TWS2024: Free-ranging farm dogs can harm native wildlife in India

Free-ranging dogs can have an outsized impact on wildlife in India—they outcompete smaller native canids like Indian foxes and prey on the eggs of critically endangered species like the great Indian bustard.

“Domestic dogs are the world’s most abundant and widespread carnivores,” said TWS member Soham Mehta, a master’s student at Columbia University in New York City.

There are an estimated 60 million dogs in India, and they detrimentally affect an estimated 80 native species, including 31 considered threatened and four that the International Union for Conservation of Nature considers critically endangered.

But not all free-ranging domestic dogs behave the same way. Mehta, who was an undergraduate student at the University of Vermont at the time, wanted to take a closer look at how farm dogs and village dogs may use the land differently—and ultimately, have different effects on the native ecosystem around them.

In ongoing work at the 2024 TWS Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, Mehta piggybacked off of work conducted in Shirsuphal, a village in Maharashtra in central west India, by Abi Vanak from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. Vanak has studied free-ranging dogs there for years and has an ongoing, long-term project there GPS-collaring dogs. “He is the dog guy,” Mehta said.

When a dog isn’t just a dog

For his honors thesis, Mehta examined data from 31 dogs collared with GPS devices in 2018. Of these, 20 were farm dogs and 11 were village dogs. They categorized dogs based on the way that they interact with humans, and the categories aren’t always mutually exclusive. Village dogs are typically unowned dogs that live inside a village and subsist on human resources there like garbage. Farm dogs, on the other hand, are loosely domesticated by farmers, who feed them but not necessarily consistently the way that North American pet owners might. The dogs in this category are often kept to protect livestock and deter crop-raiding wildlife, and farm dogs often range rather freely.

The area around Shirsuphal doesn’t have any protected areas, but it does have a lot of wild grasslands interspersed by farmlands and villages.

Analysis of the data revealed that farm dogs ranged much more widely than village dogs, which mostly stayed in the urban areas. The farm dogs wouldn’t just stay within the confines of the farm areas—they would often foray into grasslands without human homes.

“Farm dogs are more likely to be a threat to wildlife [when] they freely move between farmlands and grasslands,” Mehta said.

Dogs threaten native Indian wildlife

This is likely a problem for native species like Indian foxes (Vulpes bengalensis), which rely on these grasslands. Dogs also prey on Indian gazelles (Gazella bennettii) in these areas.

A better understanding of these differences is important for wildlife managers seeking to limit the impacts of free-ranging dogs on native wildlife, Mehta said.

His research shows that farm dogs likely present more of a danger to native wildlife than village dogs do.  Since people somewhat keep farm dogs, wildlife managers could target education programs at farmers to teach them how to better keep their dogs from straying too far, especially in villages closer to national parks or other protected areas.

It’s a challenge, he said, since dogs aren’t entirely associated with one owner in India, as opposed to the U.S. or Canada, where farm dogs have a definite owner. More regular feeding may help limit the wandering of these farm dogs, Mehta said.