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Free-ranging dogs, a ubiquitous part of human habitations, have managed to survive on human wastes and generosity. While a part of the human population shows affiliative interactions with dogs, often they are considered as a menace by people due to some of their behavioural traits and as also reservoirs of zoonoses. Rapidly growing free-ranging dog populations, an obvious outcome of the exponential growth of the human population, becomes a serious health issue in developing countries where free-ranging dogs are not banned by law. Proper food waste management is often lacking, and animal birth control programmes are too expensive to be regularly practiced. Moreover, due to their immense integrity with humans, population management becomes all the more difficult, and management decisions need be founded on a precise understanding of free-ranging dogs’ ecology and population dynamics. We carried out a five year-long census based study to understand the pattern of population growth and factors affecting dogs’ early life mortality. Since most of the pup births were recorded during winter when a drop in temperature might cause infections, especially those of the respiratory tract, we have checked the effect of the diurnal temperature difference separately on the day of death on the mortality of pups in the first month of their lives. We observed high rates of mortality, with only ~19% of the 364 pups from 95 observed litters surviving till the reproductive age; 63% of total mortality being human influenced and 32% being natural where temperature plays no role. While living near people increases resource availability for dogs, it also has deep adverse impacts on their population growth, making the dog-human relationship on streets highly complex.
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