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I'm Suzanne Bard.

Dogs began to diverge from wolves tens of thousands of years ago when their wild ancestors started

interacting with humans. Over time, domestication shaped canine behavior, and today dogs are especially adept at understanding cues from humans.

For example, when a person points at a bull, a pet dog will usually approach it.

All kinds of complex pointing gestures have been tried with pet dogs,

and they seem to be good at it?

Behavioral biologist Anandita Badru of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research.

Wolves are a different story, however.

When same experiments are done with semi-capped wolves,

wolves seem to be quite bad at it.

So there's this big open question of how did dogs become dogs.

Baudru is interested in whether dogs require training to understand cues like pointing

or if the behavior is innate.

Most studies have focused on pet dogs and developed countries,

but Badru thinks it's a mistake to overlook how stray dogs respond to human cues.

In India, we have a huge population of stray dogs.

They are not controlled by humans and they live on the streets for generations.

So we felt that the free-ranging dogs

are a very nice system, which could give us inputs

...