A Direct Observation of Infanticide by a Female Free‐Ranging Dog (Canis familiaris) Supports the Resource Competition Hypothesis
Melissa Vanderheyden, Brenda Chaignon, Clément Car, Małgorzata Pilot, Ikhlass el Berbri, Sarah Marshall‐Pescini, Friederike Range, Andreas Berghänel · 2025
Read A Direct Observation of Infanticide by a Female Free‐Ranging Dog (Canis familiaris) Supports the Resource Competition Hypothesis by Melissa Vanderheyden, Brenda Chaignon, Clément Car, Małgorzata Pilot, Ikhlass el Berbri, Sarah Marshall‐Pescini, Friederike Range, Andreas Berghänel (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12998265.txt.
Description
Melissa Vanderheyden and co-authors report the first direct observation of a female free-ranging dog killing pups inside her own pack, and test whether resource competition or hunger better explains it. Infanticide by females is rarely seen directly in mammals, so its causes are hard to pin down. Their long-term study population had many cases of overlapping pregnancies.
Across those cases, subordinate females timed births after or alongside the alpha female, a pattern that may reduce infanticide risk. Sharing a den may also blur which pups belong to whom. The observed killing followed a period of rank instability, and body condition scores argued against hunger as the motive, since not all killed pups were eaten. The authors favor the competition account.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Melissa Vanderheyden, Brenda Chaignon, Clément Car, Małgorzata Pilot, Ikhlass el Berbri, Sarah Marshall‐Pescini, Friederike Range, Andreas Berghänel |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 54 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |