Stray dogs are also not a recent phenomenon. ( Read how dogs changed humans over time, too.) Understanding stray dogs

“This is more evidence that free-ranging dogs are just as good as any other dog at using basic human gestures, and that free-ranging dogs are as smart as people often imagine,” says Brian Hare, founder and director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University, via email. (This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot.) Photograph by Susan Wilkins, Your Shot This picture was taken at the beach in Waldport, Oregon. They are named for the region in East Germany/Poland that is most associated with their early breeding. They are members of the spitz family and were favored by Queen Victoria. They are active, fun-loving toy dogs who think they are every bit as big as a Labrador. They are Pomeranians, approximately two years old. This is Zorro and his little sister, Madison. (Related: how your dog knows how you feel.) The hands of the second experimenter were never near the bowls.Ībout half of the dogs wouldn’t come close to the experimenters many appeared anxious and had likely had negative encounters with people, Bhadra says. A second experimenter, who didn’t know which bowl was which, would then stand and point at one of the bowls, sometimes for just one second, sometimes for the length of the experiment. An experimenter placed two covered bowls on the ground near them, one containing raw chicken, the other empty with just the scent of food. In the study, published January 17 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Bhadra and colleagues approached 160 solitary stray dogs in several Indian cities.

( Take National Geographic's dog quiz.) Getting to the point The study’s findings could help educate adults and children-who are often bitten and infected with rabies while sharing food with stray dogs-how to interact with them, leading to “a more peaceful co-existence,” she says. In recent experiments, she discovered that most stray dogs knew where to look when a human was pointing to an object, suggesting their ability to read humans is innate. ( Read about the many human signals dogs can understand.) That's why learning more about stray dogs and their behavior is crucial to resolving problems with people, says Bhadra, who has studied the animals for a decade. Stray dogs, she adds, are never sure whether people want to feed and pet them-or hurt them. This has made the management of stray dogs a polarizing subject, with some people killing the animals inhumanely, says Anindita Bhadra, animal behaviorist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata. These free-ranging canines often come into conflict with people, and, particularly in India, pose a public health risk as carriers of rabies, a fatal virus that kills up to 20,000 people a year in India, most of them children, according to the World Health Organization. Up to 300 million stray dogs roam the planet, with about 30 million in India alone. Now, a new study reveals even stray dogs-animals that have never lived with people-can still understand our gestures. Humans domesticated dogs, and over our 15,000-year relationship, we’ve bred canines to be friendly and eager companions-as well as skilled at interpreting our emotions.

Stray dog follows extreme race