Native American Dogs

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What is the Common Dog?

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Kate

Kate and Naiche, 1978

The “common dog” is a generic name first used by ancient American dog scholar Grover Allen about 100 years ago, to indicate a a very widespread type of dog that lived in North America before the 16th century and has kept up a presence ever since. They all tend to look more like wolves than any AKC or kennel club breed of dog, because they were never bred away from that general archetype, but they are clearly not wolves or wolf hybrids. They are just ordinary dogs with no specialized type or breeding. They are what any dog population will devolve to, if left to shift for themselves with no human intervention in breeding them. They are more like village dogs or pariah dogs in other areas of the world than any specially bred line of dogs would be. Many tribes had special lines of dogs, but common dogs do not fit that category. They are just the lowest common denominator in dog breeding with no special breeding at all. The native American common dogs always had upright ears, no special bend to the tail, and could come in about any color.

There have been some efforts made to seek out the remnants of the original native dog populations untouched by European dog blood and establish a line directly descended from original native stock, but those dogs are no longer common dogs, if they ever were. They are from plains dog stock, I think. And that stock is not the quite the same as the common dog. Though they have a similar type, the common dog has never been the recent subject of special breeding efforts to restore the type. In fact, the only way to “restore” the common dog type is to make sure that no special lines are bred into it. There is also some native dog breeder who used wolf hybrid stock in an effort to recreate something, but that is not the same as seeking out actual Indian dogs. Only genetic studies will determine if the special lines of native-descended stock have similarities to the NA dog clades first noted by early genetic studies. I hope I am still alive when this work is done, for I am interested in it.

But in the meanwhile, I also see modern mixed-breeds who follow the old type in looks,

pearl’s pup, 1978

but no special claims are made about them.All they ever get is the husky/shepherd label. At first, I took these claims at their word, that they were husky/shepherd crosses, but the sheer numbers of such crosses had me baffled. It is as though a lot of people wanted this cross and bred for it, but that is a really weird coincidence in my mind. They are just so many of the crosses around, why isn’t there a group of breeders advocating for this designer cross if they are breeding for it?

Since I don’t have genetic testing resources to test my questions, I can only go by phenotypes (physical appearance) not genotypes, which would differentiate between modern lookalikes and the old type. The phenotypes say a lot, however. 100 years ago, all there were were phenotypes, hardly anyone knew about genotypes and certainly none of those people were in the dog world.

Perhaps there is something else going on, instead in this common dog process. This blog traces my efforts to check it out. If some of these dogs ID’d as husky/shepherds are really just common dogs whether of original Indian stock or not, I want to find out if I can get a good enough argument together to allow others to entertain my ideas without thinking I am just another crazy old dog lady who is not looking at evidence, but making it up from whole cloth. or worse, claiming to be an authentic breeder of such dogs.

Stella and Kate 1982

I have had an interest in native American dogs since the 60′s, when I acquired one from my “adopted” mom, Stella Leach, a very well known enrolled Colville/Lakota activist of Alcatraz and other fame, who knew as much about Indian dogs as anyone else I know of. She was my elder/teacher about native dogs and a few other things for many years before Pferd the third, published in 1987. By that publication date, my dogs were old, and I just did not have the resources to become a breeder. So now, I know some of my dog’s descendents who live in my local area, but have not owned or bred myself, since the 1980′s. I am not a breeder and have no vested interest in making the observations I make in this blog. I am just curious and want to learn what I can about the old dogs -and the current ones who look like the old type.

It is my speculation that this unrefined ordinary dog would not have many, if any, recessives changing their looks from the standard original dog model, a domesticated wolf. Get rid of all the doubled recessives in a dog population and you would get this generic dogwolf type, the common dog. Don’t include any semi-dominant mutated traits in this mix, only the throwbacks of such matings would qualify as common dogs.

My evidence is pretty thin, but it has a lot of interrelationships. My biggest evidence is the sheer number of husky/shepherds crosses who don’t really look much like either parental type. Some of these guys really are husky/shepherd crosses, but maybe not all of them show an actual first or second generation breed cross in a genetic test. Once the breed specific traits like the black saddle on a shepherd, the cap of the malamute, or the high curled tail of the husky are gone, what is left is getting more and more generic.

