New York Times – The World if Full of Dogs Without Collars: “..add up all the pet dogs on the planet, and you will get about 250 millions. But there are about a billion dogs on Earth, according to some estimates. The other 750 million…don’t have humans to take them for walks and pick up their feces. They are called village dogs, street dogs and free breeding dogs…” See the new book, What is a Dog by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger.

• “Exploring the natural history of these animals, the Coppingers explain how the village dogs of Vietnam, India, Africa, and Mexico are strikingly similar. These feral dogs, argue the Coppingers, are in fact the truly archetypal dogs, nearly uniform in size and shape and incredibly self-sufficient. Drawing on nearly five decades of research, they show how dogs actually domesticated themselves in order to become such efficient scavengers of human refuse. The Coppingers also examine the behavioral characteristics that enable dogs to live successfully and to reproduce, unconstrained by humans, in environments that we ordinarily do not think of as dog friendly.” via the book’s publisher.