Feral Dog Study

Here is a link to the full text of one of the few research studies conducted on feral dogs. It’s an old study, originally published in 1995 but still an interesting, although academic, read.

Given the looseness with which the term is usually used I particularly like their clear definition of what they consider a feral dog to be: “those dogs living in a wild state with no food and shelter intentionally provided by humans, and showing a continuous and strong avoidance of direct human contacts”. This study was conducted in Italy and what strikes me is that under this definition I doubt that a country such as Thailand where I live has any feral dogs at all. This highlights a very real difference in the western and eastern attitudes to free-ranging dogs. As a generality, in eastern (or perhaps that should be tropical) cultures free-ranging, unowned dogs are accepted as a normal and inclusive part of society and therefore do not reach this feral state. The western (temperate) attitude is that all dogs should be owned so any free-ranging dogs are excluded from society and inadvertently pushed into the feral lifestyle.

The study’s conclusions include that “feral dogs are not reproductively self-sustaining”, “suffer from high rates of juvenile mortality” and “depend indirectly upon humans for food”. The implication is that this particular population would disappear if not fuelled by abandoned pets, which is apparently a quite different situation to that in Australia at present where a seemingly prospering feral dog population is causing increasing concerns (see my earlier post here).

Learn more about the lives and issue of unowned dogs in my e-book ”A Stray View” available from Bangkok Books (readable as .pdf on any computer)