Stella Runnels Leach on Alcatraz, 1969

There is an interesting bit of genetic trivia called, “canalisation”. It seems to describe an aspect of this mystery. Canalisation refers to the fact that individuals of a species can have a range of different individual genetic combinations, but they all still look alike. More specifically, differing genotypes, but the same phenotypes. So a shepherd/husky mix can look like a common dog, and a mutt with no recent breed background can look like a common dog.

One of those dog breed genetic testing sites has or had a rotating slide show of tests they had done with photos of the actual dogs. A lot looked like some kind of shep/husky cross, but some of those were actually two other breeds that gave a similar phenotype. I tried to find that site again for a link, but couldn’t. Nevertheless, it seems there are a number of ways to get to what is called the Husky/Shepherd type. Or what I now want to associate with the “common dog” archetype.

One reason I want to do this is, it is already happening on quite a scale, there are a lot of common dogs types though they are much more rare in a pound than the techichi (or deer chihuahua) type. These dogs are very beautiful in their vaguely wolflike way. The ones I have known have been of calm, unflappable temperaments. Sometimes, with actual recent husky, the dog may have a high energy level not suitable for laid back families, but that is easy to tell when you meet the dog. Mostly these devolving generic dogs have gentle and amenable dispositions, which is probably why they don’t end up in pounds very often, but there are hundreds maybe thousands of them in a google search for husky/shepherd images.

I think perhaps, that the US has its own type of village dog in the common dog, except in this country, we do not allow stray dogs to wander the streets and breed freely, so it is hard to call them “village” dogs. We do not allow that ecological niche for dogs in this country, so it is hard to see how many shep/huskies are out there, unless you are very interested in them, as I am and have googled images of them time and again over the years, looking for dogs that look like my former dogs.

Stella and dogs, Chato, Pearl and Naiche, 1982

I think the dogs of my line have a lot of consistency in their gray coat color with striated bands on the hairs, and masks. The ones that aren’t grey are reddish, but they all start out as dark gray. My dogs’ descendents typically have a mark like outstretched wings, in white, on the chest and that caudal (on the tail) “v” in black. I have had no say or control in the breeding of any of the descendents, but people who bred, found very similar dogs. I think I counted at least 10 generations, and the ones I see, still look like typical common dogs. I don’t think it took much acuity on the part of the family breeders to get that result, if one uses a similar, but unrelated dog. Theoretically one could use a malamute one generation and a malinois in another generation and keep the type, so breeding is not a fancy affair for professionals only. These dogs have straight teeth and good hips, so if they do have some bad recessives, outcrossing will keep those genes buried and lower the statistical chances, that two of the same recessives will meet up.

I have this consistent anecdotal information that constantly teases me with why there are so many of these dogs and breeding for the lowest common denominator seems to naturally produce these common dog. I am not going to try to deal with any claims about their origins until dog genetics are far more convenient and easy to test or there is an actual database growing somewhere.

Even if none of the so-called common dogs types belong to those ancient specific American clades, the actual dogs still present with us look and behave in ways indistinguishable from the common dogs of 125-50 years ago. Even my Indian friends have always thought so and “recognized” them as true native stock. In fact, all this pussy footing I am doing in order to not look like I am making foolish claims, would only get laughs from people like Stella. If all there was to recognize a dog type was phenotypes – as it was before genetics- these dogs would pass as native stock.

I am trying to temper the husky/shepherd label with history and context, so many more people will recognize this wonderful type of dog as being virtually like the old common dogs. When most the breeding programs of the AKC collapse in infamy, which is sure to happen in the next decade or so, I want people to turn away from inbred, purebred dogs to these beautiful and good natured dogs most of whom will never see a vet except for rabies shots until they are pushing 10 or so and big dog geriatrics can kick in.

When an individual common dog of this type has reached a maximum of genetic diversity, an outcross to an akc breed will restore far more genetic diversity in one generation, than an outcross to a very similar breed would. (which is all some cutting edge AKCer’s can conceive of at the moment). And thanks to people who have outcrossed really weird combinations like a boxer and a corgi, can restore the boxer type to show quality in 4 generations. (This particular experiment did not care about restoring the corgi type)

I know I am not the only one who has thought of this and finally, someone of enough importance will say it, then it will get some legs.

