Dogged Concerns - Who Let The Dogs Eat?

‘Love is what love does’ – is this blinkered love for our canine friends fashioning a perilous ecosystem for us all? A subject of some delicacy, but a matter that needs to be dealt with immediately.

- Sutirtha Lahiri, Neeraj Mahar

It was early one morning when on a usual trip to the mess for the first cup of chai, we were presented with a dilemma; in the mouth of one of our favourite campus dogs was a bird that many had never seen before -- a Ruddy-breasted crake! While the ruddy-breasted crake is a shy bird and is hard to find, dogs are ubiquitous in our landscape. Everywhere, from cities and towns and villages to some of the most ecologically diverse areas such as the highlands of the Himalayas and the rainforests of India. In fact, Matthew Gompper -- a scientist who has worked extensively on free-ranging dogs -- has put an estimate of close to one billion free-ranging dogs in the world. Now that’s a lot of worry for not just wildlife but also people. Being predators, dogs might naturally hunt and eat other animals, but unlike other predators -- whose natural population is maintained by their food -- dog population is human-generated. As a consequence, if you flip through any newspaper or check online reporting, you will know the extent to which dogs have impacted wildlife (including critically endangered species like the Great Indian Bustard, the Snow leopard, florican, bears, etc.) and people (rabies kills ~20,000 people every year!).

However, we all like dogs! But does this affection somehow affect how we perceive their impact on wildlife and us? We set out to investigate this in order to understand the perception of people in the conservation community. The survey, which will be published soon, gave valuable insights into how the academic community perceives the impact of dogs on wildlife, as well as what kind of mitigation measures should be taken to control them. However, the point of this narrative far exceeds the findings.