Dr Anindita Bhadra is a behavioural ecologist and Professor at IISER Kolkata, where she founded India’s first “dog lab” dedicated to studying free‑ranging dogs in their natural urban habitats. Trained initially on social insects, she brought a wildlife‑ecology lens to street dogs, documenting their social structure, personalities, and human‑driven survival pressures. Her work has helped shift global dog research from pet‑centric laboratory studies to real‑world, Global South urban ecosystems.
In this informal conversation with Naresh Nunna of Neo Science Hub, during her recent visit to Hyderabad Literary Festival, Dr Anindita explained that free‑ranging dogs are urban wildlife, not generic “strays”, and must be understood in their ecological and social context. She describes how global science initially denied their existence, how personality variation is the rule, and how rigorous, emotion‑aware observation is essential for humane, evidence‑based policy and conflict reduction.
In your work, you’ve compared free‑ranging dogs to wildlife in an “urban jungle.” How do you see these dogs in the context of Indian cities like Delhi?
For me, the dogs are in the urban jungle. I approach them with the same methodology one would use to study elephants in a forest. 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.
You’ve spoken about resistance from the scientific establishment to studying street dogs. What kind of reactions did you initially face?
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.
Sixteen years on, how has that picture changed?
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.
People often say “all strays look the same.” From your fieldwork, what do you actually see?
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. There are always some over-eager dogs, there are some very reluctant, very anxious dogs. And this is a nice distribution in the population.
Your lab works with ethograms and strict criteria, but everyone there also loves dogs. How do you manage emotion vs objectivity in studying them?
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. We define by very strict behavioral criteria and give them scores. The person performing experiments and the person analyzing video footage are different, so we don’t let our feelings for the dogs bias the data.
