There's no single template for a "good dog life"—context and individual needs shape welfare.

Pet dogs' protection often comes at the expense of their agency and freedom of choice.

Free-living dogs challenge Western assumptions about what dogs need.

Dog behavior deemed problematic in pets may be adaptive in street dogs' environments.

My students and I have studied domesticated dogs for many decades in vastly different settings ranging from "homed" dogs to free-ranging and feral dogs.

Among the most important conclusions that stemmed from these diverse research projects is that the dogs with whom the vast majority of people are familiar—those who live in homes—are not representative of the great variation in behavior that is observed in different social and ecological settings. In other words, there is no universal prototypical "dog" and we must be very careful in assuming there is and using them as a guide to what we think is normal dog-appropriate species-typical behavior.

This is one of the major points Jessica Pierce and I make in our book A Dog's World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans and I stress in Dogs Demystified: An A-to-Z Guide to All Things Canine. For this and other reasons, I was very pleased to learn about a recent paper titled "Cross-Cultural Encounters With Free-Living Dogs as Epistemic Disruption in Western Dog Training Expertise" published in the journal Anthrozoös by Dr. Daniel Ramp, Kapil V. Patwardhan, and Rosalie S. Chapple.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write “Cross-Cultural Encounters With Free-Living Dogs as Epistemic Disruption in Western Dog Training Expertise?”

Dan Ramp: Although I research free-living dingoes in Australia, my first experience of free-living dogs in urban settings was in India. While observing them, I was struck by how strongly the history of domestication shapes our assumptions that dogs are dependent on us, and that control and ownership are necessary to fulfill our duty of care. With my background in compassionate conservation, I wanted to understand........

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