HLF 2026’s Session Explores Urban Ecology Through Dogs, Cockroaches, and the Animals We Refuse to See, Praharsha Nunna reports.
As Saturday’s Science and the City programming drew to a close, the final session shifted focus from cosmic particles and digital infrastructure to the creatures living among us—some beloved, some despised, all largely misunderstood. “Animal Matters: Observing Behaviour,” moderated by Somdatta Karak, brought together Anindita Bhadra, who studies free-ranging dogs in their urban habitats, and Deepa Padmanaban, whose book Invisible Housemates chronicles the lives of creatures we call pests. What unfolded was a conversation about observation, empathy, human interference, and the profound ways we’ve disrupted ecosystems while claiming to help.
Why Free-Ranging Dogs?
Bhadra’s research began with a simple question that exposed the biases of global science: why does everyone study pet dogs in households or laboratories, but not dogs on the streets?
Her PhD supervisor at the Indian Institute of Science, Raghavendra Gadagkar, offered the answer: “You’re following research done in the global north and they don’t have stray dogs as we call them on the streets.”
This struck Bhadra as a fundamental gap. “To understand the evolution of the relationship between dogs and humans, you really have to study these animals which are out there. They are freely breeding in nature. They face the struggle for existence. They are interacting with humans, but they are not pets.”
Free-ranging dogs have all the evolutionary pressures of any wild animal—survival, reproduction, territory—while navigating the urban environment. “For me, the dogs are in the urban jungle,” Bhadra explained, approaching them with the same methodology one would use to study elephants in a forest.
The scientific establishment resisted. Early paper reviews included comments like “dogs don’t live on streets” and “how can you do an experiment giving biscuits to dogs? Dogs don’t eat biscuits.” These weren’t scientific critiques; they were expressions of ignorance about how most of the world’s dogs actually live.
“We realized that we had to really educate the world,” Bhadra recalled. Publications were slow and difficult. But sixteen years later, the paradigm has shifted. Labs in the global north now travel to countries in the global south to study free-ranging dogs, “following on our footsteps. Only they have to spend money for all the international travel, we don’t have to. So we can do small budget research.”
Invisible Housemates
Padmanaban’s Invisible Housemates takes on creatures even less sympathetic than stray dogs: cockroaches, rats, pigeons, mosquitoes—the thirteen organisms we’ve categorized as pests and war against in our homes.
“Everybody is curious about wildlife, you know we go on safaris to see wildlife,” Padmanaban noted. “Somewhere along the way it just got me thinking that we do not pay attention to the small insects and birds and animals that live in and around us.”
The book’s title is deliberately ironic. “It is not because they are invisible but we do not want them to be visible, we do not want them in our house.”
Yet each has a role in urban ecosystems. Many existed in these spaces before humans arrived. “We have in a sense occupied their space,” Padmanaban said. The goal was to change perception—to view these creatures not as nuisances to be exterminated but as participants in interconnected systems.
Take cockroaches, which Padmanaban initially despised. Research revealed they release chemical odors to recognize each other, differentiate between siblings and non-siblings, and avoid incest. “I thought, like, wow, they have good moral character,” she said with a laugh.
More surprisingly: cockroaches are social organisms living in colonies. Isolate one and it shows signs of depression—stops grooming, loses interest in eating or mating. “It is quite similar to us in that way.”
They’re also scavengers that aerate soil. After learning all this, Padmanaban still doesn’t want them in her house, “but I just pick them up and put them out” rather than killing them.
Rats, too, display unexpected complexity. Scientists have documented empathy—rats helping each other in distress. “In humans, the value of empathy is going down. But here you have rats, which most people despise… but they still have this empathy.”
Methodology of Observation
How do you study animals scientifically when they evoke such strong emotional responses? Bhadra’s team works entirely on the streets, identifying individual dogs by coat color and morphology. “Often people tell us, how do you know they all look the same? But they don’t. Even in the same pack, each dog has its own morphologically different features.”
They use ethograms—catalogs of behaviors—and choice-test experiments where dogs are given options and researchers observe their decisions. Some dogs approach eagerly; others retreat. “There are always some over-eager dogs, there are some very reluctant, very anxious dogs. And this is a nice distribution in the population.”
The challenge is maintaining objectivity. While behavioral biology uses terms like “kinship,” Bhadra’s team avoids subjective words like “empathy.” Instead, they look for measurable markers—tail wagging as a friendly gesture—and score behaviors on scales. “We define by very strict behavioral criteria and give them scores.”
