  Mammalian offspring require parental care, at least in the form of suckling
during their early development. While mothers need to invest considerable time
and energy in ensuring the survival of their current offspring, they also need
to optimize their investment in one batch of offspring in order to ensure
future reproduction and hence lifetime reproductive success. Free-ranging dogs
live in small social groups, mate promiscuously, and lack the cooperative
breeding biology of other group living canids. They face high early life
mortality, which in turn reduces fitness benefits of the mother from a batch of
pups. We carried out a field based study on free-ranging dogs in India to
understand the nature of parental care provided by mothers at different stages
of pup development. Using behavioural patterns of mother-pup interactions, we
draw up a timeline of pup ontogeny. Our analysis reveals that mothers cleverly
reduce investment in energy intensive active care and increase passive care as
the pups grow older, thereby keeping overall levels of parental care more or
less constant over pup age.
