A new study on the Indian street dog states that “food subsidies” — availability of abundant, predictable food through garbage and intentional feeding — have an impact on their population in the country’s urban ecosystems.
Kumar’s study published in Nature Cities offers a new perspective as he argues that the driver lies in how Indian cities provide free-ranging dogs with abundant and predictable food through garbage and intentional feeding. The study added that sterilisation, shelters, fencing or removals cannot succeed when urban landscapes provide food subsidies to animals without corresponding responsibility.
The study, titled ‘The Indian street dog crisis and multi-species coexistence in tropical urban futures’, conducted by Nishant Kumar, a DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), said that abundant and predictable food through garbage and the intentional feeding provided to free-ranging dogs influences their population. NCBS said that while India’s street-dog crisis is often framed as a problem of animal population control, Mr. The study calls for a shift from reactive dog control to multispecies coexistence and says that this would require public health, veterinary services, waste management, urban planning, and conservation agencies to work together, supported by long-term data on dog populations, movement, reproduction, mortality, and behaviour.
