Addressing a session titled ‘Animal Matters: Observing Behaviour’, Bhadra stressed that concentrating large amounts of food in one area disrupts natural behaviour. “Dogs are group-living and territorial. Feeding too many dogs at one spot leads to overcrowding, fights, and heightened conflict,” she said, adding that lactating females or injured dogs are more likely to react defensively.Delving into the behavioural aspect, she said urban dogs constantly observe and interpret human actions, relying heavily on eye contact, body language, visual cues, and voice to make split-second decisions. She also highlighted surprising findings on colour perception. “Dogs respond strongly to the colour yellow. In multiple experiments, they ignored food momentarily to first investigate yellow objects. This suggests that visual cues play a major role in urban environments, which are otherwise olfactorily noisy,” Bhadra said.On bonding, Bhadra said dogs “hijack the oxytocin pathway”. “When humans and dogs look at each other, both release oxytocin — the hormone linked to maternal bonding. This builds trust. That’s why dogs tend to trust people who pet them more than those who only feed them,” she said, adding that most dogs do not attack unless they feel threatened. “Growling or barking is a warning. The idea that all street dogs are dangerous is completely incorrect,” she said.Meanwhile, author Deepa Padmanabhan, who was also part of the session, expanded the conversation beyond dogs to other urban species through her book ‘Invisible Housemates’. She said the book examines animals and insects that live alongside humans, but are routinely dismissed as pests. “They are not invisible because they are rare, but because we choose not to see them,” she said, adding that many of these species, from cockroaches and pigeons to rats and lizards, play crucial roles in urban ecosystems. Linking her work to the human-dog debate, Padmanabhan said cities are “highly interconnected ecosystems”, and warned against viewing species in isolation. “When a species is abundant, we label it a nuisance; when it disappears, we mourn its loss. This says more about human behaviour than about animals,” she said.
