The great Indian joint families of free-ranging dogs

Abstract

Cooperative breeding is an excellent example of cooperation in social groups. Domestic dogs have evolved from cooperatively hunting and breeding ancestors but have adapted to a facultatively social scavenging lifestyle on streets, and solitary living in human homes. Pets typically breed and reproduce under human supervision, but free-ranging dogs can provide insights into the natural breeding ecology of dogs. We conducted a five year-long field based behavioural study on parental care of free-ranging dogs in India. 23 mother-litter units, belonging to 15 groups were observed, which revealed the presence of widespread allo-parenting by both adult males and females. While all the females were known to be related to the pups receiving care, the relatedness with the males could not be determined. Hence, we coined the term “putative father” for caregiving males. Allomothers provided significantly less care than the mothers, but the putative fathers showed comparable levels of care with the mothers. Mothers invested more effort in nursing and allogrooming, while the putative fathers played and protected more. Our observations provide support for both the “benefit-of-philopatry” and “assured fitness returns” hypotheses. Free-ranging dogs are not cooperative breeders like wolves but are rather communal breeders; their breeding biology bearing interesting similarities with the human joint family system. This breeding strategy is likely to have played an important role in increasing pup survival in a stochastic environment and helping to adapt to living among humans during the domestication of dogs.

Evaluating the self‐domestication hypothesis of human evolution

“…Dogs, the domesticated form, are not simply more cooperative and less aggressive than wolves, the wild form (e.g., Range et al). In fact, Hare and Woods pointed out that cooperative breeding is virtually universal in wolves but rare in dogs (but see Paul & Bhadra). It is to be noted that the design and interpretation of cognitive tests to compare the two can be controversial and subject to opposing interpretations …”

Forgotten, But Not Lost—Alloparental Behavior and Pup–Adult Interactions in Companion Dogs

“…Interestingly, our results, as well as in the earlier study of [35], show a considerably common occurrence of alloparental behaviors among companion dogs. The apparent difference compared to the infrequently observed foster-behaviors among free-ranging dogs [19,20] could be the result of the complex effect of different levels of food competition, human intervention, and, in part, the density of animals around the breeding mother/puppies (see condition #iv by Riedman [44]). Based on this, we can hypothesize that the capacity for alloparental caretaking is steadily present in the domestic dog, even in the population of pets and working dogs where the conditions for both the breeding and caretaking of the young are highly artificial.…”

“…From the 41 responses, 18 breeders reported observations of other (i.e., not the mother) dogs providing food by regurgitation to the puppies. Based on the very sporadic incidence of this behavior, based on the literature about free-ranging dogs [20,36], we set the reference ratio near zero (0.01). The observed ratio was significantly higher than this (binomial test, p < 0.001).…”

“…As the reproduction of companion (and working) dogs is mainly planned, supervised, and restricted by human caretakers [16,17], this segment of dog behavior remains almost untouched by ethologists. Furthermore, alloparental behavior and paternal caretaking of the young, two factors which are considered uniquely typical for a wide selection of canid species [18], are literally unknown among companion dogs, and have only recently been discovered in the free-ranging dog populations [19,20].…”

“…However, when it comes to parental behavior, seemingly, there is a considerable difference, even among free-ranging dogs. This has led to such widely differing observations, which have either stated that lack of alloparental care is one of the reasons why mortality rate of young pups is very high among free-ranging dogs (in Italy- [22]; in Mexico- [23]), or described more or less sporadic, but existing paternal/alloparental caretaking (in India- [20,24]). In their exhaustive review on canid reproduction, Lord and colleagues [25] assumed that since domestic dogs became dependent on human resources, they mostly lost the need for alloparental caretaking (i.e., because they have a stable food supply); meanwhile, the same ecologically predictable food resources made it possible that the sexual behavior of dogs also mostly lost the strict seasonality that is typical to wild canids.…”