Meanwhile, sidestep the entire inbred issue by choosing a dog like the common dog- (or, if you like 10 pound dogs, the techichi, aka the deer Chihuahua). The evidence is a bit stronger for the Techichi at this moment, but I hope to be able to get more evidence in suggesting the common dog of today is virtually the same as it has been for the last 500 years Europeans know of. And, if that is true, then this type goes back to the earliest immigrants to arrive on this continent, so many years ago.

Native American activist Mrs. Stella Runnels Leach, then living at Oakland, Calif., before the Senate’s special subcommittee on Indian education, chaired by New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, which was held at the American Indian Center, San Francisco, Jan. 4, 1968.

Do you have a techichi on your couch?

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Kate

There is no mystery about it, ‘techichi’ was the slang name the ancient Aztecs called the small dogs of the northern deserts. It never was what the northern peoples themselves called their local dogs, but it was the name the Spaniards picked up on, because they started getting acquainted with the central area of Mexico first and looked at history and geography from the central Aztec’s point of view.

Back then, the Aztecs considered themselves far more civilized than the tribes in the far north where people still lived in very simple circumstances aggravated by the low rainfall of those desert areas. The northern desert dwellers were usually referred to as barbarians collectively called the “chichimeca”. These tribes had small dogs- in fact they were known by their small dogs, the ‘techichi”.

These dogs are now popularly called ‘Chihuahuas’, which is the name Americans have been calling them since the invention of the AKC Chihuahua popularized the name. That became another name some strangers from the East called the little local dogs of the American deserts along the border with Mexico. They had no idea that the Aztecs had called them ‘techichis’, because all the local languages just called them “dogs” in their own language. They were “perros” in Spanish.

However, the AKC Chihuahua took on its own looks as bred by those Easterners who came and bought the smallest local dogs. The AKC dogs were all supposed to be extra tiny, under 5 pounds, and only a few of the local dogs had puppies that small when grown. Instead, the average was more like 10 pounds with longer noses and longer legs than the newly engineered breed had. The dogs looked like small deers to many and so picked up the name ‘deer Chihuahuas” This was never their local name in the past either.

What is true is that the designers of the purebred Chihuahua came and got the smallest of these local dogs and used them to form the new breed. Because they got very famous as a breed, the local southwest dogs became known as Chihuahuas and as the ancestor of the tiny dog that went in the ring.

Even with the huge influx of Americans to the deserts areas along the Mexican border and all the larger dogs they brought along, these 10 pound deer-like small dogs persist as one of the most popular local dogs.

If your “Chihuahua” isn’t a member of the AKC, then it is probably one of the old local dogs, first known to the Spaniards as the “techichi”. I think it is a cute name that uses that “chichi” root and gives the old time deer chihuahuas what was meant to be a slang name in the first place.

Sometimes people say, “why try to revive an old breed name when the breed itself won’t be the same genetically as the old dogs.” In this case, “Techichi’ was never a breed name used by the locals who raised the dogs, such as, the “Tahltan bear dogs” who were of a specific lineage and of a specific tribe. Techichi just meant “cringing mutts of the Northern Barbarians”. There is still good reason to use it as a way of pointing out that the tradition of these small desert dogs has remained, even if the genes have changed.

So take another look at the 10 pound deer Chihuahua on your couch and join the old Aztecs in calling them “techichis”!

America’s Common Dog; the Husky/Shepherd type mixes.

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Kate

I have been working with these three maps. They are all vague -the boundaries are far from set. These represent good indications of our knowledge about the areas indicated by native languages and the areas indicated by native dogs. The large areas of white in the dog map must have been sheer timidity on the part of Pferd III who drew the map. There was no place where there were no dogs. Dogs were everywhere Native Americans were.

So, mentally, I’ll just fill all the white areas with the dog known as “the common dog”, until I find the dogs weren’t the common variety in the white areas. The common dog was aptly named because almost any two prick-eared average size and shaped dogs of different breeds will produce a litter of common dogs. My favorite example is all the husky/shepherd crosses who look more like common dogs than either of the breeds that went into them.

When a major outcross behind a German Shepherd and a Husky, Malamute or Inuit dog type with the high carried tail with a curve (I’ll call it “spitz type tail” or northern tail) until I learn better, the carefully bred-in color schemes disappear in the first generation leaving mostly silver and gold basic coats, white legs and usually with masks of some kind on the upper face while the lower jaw remains white. All offspring of these possible shepherd/husky crosses will jump right into the common dog type in the first generation.

My thought is that if the first generation hybrids are outcrossed into common dog phenotypes, the blended types will continue to look like common dogs -though occasionally a breed specific trait will show up, say a hint of a black saddle from a German Shepherd or a mask only seen in malamutes. Details really, because the common dog phenotype is kept once it is reached.

The old style American common dogs were typified by prick ears a relaxed tail and average size. Colors tended to be grays or yellows or as I called it earlier, golds and silvers. In the painting to the left, the dog is white. Mostly likely he is a faded some other color. There seems to be a fading gene in that population.

Almost everything I ever learned about the way common dogs used to look can be found in the many paintings of a few nineteenth century European-style painters. There is also a record to be found on a few old buffalo hide paintings and rock art, but the dogs are stylized and not representational, except maybe, size. Some of the Mexican old pottery dogs are fairly representational, but that is an aside in this paragraph.

I like the one to the right as it has what I call gold and silver coat types. These guys have full, though not long coats, or it is winter.

Traveling people as these Sioux are in this painting by Karl Bodmer, had useful dogs that worked hard moving camps, even after horses arrived. So these dogs to the right may just be the slighter smaller “plains dog”. Personally, I don’t see much difference between these guys and the common dog.

In fact, how much different are these dogs from the earliest domesticated dogs? My person opinion is that they have changed little since their tenure in the central plains of Eurasia,(source) back when.

This map of Eurasia is interesting for the grid lines. Those central plains were largely southeast of the top right grid crossing, perfect hunting/herding/gathering lifestyle from which the dogs that crossing the Bering strait had come. I don’t mean in a direct line, but by however it happened, batches of these domestic dogs came to North America with their people. I don’t think I am going out on a limb by saying they were probably the same kind of probably already domesticated dogs that first came out of Africa. Mark Derr on the subject of dog domestication called these earliest dogs dogwolves. In their earliest days, they probably looked mostly like wolves, but perhaps by the time people left the central plains and went east, they were probably indistinguishable from the common dogs who arrived in America. These dogs were already useful as pack animals, so in the time they first started packing for traveling people, were they dogwolves or common dogs? I imagine the very dogs that left Africa were already packing stuff for people whether they hunted or not. No one knows if there was a division of labor among the sexes in dogs coming out of African and working the Central Plains for all those eons, Even if only the males went hunting, they would be packing on the way home if successful. But my money is on the packing; if dogs did not pack, they were not fed when people had to move around. The non-packers got left in Africa.

By the time the 19th Century artists who came and painted the North American descendents of those African dogs arrived, the dogs had hardly visibly changed at all. They were the same in size, shape, duties as they had been for thousands of years. I am not discounting exceptions of all kinds, but the numbers always remained with the common dog in the common average size.

Except, there was an interesting exception. There was a version of this common dog that carried a gene that made them small. If one bred small to small, no adult would be over 20 pounds and about 18″ tall. This recessive was apparently in the parent wolf of the domestic dog, the African wolf, for they also occur in small sizes, but rarely.

The gene probably stayed recessive most of the time, but there came a time in many parts of America when this gene would double up and small dogs would happen. They breed true, so if it is safe for this gene to express, it becomes a popular variation on the common dog where ever it showed up.

You can see in the above dog map that this gene popped out all over the continent and was kept expressed through care of the smaller dogs, when a lifestyle for them was possible. When the original Chihuahua breeders came out to Arizona to get small stock, it may have been that the native small dogs on the Eastern seaboard had gone recessive again for they were once all up and down the east coast of North America from Boston to Monterrey.

