Fixed Players, Fluid Moves: Refining Strategy While Preserving Identity in Free-Ranging Dogs

Abstract

Animals often display active decision-making while navigating noisy habitats, for varied purposes like foraging, finding shelter, evading predators or finding suitable mates. While some responses are hardwired, following fixed action patterns, others are more flexible, and display context-dependent plasticity. Animals might weigh behavioural consistency against adaptive plasticity when facing recurrent ecological difficulties, but the nuanced mechanisms orchestrating this balance is not well understood. We investigated this question by repeatedly exposing 47 free-ranging dogs to chicken contaminated with lemon solution, an aversive but edible and familiar food source, across four consecutive trials. By integrating behavioural frequencies, latency measures, feeding efficiency, interaction-time and location effects, repeatability analyses, and behavioural sequence structure, we examined how repeated experience influenced foraging behaviour. Contrary to expectations of broad behavioural reorganisation, most behaviours remained stable. Initial approach latency was strongly repeatable within individuals with no detectable influence of sex or trial number across the population. This suggests that how an animal first assesses risk is primarily shaped by stable personality traits rather than momentary external factors. Eating behaviour and bowl nudging also changed selectively across exposures, with modest sex differences in several behaviours. Behavioural sequences became increasingly similar over time, while several behaviours retained consistent individual differences, indicating persistent behavioural tendencies. Our results collectively demonstrated that repeated aversive exposure selectively modified a few critical decision points rather than the entire behavioural repertoire. This implies that animals can adapt by making small adjustments to specific behaviours while maintaining the stability of their overall behavioural architectures. Animals seem to assess risk separately from how well they use resources. That separation may help explain how stable personalities can coexist with the fast, flexible decisions animals need in unpredictable environments shaped by humans.