Crucially, the person performing experiments and the person analyzing video footage are different, preventing observer bias. “Everybody who works in my lab likes dogs. That’s why they’re there. If you’re scared of dogs, then don’t come there.” But students must undergo “training to unlearn and to now start looking at their focal animals as an observer rather than as a dog lover, which takes a lot of time.”
This is especially difficult because the dogs aren’t caged or leashed. “They don’t understand your instructions so you have to work around them and not upset them.”
What Dogs See When They Look at Us
Recent experiments reveal sophisticated perceptual abilities. During COVID, when everyone wore masks, Bhadra’s team wondered: can dogs still recognize us? They tested with sunglasses, hoodies, and masks. “Dogs are really looking at our eyes. Those are very important for them to identify familiar versus unfamiliar.”
Voice matters too. In one experiment, a familiar person stands silent while a robot wearing identical clothes calls the dog. “The dogs go to the robot not to the human who is familiar to them.”
Smell, surprisingly, seems important mainly at close range. “These dogs are in a very olfactorily noisy environment. There are so many smells around. So from a distance, it is very difficult.” Visual and vocal cues dominate, then smell once the dog approaches.
Even more unexpected: dogs appear to favor the color yellow. In experiments, they’ll ignore food to explore yellow objects. “Nobody has ever said dogs have a favorite color. But we have seen that… there is a lot of visual cues out there and in the urban habitat I think that is adaptive.”
All of this translates to the current national debate about dog attacks. “It’s the body language that they’re looking at,” Bhadra explained. If you crouch, pretend to pick up a stone, or hold a stick toward them, they respond accordingly. “They are observing us. They are paying a lot of attention to our body language, then our eyes.”
Dogs are more likely to beg from people who are eating and making eye contact than from people with food who look away. But prolonged staring makes them uncomfortable—they look away and move away.
Studies on pet dogs show that when humans and dogs make eye contact, “we both release oxytocin which makes us like dogs and dogs like us, similar to our response to human babies.” Free-ranging dogs have “hijacked” this maternal bonding pathway.
“Very rarely will they attack. Almost they will growl and bark from a distance and only then when they feel threatened themselves then they will attack.” Data confirms that lactating females guarding babies or ill dogs are most likely to bite. “This entire thing about all dogs out there to bite people is very, very wrong.”
When Care Becomes Harm
Asked for advice on healthy relationships with dogs, Bhadra’s answer was direct: “Pet them, feed them.” Research shows dogs trust people who pet them more than those who only feed them—”because people feed them poisonous food all the time. But people who pet them will never hurt them.”
She does it constantly. Her son has since age two. Neither has been bitten. “From the body language, you’ll know if the dog wants to be petted.”
But then came a harder truth: “I think we have as humans created this problem by overfeeding dogs.”
Dogs are scavengers adapted to feast-and-famine cycles. They’re not meant to eat multiple meals daily or bulk quantities of food. “One day they are getting garbage outside the shawarma shop. Next two days they might not eat. And that’s completely fine with them.”
While they have genes enabling carbohydrate digestion, “that doesn’t mean we feed them khichdi every day, that is not their diet.” Overfeeding carbohydrates means excess energy to burn. Combined with dogs being territorial pack animals, concentrated feeding creates conflict. “Giving a lot of dogs food in one place, all of these actually create issues.”
The traditional practice—giving leftovers to scavengers in the courtyard—has vanished. “Now we have clean streets, garbage pickers, everything. So this tradition has been forgotten.” Dogs once scavenged from 3-4 households, caught rats or frogs when hungry, and maintained population equilibrium.
Now they receive daily khichdi or rice with chicken. “People tell me very happily that they are giving vegan food to dogs on streets, I don’t know why.” Meanwhile, vaccination and feeding ensure most puppies survive when naturally only 20% would.
“Then you say there are too many dogs, now we go neuter them. And then you overfeed them and make them obese. And then when they need to burn their energy, they go fight with each other because there are too many dogs. And then we say, OK, now we have to do something about these dogs, put them in shelters.”
Bhadra’s neighborhood had 4-5 dogs growing up. Now there are 15, “because there is one feeder who feeds every dog that comes there a lot of rice and khichdi.” The dogs don’t move. “There are just too many for that small neighborhood. That is the issue.”
The Sparrow Parable
Padmanaban’s book documents a recurring pattern: humans manipulating animal populations with catastrophic results.
