dogs have been shown to follow human pointing cues, from simple to complex. Moreover, they exhibited situation-specific responsiveness to typically used human social cues. We are conducting further experiments on social cognition to understand these 'smart' animals more.

Social facilitation

Social facilitation can modify an individual’s performance and behaviour. Crawford defined social facilitation as “any increment of individual activity which results from the presence of another individual”. In humans, this phenomenon has been shown to affect nearly all behaviours, from food consumption to cognition. Social facilitation can happen by "mere presence" of conspecific(s), and/or a "co-action" effect. It has been shown to be a crucial mechanism for group-living animals, due to its impact on group cohesion and behavioural coordination.
We are conducting comparative studies using individuals and groups of free-ranging dogs to understand the impact of social facilitation. We are also specifically investigating the role of social facilitation in dogs' physical cognitive tasks.

Cognitive decision-making

“Life is a matter of choices.” A question that crops up while studying animals is the question of choice. All real-life choices carry with them a quantity of uncertainty and risk and throughout the scientific community there is a significant interest in understanding how or why animals choose between given probabilistic outcomes. Choices are preceded by decision making processes, guided by motivation and preference and may be dependent on both intrinsic and extrinsic factors like age, genetics, resource availability etc.
Similarly, free-ranging dogs have to make choices when foraging for food and selecting territories. An additional human component while making these choices also factor into their decision making because of the dogs’ close association with humans. Ergo, a part of the cognitive studies in our lab explores this aspect in the light of their foraging habits and how they are affected by humans. In our lab we ask questions like, What factors govern these choices? Are these choices adaptive? What kind of strategy do the dogs follow when making certain choices? How good are they at making these decisions? These and other similar questions are answered through controlled experimental designs in the field.
Our investigations reveal that dogs show context dependent quantity discrimination and use a Sniff-and-Snatch strategy while acquiring food. They are also able to follow complex referential human gestures, an ability that comes in useful as humans are an indirect and direct source of food and shelter for the dogs. Furthermore, it was found that the dogs were able to adapt to changing scenarios if the choices they made did not maximize their benefit thus displaying a high level of cognitive ability.

Dog-Human Interaction

Human-Animal interaction is a relatively new but trending area of scientific research in the modern era. Of particular interest is the dog-human interaction. Dogs have a long history of cohabiting with humans. They are also arguably the first species to have been domesticated, 10,000 – 15,000 years ago, from wolf-like ancestors.
Unfortunately, research on dogs has been primarily restricted to pet dogs in the United States and Europe. Pet dogs share the same environment with humans, receive extremely positive human socialization, and live under direct human supervision. Therefore, the behavioural outcomes or responses can possibly be the result of indirect conditioning. Also, pet dogs can not be used as a model to explore the eco-ethology of dogs. As a consequence, canine literature is currently insufficient and also facing the problem of not having conclusive studies from the "dogs" that make up the majority of the world’s dog population.
Over the years, we have studied the dog-human paradigm in their natural habitat of coexistence - the streets. Our results have revealed several cooperation and conflict scenarios occurring between these two closely inhabiting species. We continue to peer further into this paradigm through studies involving effects of human induced manipulations- like domestication and sterilization of dogs.

Behavioural Patterns

Simon de Laplace, one of the pillars of probability theory, believed that events look random to us, as we are limited by our ability to grasp the numerous hidden factors that influence, and thereby affect such events. Scientific inquiry provokes us to investigate such causes and enhance the predictability of apparently random events.
A large cross-section of the scientific community is engaged in studying behaviour at various scales of organization, from molecules to communities, across the domain of the living and the non-living, using myriad tools, both theoretical and experimental. A wide range of ecological and behavioural phenomena are known to show power law distributions.Power law distributions represent classic cases of order in chaos and are often considered as a signature for the presence of potential mechanisms that drive the observed data.
At the Dog Lab, we have recently started analysing the entire behavioural repertoire of free-ranging dogs, for the existence of such statistical patterns. We are presently concentrating on tracing similarities between behaviour and lingustics. We soon hope to diverge into analysing certain categories of behaviours for such patterns and trace analogues with other kinds of orderly sets.
We have recently found that the repertoire of dog behaviour, shows a power-law distribution, but is not identical to languages, which follow a special case of power-laws, called the Zipf’s law. Also, the distribution has been found to be scale-free and to show a multi-fractal nature. We are further looking into the existence of a syntax within behaviour, analysing the variance of vocalization patterns with age and sex and trying to understand their implications.

Ongoing Projects

Projects headed by graduate Students

Debottam Bhattacharjee : Behavioural adaptations of Indian free-ranging dogs in urban environments

Arunita Banerjee : Drawing statistical parallels between linguistics and the repertoire of dog behaviour

Rohan Sarkar : Investigation of the strategies and tools of free-ranging dogs' feeding behaviour

Sourabh Biswas : Understanding the formation and maintenance of territory in Indian free-ranging dogs.

Piuli Shit : The social structure of free-ranging dog groups in presence and absence of external cues and the territorial responses to auditory cues.

Projects headed by MS students

Daisy Babu: Analysing the approachability of dogs and trying to understand if there exists a certain bias towards a particular human gender

Anjira Sengupta: Inter and intra group dynamics in Indian free- ranging dogs

Rituparna Sonowal: Understanding the behavior profiles of different free-ranging dogs

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse