The New York Times feature “Feral Dogs on the Roof of the World” makes for compelling reading: packs of dogs harassing snow leopards, chasing livestock, prowling the edges of the Trans‑Himalaya. It is powerful storytelling—but it is not good ecology, good science, and it is not good public health.

This article offers a counter‑narrative grounded in decades of research on free‑ranging dogs, human–wildlife conflict, and rabies control. It makes three central claims.

1. Free‑ranging and free‑living dogs—even unowned—are not “feral”. They are Canis lupus familiaris, domestic dogs whose ecological niche is bound to humans.
2. Behaviour and conflict patterns in high‑altitude wildlife landscapes like Ladakh cannot be copied wholesale into urban dog policy. The ecologies, relationships and management goals are different.
3. The way forward is systems change—waste, tourism, livestock management and citizen‑centred dog care and vaccination—not killing or mass relocation. Quick‑fix removal and relocation are ecologically ineffective and risk undoing India’s hard‑won gains on rabies.

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1. Misnaming the dog: why “feral” is wrong

In the NYT article and its social‑media framing, Ladakh’s free‑ranging dogs are repeatedly labelled “feral”. This is both scientifically incorrect and politically loaded.

Taxonomically, these animals are domestic dogs: Canis lupus familiaris. India’s village, street, community and so‑called “stray” dogs are not a wild canid species. India does have a wild canid often colloquially called “wild dog”: the dhole (Cuon alpinus), an endangered species with its own conservation status and ecological role. To collapse dhole and domestic street dogs under a generic “feral dogs” label is a basic category error.

Within Canis lupus familiaris, there is a continuum of living arrangements, all still domestic dogs:

• fully owned, confined pets;
• owned but free‑roaming village and pastoral dogs;
• community dogs recognised and fed by households, monasteries, army units and shops;
• genuinely unowned free‑living dogs, who nonetheless live almost entirely in human‑dominated spaces and on human‑derived food.

At no point along this continuum do these dogs become “wild” in the ecological sense of being independent of humans. Their densities and movements track human settlement, waste and livestock, not untouched wilderness.

Calling them “feral” does two kinds of damage:

• Ecologically, it erases the fact that these are human‑created, human‑sustained populations. They are commensal scavengers that evolved to live off our waste and remain tightly bound to our presence.
• Ethically and politically, “feral” positions them as outsiders to the moral and civic community. It primes killing and removal as intuitive solutions, and it conveniently hides the human behaviours—open garbage, abandonment, unregulated breeding, poor livestock protection—that actually create and maintain the problem.

The accurate and responsible terms are “free‑ranging dogs”, “free‑living dogs” or “community dogs”: all explicitly acknowledging that these are domestic dogs whose ecology exists inside human systems, not outside them.

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2. Dogs live where humans live: the niche we created

A central insight from evolutionary and behavioural work on dogs is that village and street dogs are not “failed wolves” but successful scavengers. They evolved around human settlements, selected for tolerance of humans, short flight distances, and an ability to survive on human waste.

Empirical work in India and elsewhere strongly supports this:

• Long‑term urban and peri‑urban studies show that Indian free‑ranging dogs spend their lives as scavengers. They depend on garbage and human generosity and are only rarely observed engaging in sustained hunting.
• Densities and distributions of street dogs are best predicted by the density of houses, eateries and garbage piles.
• Experimental work shows that dogs’ foraging decisions are tuned to mixed human food: they foraging near markets, eateries and dumps, and use simple rules like “if it smells like meat, eat it” to pick protein‑rich scraps out of carbohydrate‑heavy piles.
• In rural Zimbabwe, a study revealed that about 88% of free‑ranging dogs’ diet by mass came from human‑derived foods such as maize porridge, leftover vegetables, livestock carcasses and human faeces. Similar “anthropogenic subsidy” patterns are documented in India and Latin America.

Ladakh’s dogs fit squarely into this pattern. They cluster around villages, monasteries, army camps and tourist infrastructure. They feed on kitchen waste, open garbage, livestock offal, human leftovers and handouts during tourist peaks. They do not spontaneously appear in remote snowfields far from humans.

To present them as wild “feral” invaders of a pristine landscape is to fundamentally misrepresent their ecological niche.

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3. What Ladakh data actually say: dogs are one part of a larger mortality system

The NYT story leans heavily on the claim that free‑ranging dogs are now an out‑of‑control driver of livestock loss, fuelling public anger. A closer look at the best available data from Ladakh tells a more nuanced story.

A study of villages within 40 km of Leh examined all causes of livestock mortality over 12 months, combined with interviews about attitudes towards snow leopards, wolves and free‑ranging dogs. It found:

• Weather and natural events accounted for roughly a third of all mortality events and the largest share of economic loss per household.
• Disease was responsible for close to a fifth of events and nearly a quarter of total loss.
• Snow leopards accounted for around a quarter of mortality and about a quarter of losses.
• Free‑ranging dogs accounted for around 15% of mortality events and roughly 13% of economic loss.
• Wolves accounted for under 10% of events and about 4% of financial loss.

In other words, dogs are responsible for a minority of losses. Weather and disease together do more harm than all predators combined, and snow leopards alone impose roughly twice the economic loss that dogs do.

Spatially, the same study observed that:

• Dogs killed livestock primarily inside corrals or close to villages—locations where animals are presumed safe.
• Wolves killed mainly in distant pastures.
• Snow leopards exploited corrals but in somewhat different patterns, often under cover of darkness.

Each predator is using different vulnerabilities in human practices. Flattening all “predation” into a single category and focusing objection only on dogs erases these differences and hinders targeted mitigation.

On attitudes, the study found that:

• Despite substantial losses, villagers held generally positive attitudes towards snow leopards and wolves, often informed by religious beliefs, conservation awareness and tourism benefits.
• Attitudes toward free‑ranging dogs were neutral on average: dogs were seen both as a nuisance (barking, bites, chasing) and as part of everyday village life.

Taken together, the evidence shows that dogs are one contributor to livestock loss, but not the major one, and certainly not the only one. The NYT’s framing of dogs as the central villain oversimplifies a complex web of climate, disease, husbandry and multiple predators.

Rashmi Rana a conservation scientist and researcher specialising in the ecology and socio-ecological impact of dogs in high-altitude Himalayan regions, says this about the socio-ecological role of livestock guardian dogs (LGDs) in chasing predators, “Across the Himalayan pastoral landscapes, from India to Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet/China, Pakistan, and Mongolia: many of these free-ranging dogs function as livestock guardian dogs who are historically embedded within agro-pastoral systems since millennia. In India, this is clearly evident in regions such as Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Kashmir, where free-ranging LGDs work in close partnership with shepherds of the Changpa, Gaddi, Bhotia, and Bakharwal communities, to protect livestock from wild predators including snow leopards, common leopards, wolves, and brown and black bears. In these contexts, it is important to distinguish the predator-chasing behaviour of dogs that likely reflects guardian responses aimed at defending livestock (such as pashmina goats in Ladakh) from indiscriminate predation. Failing to make this distinction only risks misinterpreting the traditional social, cultural and ecological role of dogs within pastoral systems and oversimplifying their contribution to livestock mortality. We must not overlook the the historical role of dogs in facilitating coexistence between humans and other wild animals.” 

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4. Dogs as scavengers, not “re‑wilded” predators

The core behavioural repertoire of street dogs remains that of flexible scavengers.

Studies of Indian free‑ranging dogs show that:

• Pups begin life as opportunistic foragers, grabbing whatever they can from human refuse, with protein coming predominantly from mother’s milk and regurgitated food.
• As they grow, they learn simple heuristics—such as choosing meat‑smelling items first—that allow them to extract protein efficiently from predominantly carbohydrate‑rich human waste.
• Time‑budget analyses in cities show that dogs spend large chunks of the day resting near resource hotspots, with short, opportunistic foraging trips rather than long, energetically costly hunts.
• Social foraging studies reveal loose, fluid groups where competition and occasional cooperation are balanced by the patchy, human‑structured nature of resources.

Across urban, peri‑urban and rural settings, diet studies converge on the same broad pattern: human‑derived food—garbage, offal, faeces and handouts—dominates. Livestock and wildlife appear as opportunistic components, especially in landscapes where humans have studded rangelands with settlements, carcass dumps and tourist hubs and allowed dog numbers to swell.

The NYT story briefly notes that Ladakhi dogs feast during tourist peaks but face scarcity at other times, which drives competition and conflict. 

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5. Dogs as biobuffers and the vacuum effect

In human‑dominated landscapes, free‑ranging dogs perform three crucial buffering functions:

• They rapidly consume edible waste and carcasses around settlements, reducing the payoff for larger carnivores to approach.
• They harass and displace other scavengers and meso‑carnivores—foxes, jackals—from village edges and dumps.
• Their barking serves as an early‑warning system when leopards, bears or other large carnivores come near homes and corrals.

This means that dogs stand, literally and figuratively, between human settlements and the wild carnivore guild. They form a safety layer that has emerged around human expansion.

When we talk about “removing” dogs—through culling or relocation—without simultaneously addressing what created their niche (waste, livestock practices, landscape change), we trigger a vacuum effect. The ecological slot of “medium-sized carnivore/scavenger benefitting from human food and livestock” does not stay empty. It is reoccupied:

• by new dogs from surrounding areas, often unvaccinated and more fearful of people; and/or
• by other scavengers and predators, including rodents and, in some contexts, larger carnivores like bears and leopards.

Rabies‑control and dog‑demography studies from multiple continents consistently show that culling and relocation:

• temporarily reduce numbers but are quickly followed by rebound through migration and reproduction;
• remove vaccinated and socially integrated dogs, undermining herd immunity;
• make remaining dogs more wary and less accessible to vaccination;
• destabilise dog social structures, which can increase conflict and bite risk.

At the same time, removing dogs from urban and peri‑urban environments has historically led to rodent population surges and rodent‑borne disease risk, since dogs are one of the few predatory checks we have in dense cityscapes.

Put simply: we know how to live with dogs, and we have effective tools—vaccination, sterilisation, waste control—to manage their risks. 

We do not yet know how to live safely with tigers on golf courses or sloth bears in garbage dumps when we strip away the buffer that free‑ranging dogs currently provide.

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6. Wild landscapes vs cities: different problems, different tools

One of the most dangerous conceptual moves in both media and policy discussions is to treat “dogs” as a single problem and apply lessons from one context to another without adjustment.

Ladakh’s high‑altitude rangelands and India’s cities are profoundly different systems.

In the Trans‑Himalaya, free‑ranging dogs share space with snow leopards, wolves, foxes and wild herbivores in a cold, low‑productivity environment. Human presence is spatially patchy but growing, shaped by military installations, monasteries, tourism, and climate‑sensitive pastoralism. Conservation goals should rightly include protecting domestic dogs, snow leopards, kiang and ground‑nesting birds, alongside safeguarding pastoral livelihoods without selective speciesism.

In cities like Bengaluru, by contrast, free‑living dogs exist within a dense concrete ecosystem dominated by humans, rats, crows, mynas and vehicles. Large wild carnivores are absent. Here the primary goals are public health (rabies, bites, zoonoses) and conflict reduction, not wildlife conservation.

Food webs, carrying capacity, human–dog relationships and management levers all differ:

• In Ladakh, tourist peaks, army rations and carcass disposal create sharp dog hotspots in otherwise resource‑scarce terrain, especially around army camps, labour colonies and tourist hubs where waste is poorly regulated.
• In cities, pervasive food waste and household feeding create a relatively distributed carrying capacity.
• Pastoral dogs may be more loosely owned and integrated into herding systems; urban community dogs are embedded in informal caregiving networks and are crucial nodes for vaccination campaigns.
• Around sensitive wildlife habitats, fencing, livestock protection and strict waste management near protected areas can be warranted; in cities, rabies control and coexistence strategies must be designed primarily around dog–human interactions.

Dog–wildlife conflict in Ladakh should guide conservation‑specific strategies there without selective speciesism. It should not be used to justify blanket, anti‑dog policies in Indian cities. Urban dog policy must rely on urban data: how many dogs there are, who feeds them, where they move and rest, and what kinds of human–dog relationships and behaviours drive coexistence.

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7. Ladakh’s dog policy, governance gaps and non‑lethal tools

Ladakh is not ignoring the issue. In May 2023, the administration launched a five‑pronged action plan to address the growing free‑ranging dog population. The plan includes:

1. Deployment of sterilisation teams across key settlements,
2. Ear‑tagging of sterilised dogs for easier identification,
3. Establishment of shelters,
4. Improved food waste management, and
5. An animal helpline for reporting and coordination.

This framework is conceptually sound. It recognises that sterilisation, identification, sheltering and waste management must work together, and it begins to build channels for citizen reporting.

However, three critical limitations have already become clear:

• Unregulated food sources remain largely untouched. Around army camps, labour clusters and tourist hubs, open kitchen waste and carcass disposal continue to sustain high dog densities. This undermines sterilisation efforts by maintaining carrying capacity and drawing in new animals.
• Weak inter‑agency coordination hampers implementation. Wildlife, municipal, veterinary, military and rural development authorities often operate in silos, even though dog ecology cuts across all their mandates.
• Limited public awareness and participation mean that many residents do not understand why sterilised dogs are returned, why relocation is counter‑productive, or how their own waste practices and feeding habits shape dog numbers and behaviour.

At the same time, Ladakh has piloted several innovative approaches. Community‑backed ABC and anti‑rabies campaigns, including the use of colour‑coded collars to signal vaccination and sterilisation status, have shown that when citizens are engaged and can visually identify protected dogs, tolerance and cooperation improve. Yet case reports from places like Saspol, where livestock depredation reportedly more than doubled within a year despite ongoing interventions, highlight how fragile these gains are when public awareness, waste regulation and coordination are not sustained.

Political leaders and local experts have underlined that the present situation is man‑made. Increased tourism, military deployment, rapid urbanisation and unmanaged waste have created abundant carrying capacity for dogs at the same time as traditional roles—hunting, shepherding, watchdogging—have eroded. Eastern Ladakh, which combines high wildlife richness with poor waste management, has been hardest hit. The main concern, as local officials put it, is the sheer availability of excess kitchen waste in army and tourist areas.

Alongside these governance challenges, Ladakh is experimenting with non‑lethal protection and traditional tools:

• In Liker village in the Sham belt of Leh district, solar‑powered electric fencing was installed around livestock enclosures in December 2024. This non‑lethal system is reported to have prevented further dog incursions on corrals. For remote areas with high predator pressure and limited manpower, such fencing offers a scalable, humane model that protects both livestock and wildlife.
• Organic‑waste composting units and biodigesters—piloted under programmes like SECURE Himalaya—demonstrate that food waste at camps and large settlements can be drastically reduced, cutting off one of the main drivers of dog population growth.

These experiences show that Ladakh’s challenge is not a lack of ideas, but the need to integrate sterilisation, waste reform, livestock protection and community engagement into a coherent, long‑term strategy.

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8. NYT’s narrative bias: what it shows, and what it hides

There are several clear biases in how the NYT structured and promoted its story.

• On social media, the NYT amplified the most anti‑street‑dog voices and images: dogs attacking livestock or wildlife, dogs in distress, dire warnings about “feral dogs”. More nuanced expert views—which emphasise the complexity of dog–wildlife interactions and note that dogs are also prey for snow leopards in some areas—were sidelined.
• The article acknowledges that dogs receive abundant food during tourist peaks but face scarcity later, which drives conflict, yet it does not frame scarcity and human‑made carrying capacity as the core issues. Instead, it frames “feral dogs” as the problem.
• It fails to mention that snow leopards, wolves, weather and disease all contribute substantially to livestock loss, while also ensuring the visual and narrative focus remains on dogs.
• It fails to mention the extensive literature showing that removal and relocation destabilise rabies control and create vacuum effects.

In effect, the piece imports a pre‑existing storyline—“feral dogs out of control, heroic scientists sounding the alarm”—and bolts local detail onto it. What is lost is the central role of human expansion, waste, livestock practices and tourism in creating the conditions for dog–wildlife conflict in the first place.

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9. Why mass relocation and “zero dogs” are bad public health

Since at least the early 2000s, India’s rabies and dog‑population research has converged on several robust findings:

• Rabies elimination is achievable through sustained vaccination of a sufficient proportion of the dog population, typically around 70%.
• Capture–Neuter–Vaccinate–Release (CNVR), with dogs returned to their original territories, is more effective and ethical in the long term than culling. It stabilises populations, improves dog health, and provides a platform for vaccination coverage.
• Human rabies cases decline dramatically where high CNVR coverage is reached and maintained.

By contrast, culling and mass relocation have repeatedly failed:

• They temporarily thin dog populations but are quickly followed by rebound through migration and reproduction.
• They remove vaccinated, socially integrated dogs and undermine herd immunity, allowing rabies to re‑emerge.
• They make remaining dogs more fearful and harder to handle, complicating future vaccination drives.
• They eliminate a key predator and scavenger at the urban food‑waste interface, opening the door to rodent population growth and rodent‑borne diseases.

India’s own history offers cautionary tales of what happens when dogs are removed en masse without addressing waste and housing conditions: rodent‑borne disease outbreaks, public panic, and ultimately a return to the status quo.

From a public‑health perspective, “zero dogs” is not only unrealistic but actively dangerous. The goal must be stable, vaccinated, well‑integrated dog populations, not their disappearance.

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10. Citizen‑care is part of the solution, not the problem

A persistent blind spot in both colonial and contemporary debates on rabies and “stray” dogs is the way public health has treated citizen‑care—feeding, sheltering and informally “owning” free‑living dogs—as an obstacle.

Recent social‑science work challenges that framing.

Surveys across Indian cities show that:

• A majority of respondents, including many who complain about free‑living dogs, admit to feeding them at least occasionally.
• Community caregivers often know individual dogs by personality and history, monitor their movements, and can reliably bring them to fixed vaccination or sterilisation points.
• Caregiving is often tied to religious or ethical frameworks that interpret feeding animals as an act of compassion and duty.

Historically, rabies policy has tried to harness “responsible ownership” and registration to eliminate free‑living dogs. It has paid far less attention to what could be achieved by actively supporting citizen‑care for community dogs as a public‑health resource.

Case studies from Jaipur, Jodhpur, Goa and elsewhere demonstrate that:

• Rabies can be driven to extremely low levels even in areas with substantial free‑living dog populations, provided vaccination and CNVR coverage is high and sustained.
• Campaigns are more cost‑effective and scalable when citizen‑caregivers are engaged as partners—bringing dogs to clinics, monitoring new arrivals, and helping identify animals needing follow‑up.

Decoupling rabies elimination from the fantasy of dog elimination allows us to treat caregivers not as saboteurs but as allies. Citizen‑care becomes a cornerstone of a realistic “One Health” approach to managing dogs, disease and human wellbeing together.

Read more on drawbacks of mass relocation and how citizen-care of street dogs is critical.

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11. Real solutions for Ladakh—and beyond

A serious, science‑based and experience-backed response to the issues raised in the NYT article must move beyond the seductive simplicity of “feral dogs” as villains. It must confront the human systems that created these conflicts and use tools that match the ecology.

11.1 Recommendations for Ladakh and similar landscapes

Given the evidence and Ladakh’s own experiences, a serious, science‑based and locally grounded strategy for Ladakh and comparable high‑altitude regions would include:

• Map ecological and conflict hotspots.
• Strengthen food waste management.
• Intensify but refine CNVR.
• Promote predator‑proof corrals and better herding practices in high‑risk seasons.
• Document and share best practices from communities that successfully balance livestock protection, wildlife conservation and dog coexistence.
• Expand non‑lethal physical barriers

11.2 Recommendations for Indian cities

For cities, the priorities are public health, safety and coexistence. A coherent urban strategy would include:

• Commit to long‑term CNVR and vaccination.
• Stop culling and relocation; return vaccinated, sterilised dogs to their territories as required by law.
• Treat citizen‑care as infrastructure. Recognise community feeders and dog guardians as partners.
• Fix the waste system.
• Create community awareness on safe behaviour around dogs, bite‑prevention and conflict de‑escalation.
• Build data and accountability.

Changing the story

The surge in free‑ranging dogs in Ladakh is not a simple “feral dog problem.” It is a complex socio‑ecological challenge that sits at the intersection of unregulated tourism, proliferating food waste, poor pet management, climate‑stressed pastoralism and shifting land‑use practices.

Addressing it calls for science‑based, locally anchored and multi‑sectoral strategies. Sterilisation and vaccination remain essential, but they are not enough. They must be coupled with ecosystem monitoring, strict waste regulation, support for guardian dogs and corrals, and genuine community participation.

Ladakh is uniquely positioned to lead. It has a small, engaged population; strong local institutions; global visibility; and growing experience with integrated initiatives like Dark Sky regulation and solar‑fencing pilots. With sustained political will, public awareness and institutional coordination, Ladakh can move beyond reactive control and become a model for humane, ecologically literate dog management in high‑altitude regions.

To get there, however, we must ask the real question. One that is harder, but much more honest: given that dogs are domestic animals living in the ecological niche we created, how will we change our own systems—waste, livestock, tourism, governance—so that dogs, wildlife and people can all survive?

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