In 15th-16th century Europe, sparrows were deemed pests destroying crops. Concentrated eradication campaigns ensued. In 1958, Chairman Mao declared sparrows pests in China. Thousands were killed.
Then crops were destroyed even more—by the worms and pests that sparrows had been eating. This contributed to China’s Great Famine. “Then they realized that they were wrong and they said we need to bring the sparrows back.”
“This theme is there, if you read my book you will see, it is there in almost every animal or insect. We first introduce them somewhere and then we try to feed them and then they become too much. Then we call them as pests and then we try to control them.”
It’s happening now with pigeons—once prized possessions of royalty, bred as messengers. When technology obsoleted them, they were released. “Now we have feral pigeons all over the world and many cities are trying to tackle this problem because now pigeons are going to cause this lung disease.”
Indian culture encourages feeding animals, so pigeon populations explode. Then bird nets go up, trapping pigeons. Wildlife rescuers get overwhelmed with calls. “I don’t know what’s the answer really… Maybe let it be. We’ll have to just see. Let them be. And then maybe nature will take care of it.”
Biologist Rob Dunn captured the paradox perfectly, in a line Padmanaban quotes: “When sparrows are rare, we tend to like them. When they are common, we tend to hate them. Our fondness is fickle and predictable, but it says more about us than them.”
Can We Just “Let Them Be”?
When asked about her philosophy of interaction with urban animals, Bhadra’s answer was simple: “Let them be. That is my philosophy, let them be. Don’t interfere in their lives as much as you can. That’s the healthiest way to be. Just co-exist.”
But Padmanaban was less certain: “I think we have passed that tipping point. I mean, yes, let them be would be the philosophy if we are in ideal conditions. If the ecosystem was in balance… But right now, we have already interfered so much that I don’t know if it will work now.”
An audience member challenged Bhadra: isn’t “let them be” too utopian for cities where dogs multiply with available food? And what about the Supreme Court order—another extreme intervention?
Bhadra clarified she meant “let them be” as long-term philosophy for coexistence, not abandoning management where overpopulation exists. “My point is if you really want to take care of a dog, take it to a doctor, keep it as a pet. As a community they can exist, let them be.”
She’s seen her small town’s dog population triple in fifteen years due to a single feeder providing daily rice and khichdi. “If we did not have a problem, let us not create a problem by overfeeding, over-caring.”
The Supreme Court case remains unresolved, with weekly hearings. The central government has directed municipalities to remove dogs from school and college campuses and place them in shelters. “They said we don’t have funds. We don’t have a shelter and in fact we have been trying to do a vaccination and partial neutering drive but they don’t have a space.”
Playing God
A penetrating question from the audience: “Are we also playing God with the human species? Are we interfering in human life… thinking we know enough about our own lives to make decisions on them?”
Padmanaban acknowledged that from an environmental perspective, “I don’t think we understand what we are doing to other humans as well.” Climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities, yet policy discussions focus on economics and development. “There is really not much discussion from human, as a human species, what is good for us, right? I mean, we are part of this environment, we are part of this planet, and that connect sometimes is not really there.”
She recalled driving with conservationist Ravi Chellam through Hyderabad’s concrete sprawl. He observed: “All of that is real estate, as if whatever existed before that was false.”
Then a darker thought: “I look at our population, right, how much our population has grown over the years and how much we are extracting from the planet earth… Maybe if somebody asks planet earth, like who are the pests, she might say that humans are the biggest pests.”
What We’re Really Observing
The session’s title was “Animal Matters: Observing Behaviour,” but by the end, it was clear the observation ran in both directions. Dogs observe our eyes, our body language, our voices. Cockroaches recognize kin. Crows transmit knowledge of threats across generations and to migrants. Rats show empathy.
Meanwhile, we’ve created crises of our own making: overfeeding animals, then calling them pests; neutering populations we’ve artificially inflated; building cities that displace species, then being shocked when they adapt or die; labeling as “invasive” the species we ourselves transported and released.
Bhadra trains her students to unlearn their love for dogs—to observe objectively. But perhaps the larger lesson is learning to observe ourselves with equal rigor: our interventions, our contradictions, our fickle fondness that says more about us than about the animals we claim to understand.
The invisible housemates are invisible because we’ve made them so. The question isn’t just whether we can learn to see them, but whether we can bear to see what our seeing—and our blindness—has done.
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