People have been breeding dogs since prehistoric times. Early dog breeders used wolves to create domestic dogs. From the beginning, humans purposefully dog breeds medium to perform various tasks.
Hunting, guarding and herding are believed to be among the earliest jobs enthusiastically performed by the animal destined to be called ‘man’s best friend’.
For thousands of years, humans bred dogs towards the physical and mental traits best suited to the work expected of them. The sleek types of greyhounds bred to chase prey with fleet legs, and the huge types of mastiffs used as guard dogs and warriors, are two ancient examples of dog breeds medium bred for specific jobs.
As humans became more sophisticated, so did their dogs. Eventually, specific breeds of dogs emerged, custom bred to meet the local needs and circumstances of the breeders.
The Greyhound, for example, was the base type for the huge Irish Wolfhound and the delicate Italian Greyhound. All three have a distinct family resemblance, but you will never mistake one for the other.
So when is it a breed and not just a type of dog? The simplest way to define a breed is to say that it always ‘breeds true’. In other words, breeding a purebred Irish Setter to a purebred Irish Setter will produce dogs that are instantly recognisable as Irish Setters.
The ideal physical traits, movement and temperament of each breed are set out in a written document called a ‘breed standard’. For example, the breed standard sets out the traits that make a Cocker Spaniel a Cocker Spaniel and not a Springer Spaniel.
History of dog breeds
When we think of dogs, we often think of dog breeds, from the tiny Chihuahua to the massive Great Dane, or from the Labrador to the breeding Border Collie.
When we come across a cute mixed dog breeds medium, one of the first questions we often ask its owner is ‘What breed is it?’ Playing the breed guessing game is a favourite pastime among dog owners.
But in fact, looking around the world, breeds make up a small proportion of canine genetics. Kathryn Lord in a 2013 article estimated that there are between 700 to 1 billion dogs in the world.
Of these, the vast majority – up to 83% – choose their mates on their own, without any interference from humans. In fact, most of them live alone, making their homes around humans but not in human homes.
If you go down the family tree of most of these dogs, you will find no ancestors belonging to any particular breed. They are just dogs, breeding as they have been for tens of thousands of years.
Most of these dogs are very similar to the original dog, living in the same environment as their ancestors did thousands of years ago, in other words, looking for what humans leave behind, or for scraps.
Breeds are, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the history of dogs. We still don’t know how long we have had dogs on this planet, despite the many researchers who are working hard to solve that particular puzzle, but they certainly have been on the planet for at least 10,000 years.
For much of that time, dogs were bred as they chose, and the resulting animal often resembled what we now call a ‘village dog’, to be slightly larger and have longer, thicker coats, while dogs living in warmer climates tend to be slightly smaller and have shorter, thinner coats. The most common colour among these village dogs is lion-like yellow with a white underside, but we also see many other colours.
Over time, dogs living near different populations of humans began to adapt to that population. Initially this was not due to intentional human interference with the dogs’ breeding choices. Most likely, the first way we selected which dogs to breed was simply by tolerating or even feeding dogs that bothered us or were affectionate to us.
Dogs that did not chase livestock would have been less likely to be chased off and killed, and dogs that chased away other predators might even get extra food on their way. Over time, this unintentional selection resulted in groups of dogs that were actually useful to have, doing jobs such as guarding livestock.
The term ‘landrace’ is sometimes used to describe these populations of dogs: dogs adapted for a particular part of the world and perhaps good to be useful, but not intentionally selected by humans. These dogs were not yet ‘breeds’ by today’s standards. Because they were bred freely for their ability, any dog of an unknown breed could be considered a useful dog of a particular type, as long as it could do the job.
Over time, some people began to dog breeds medium with some intention, getting dogs that were better at certain jobs, such as herding or retrieving. Dogs became more adapted to their jobs and began to do more work during this stage.
However, breeds as we know them today did not appear until the Victorian era, when the fashion for ‘dog lovers’ was born in England. Dog fanciers began breeding dogs for very specific looks, such as particular coat colours or ear shapes or mouth lengths.
Over time, some people began to dog breeds medium with some intention
Because their dogs were more likely to be kept in houses and under very strict control than dogs at younger ages, it was easier to control which dogs were bred.
As dog breeders successfully developed some dogs with a particular and unusual appearance, they began to keep records (records of who was the sire of whom) to help them better select dogs to breed (or not to breed).
At some point these registers were ‘closed’, meaning that new dogs were not allowed in unless they could fully trace their ancestry back to the dogs already on the list. It was then that breeds were born, along with kennel clubs to maintain the registers.
Today, we understand a dog to be a member of a breed if its ancestry can be traced back to the dogs that were founding members of the breed; in other words, they are listed in the original breed registry entries. If there is a single dog in a dog’s ancestry that cannot trace its ancestry to the original breed registry, technically, that dog is not purebred.
What this means for Darwin’s dog project is that sometimes, when we return breed results for a mixed-breed dog, we find fragments of its DNA that we cannot match to any breed.
What are these fragments? Possibly they are from a breed that we don’t yet have in our reference panel. But possibly these areas of your dog’s DNA come from ancestors that go back to village dogs, to populations of dogs that were never selected by people and never belonged to a breed.
We call these ‘non-breed dogs’, but in reality, they are just dogs, choosing their mates on their own, like most animals in the world.
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