The Ecology of Stray Dogs

No. 155

We lost a neighbor this week, one who stayed with us often. A canine neighbor, a dog that really was family. Lucy, pictured in the foreground above, was our dog Lupe’s sister, and spent her life three doors down from us on our weird little street—after spending her early youth with her sister living on the street.

The pair of them appeared not long after we moved here in the spring of 2010, living in a little rented cottage next to the brownfield lot I had bought the year before and had the half-baked idea to turn from a dump site into a homesite. We’d see them in the morning, two puppies hanging out on the sofa someone had left in the parking lot behind the old diner. Our neighbor Gina, a filmmaker and Level 20 Dog Whisperer, who had already saved three street dogs over here and made them her and her partner’s domestic companions (one of whom, She-Ra, she famously managed to lure growling and snarling from underneath a parked semi), was the one who figured out they had been abandoned. So our neighbors Leila and Jimmy (also filmmakers—you know you have found a good spot to make your home when it’s the one the professional location scouts pick for theirs) adopted Lucy, and we adopted Lupe.

Lucy (front), Lupe (black) & Katsu (white), July 2017, behind the factories

This was and still is the sort of neighborhood where it is extremely helpful to have canny working dogs as part of your household. We live in an old industrial part of town slowly transitioning into something else, wedged between light factories and major thoroughfares on one side and the weird wild woods along the stretch of urban river hidden behind them. A double dead end at the edge of town where you regularly encounter both human and animal danger, and good dogs can help you be and feel safe, and better understand everything going on in the environment around you. Even as they also help you understand how our dogs express our violent exercise of power and dominion over our natural environment.

When we moved here, it was still the sort of place where stray dogs were common, and loose dogs more so. Right after I bought the lot, I got attacked by one when I was coming back for a run, chomped right in the calf by a stocky mongrel that for all I know may have later sired Lupe and Lucy. It hurt like hell and also felt weirdly appropriate, maybe even karmically just, as a hazing of the new interloper. In the following years, we had many encounters with free range urban pit bulls, one exceptionally scary run-in with an aggressive pack that ran down the street and tried to get through our front gate on a Sunday morning, and magical glimpses of the ghost dogs who move through the urban negative space behind the industrial park.

From The Ecology of Stray Dogs

Stray dogs used to be more common in American cities, as I can remember from being a kid in the 70s. Last year I discovered Alan Beck’s fascinating little book The Ecology of Stray Dogs, published in 1973, which documents his study of free-ranging canines in early 70s Baltimore. That was an era when human trash was more easily accessible as a food source for street dogs, and animal control less advanced. An age of alley scavengers enjoying the bounty of overturned metal trash cans and pools of fresh water underneath A/C window units. Those kinds of dogs are mostly gone now, even in this neighborhood. In their absence, coyotes have moved in and adapted to much the same territory, denning in pockets of interstitial wilderness, hunting rather than scavenging.

Not long after we built our house, the coyotes started to come right up to the fence in the morning to interact with our dogs. The first time I witnessed such an encounter, one of the two coyotes was pogoing up out of the tall grass like a cartoon character. The official narrative is that they want to lure the domestic dogs out to be ambushed by the pack, but watching those interactions over the years I came to question that presumed predation. They say all members of the genus canis are capable of interbreeding, and one wonders what weird new variants may be incubating as historical habitat disappears and climate patterns become chaotic. I’ve seen some over the years, wild dogs that could have been coywolves, maybe part red wolf, or maybe half coyote half German shepherd. And plenty of textbook coyotes, most of them healthy, a few mangy or lame.

Coyote in the empty lot next door, November 2018

A year after we brought Lupe into our home, we got a second dog, this one a male. He was a Japanese hunting dog my then middle school-aged son picked out, a Kishu-ken—a medium-sized hunting dog from the mountains of southern Honshu that was bred by a lady who brought a pair back to the coastal fishing town of Rockport, Texas. Katsu lived up to his breeder’s characterization of her animals as “closer to the wolf.” Like a stocky white coyote, with triangle eyes and a capacity for vocalization and dance like some weirder and scarier version of Scooby Doo.

In those first couple of years, I spent a lot of time training both dogs. We walked every morning at daybreak, mostly in the urban woods and along the river, but also around the more urbanized parts of the neighborhoods, exploring in every direction from our house, down residential blocks and industrial ones, along railroad tracks and outlaw trails, through empty lots and expansive brownfields. We learned a lot about canine territoriality, often provoked by Katsu’s thoroughbred eunuch energy. I mostly worked at home, and spending my days in the company of these two dogs who were each exceptional hunters, expressing different aspects of what that involves, helped me better understand the bargain that was struck between humans and wild dogs all those millennia ago, and what it reveals about how we regulate nature.

We’ve all read different theories of how dogs and humans came to live together, theories that are really speculative stories tied to nuggets of observed truth. Living with dogs tuned into the wild, and being around wild canines nearby, provides a lot of insight into how we have co-evolved. Doing so in the urban edgelands, I came to see how dogs are one of the ways we have trained wildness to mediate our interaction with the wild. Familiars of the long Anthropocene, who help us stay on top of the food chain and are rewarded with the benefits of staying there with us.

The family “pet” after an early morning armadillo encounter

They do so in two main ways, quite instinctively: by guarding the perimeter of our habitat, and by helping us kill representatives of other species that could provide us food, or that could threaten our foodstores and families.

It does not take much to teach a dog to patrol and protect the boundaries of one’s home site. They take to it quite naturally. If you teach them to walk it every morning and every night, to cover the full perimeter, they will do so. And you will soon see that their natural reaction to any unfamiliar presence at or within that perimeter is alarm. And if the presence is something other than a member of our species or theirs, they will attack it. Cat, opossum, armadillo, squirrel, fox, or anything else except, in my experience, a snake, which our dogs at least had an instinct to keep their fangs off. I worked hard over the years to prevent such backyard horrors from happening, but having trained our dogs to wake me up before dawn and hang out outside while I worked, there would always be some.

At home or in the field, what dogs do if they encounter an animal’s traces in the environment—usually a scent trail on the ground—is to follow it until they find the animal. And when they find it, they will try to kill it. The quantity of life that can get wasted by dogs and cats is remarkable. Dogs are especially gifted to hunt mammals, cats to hunt birds, and both are pretty good at catching and killing reptiles (other than snakes). And almost always, at least with dogs, they will leave their kill for you to decide what to do with it. They will not eat it themselves, though if you let them, they may keep it as a trophy to carry around with them with pride.

Lucy showing off

Lucy was not a big dog, a little smaller than her sister, maybe 40 pounds after a big meal. And she didn’t look fierce, with her sweet Old Yeller coat and attention-loving demeanor. But she was an amazing huntress, and got lots of opportunities to exercise her skills, as she was also a natural-born Houdini, one of those dogs who can’t be fenced in. We would often find her at our back fence or front, coming by after a woodland romp to visit her sister, who was quite happy to hang out at home. Lucy once, to our collective amazement, killed a deer all by herself, by chasing it into the river, getting up on its back, and drowning it.

We got to know Lucy well the summer she stayed with us while her adoptive parents were away. Every morning I would take all three dogs out into the urban woods on long leads, which was as comical a cluster as you might imagine, and also surprisingly easy. The natural synchronization of the pack became more evident, and you could imagine how much terror they could wreak for the creatures of the field if you let them off leash.

Street gang of the long Anthropocene

Katsu died three summers ago, when he had an armadillo trapped in a burrow at the back of our yard one June morning, and his relentless efforts to dig it out dislodged a several-hundred-pound chunk of concrete debris that had been half-embedded in the hill, which slid loose and crushed his neck. Lupe and Lucy continued to age, and by their thirteenth year they were showing their years—less energetic in the woods, less tolerant of the Texas heat, and increasingly deaf or oblivious to our calls. Tuesday, right after the sisters had hung out for the weekend, Lucy’s back legs failed her, and when they got to the vet it was evident she was at death’s door, likely due to cancer.

Yesterday on our walk Lupe tried to see if her sister was around, and I wished I had a way to tell her.

All three of Gina’s pack of canine street girls left us around the same time as Katsu. She and Mike adopted a new rescue, but these dogs who have passed represent the end of an era. The feral corner we moved to, a strange long block where you could have an experience of wilderness living in the city, by choosing to live behind the truck tarp shop or the door factory, has changed. The wildness slowly bleeds away over the years, as the town around it grows, and the relentless march of development in the surrounding zone changes the energy.

Piper, Jordi and She-Ra

When I read in the paper a while back that East Austin now has more dogs than children, and half the elementary schools are closing, I understood we had reached the tipping point where our domestic animals replace the urban wild instead of moderate it—an aspect of gentrification that gets less notice. And I realize now, as they are mostly gone, that the greatest gift our edgeland hounds gave us was to help us awaken the dormant wild within ourselves. Showing us how we, too, were creatures of the field at the core, adapted to walk above the tall grass and see family dinner at a farther distance across the savanna.

With that fresh understanding, and in the company of our canine companions, we could find windows of momentary escape from the alienated drone of modern life. And start to renegotiate our relationship with the natural world, on more reciprocal terms. Now when I hear the coyotes call back to the sirens of the first responders hurtling toward the onramp, and Lupe is the only canis familiaris around to join in the chorus, I wonder what wilder world the future might bring, if we let it.

Saturday afternoon in our rewilded front yard

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Further Reading

Alan Beck’s The Ecology of Stray Dogs can be downloaded for free as a PDF from the press of Purdue University, where Beck taught for many years.

For a roundup of the scholarly thinking on the deep history of the domestication of dogs, this encyclopedic Wikipedia entry is hard to beat. See also these recent pieces at Scientific American, New Statesman, BBC, and these pieces on the Bonn-Oberkassel dog(s).

For the coolest story of the last decade about urban canids, check out this NYT report from 2022 on the “Ghost Wolves of Galveston Island”—red wolf mixes living behind run-down apartment buildings.

More here on the Black Mouth Cur, the regional hound which is most likely Lupe and Lucy’s breed.

And from three years ago this weekend, my remembrance of our fiercest edgeland hound.

Thanks to reader Katie M. for tipping me off, after my report last week on the proposed expansion of I-35 expansion Austin and the threat to the urban Colorado River, to this great NYT piece on the very different approach policymakers in the State of Colorado are taking to highways—by not building more.

Have a great week. I’ll be celebrating a big birthday this week, which I will indulge by reminding you my new book A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, forthcoming in October from Timber Press, is now available for preorder—follow the links on the Hachette Book Group site here if you’re interested. I’ll also be working this week on the print version of this newsletter to begin mailing out soon—if you’d like a copy please email me at chris@christopherbrown.com with your preorder confirmation and snail mail address. Thanks again to all who have already done so.