Street Dog: On the Origins and Future of Our Best Friendship
About this ebook
Today, there are close to a billion dogs on the planet. Some twenty thousand years ago, there were none. How did dogs originate from wolves? And how did we begin our best friendship? Although we can’t go back in time, we can study modern dogs for clues. Of today’s dogs, about eighty percent are street dogs, which don’t live in human homes, but near them, existing in a space between wild and domesticated.
This fascinating and eye-opening book offers us a chance to meet these street dogs and, through them, to imagine the earliest stages of human-canine companionship and collaboration. Award-winning author and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin and world canine expert Anindita Bhadra take us from the hallways of Bhadra’s Dog Lab onto the bustling streets of Kolkata, India, where we encounter the intelligent, resourceful, and sometimes mischievous street dogs that have lived alongside humans for hundreds of dog generations. By observing these street dogs’ social structures, survival strategies, and personalities—and comparing them to foxes, wolves, and house dogs, among other species—we learn a lot about canine behavior. Take, for example, Bhadra’s discovery that, no matter how vital food is to a street dog, when given a choice between a meal and a gentle carress, dogs choose love over the food. We also learn that many dogs prefer yellow to other colors; that dog grandmoms may adopt unrelated puppies; and that dog genes harbor a mutation that, in humans, is associated with extreme friendliness. We even begin to understand why dogs pee on, well, everything—particularly on other dog pee.
Watching dogs live independent lives alongside humans, we also start to wonder, as Bhadra does, about the origins of human-dog cooperation. She persuades us that early dogs and humans likely protected each other, as many still do today, and that street dogs may help us to imagine our ancestors’ interactions with the earliest proto-dogs. In their engaging exploration, Dugatkin and Bhadra show that getting to know street dogs may help us understand the past, present, and future of our unique interspecies relationship.
About the author
Lee Alan Dugatkin is an animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the author of more than two hundred research papers, and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, American Scientist, New Scientist, and The Washington Post. His many books include How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), Power in the Wild, The Well-Connected Animal, and Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. Anindita Bhadra is a behavioral biologist who established The Dog Lab at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata in Mohanpur, India, where she and her students study the lives of street dogs. This is her first book, which, she hopes, will make the street dogs of India better known to dog lovers across the world.
