When author Susanne Sternthal moved to Moscow last year with her family, she was surprised to see so many stray dogs. They live everywhere, much like homeless humans. Some 500 strays live in metro stations, and some have even learned to ride the trains. Sternthal describes their lives, drawing on the work of Andrei Poyarkov, a 56-year old specialist in wolves who began to study Moscow’s stray dogs 30 years ago.
He [biologist Andrei Poyarkov] quickly found that the strays were much easier to study than wolves. “To see a wild wolf is a real event,” he says. “You can see them, but not for very long and not at close range. But with stray dogs you can watch them for as long as you want and, for the most part, be quite near them.” According to Poyarkov, there are 30,000 to 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow, while the wolf population for the whole of Russia is about 50,000 to 60,000. Population density, he says, determines how frequently the animals come into contact with each other, which in turn affects their behaviour, psychology, stress levels, physiology and relationship to their environment.
“The second difference between stray dogs and wolves is that the dogs, on average, are much less aggressive and a good deal more tolerant of one another,” says Poyarkov. Wolves stay strictly within their own pack, even if they share a territory with another. A pack of dogs, however, can hold a dominant position over other packs and their leader will often “patrol” the other packs by moving in and out of them. His observations have led Poyarkov to conclude that this leader is not necessarily the strongest or most dominant dog, but the most intelligent – and is acknowledged as such. The pack depends on him for its survival.
Susanne Sternthal, “Moscow’s stray dogs”, Financial Times, 16 January 2010.
There is much more. I especially enjoyed the comments of Alexey Vereshchagin, a graduate student who works with Poyarkov. Vereshchagin explains that number of stray dogs does not exceed 35,000 because food is limited. The population is in Malthusian equilibrium, so if an abandoned pet survives, “it is only to replace an adult dog that died”. Only 3% of pet dogs dumped by owners on the streets of Moscow survive more than a few days.
The article is worth reading in its entirety, but access might be restricted. Susanne Sternthal is author of Gorbachev’s Reforms: De-Stalinization through Demilitarization (Praeger, 1997).