The common dog itself is said to have gone extinct since those romantic 19th century paintings, overwhelmed by European diseases and dogs, yet what I see is that a gene from here and a gene from there in the old native dog genome, is still in the gene pool. Then I also see these lovely shep/husky mixes who look so much like the old common dog. I assert that the common dog lies under the surface of most breeds, once a few of the dominant genes are reintroduced. So why be snotty about these common dogs not having certain clade marks of native dogs, which clades may have gone extinct, but “here’s a gene, there’s a gene” from the old native stock is still being expressed.

How many alleles have had to have come and gone, to decide the new common dog is not the same genetically as the old common dog? Or that the North American common dog is/was about the same as the Central Asian dogwolf in phenotype? And is about the same dog today, even with the Euro-genetic input?

I found the term canalisation in genetics. It isn’t the most popular term in genetics, but it is an excellent metaphor for the current shep/huskies

“Canalisation (or canalization) is a measure of the ability of a population to produce the same phenotype regardless of variability of its environment or genotype.”

Does not this general definition of canalisation in genetics apply to the case in question? Whether in India, or Africa or South America the dogs return to the archetype sans missing dominants. And the second part of the definition in Wikipedia is that canalisation equals genetic robustness. Gee. Just what so many of the inbred dogs are missing – robustness.

One conclusion is that everyday people who like a natural, rather wolfie looking dog, love the shep/husky mixes, and less and less often tell each other as they sell/trade them that they are part wolf. Well yes, as much wolf as any other dog, but without the burden of being an actual part wolf or being bent out of the natural wolf shape.

Only geneticists can say with surety that this or that dog is or is not genotypically similar to the old dogs or not. Most people go by looks, or phenotype, alone. Well nature has made it so that looks remain similar, while the genes come and go. After all, when all is said and done, all dogs are almost 100% wolf genes, anyway, so there are many genetic canals (wink) to keeping lines of dogs similar to the wolf type intact.

While Common Dog is not a great name, it is not a proper name at all, I don’t think shepherd husky types is a good name either. thus I stick my neck out and risk being called a nut by just calling these lovely animals native American dogs.If you look under this phrase, there is an imaginary subscript after American and before dogs that says “type”- (native American ‘type’ dogs). As long as it is not a proper noun for a breed, the only word capitalized is American.

Wawa Watch March 2013

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Kate

Hard to believe, there were only 2 deer chi at the Pima County AC today!

and

So I checked out Mesilla Valley AC in Las Cruces NM. This are is the mecca for techichi types.

Native American Dogs” vs “native American dogs”; getting the terms right

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Kate

The term, “native American dogs” needs to be defined and refined. The debate about native American dogs needs to be laid out piece by piece. Most people do not even know what the term means. They may think they do, but only some realize the term itself is inappropriate.

The expression “native American dogs” is not capitalized because it is not a proper name but a name that includes all dogs native to the Americas before Europeans arrived and their possible descendants

In this post, I am specifically excluding the two breeds known today as “Native American Indian Dogs” and “American Indian Dogs”, because those are two brand names owned by individuals. Whatever their parent stock was, both of these breeds refer exclusively to the stock developed by the owner of the breed name. They are each a private enterprise, so to speak, have exclusive rights to their breed names and their dogs’ offspring, dictate the breedings of their followers’ dogs and otherwise act just like breeders in a kennel club. I may get around to discussing these guys some day- they are quite different from each other in some ways- but they both claim they are breeding some kind of original Native/ American Indian Dog.

Hare Indian dog by Audubon

This phrase, “Native American Dog”, in capital letters, sticks in my throat. My objection to using this global term is that if it is really something Native American, it belongs to a specific tribe. In other words, it is a Hare Indian dog, a Taltahn bear dog, a Lakota travois dog, a Chichimeca terrier, or an Inuit sled dog, etc. You could call the kind of dogs the Sioux, Cheyenne, Commanche and other plains tribes used, “plains dogs”, but it would be a generic term because most of the dogs were of a similar size, type, and use. It would be as if all the Euro-Shepherd types with prick ears are called “shepherds”, but there really are several kinds according to territory. The German shepherd, the Tervuren and the the Malinois are all shepherds and a lot of people do not know the difference between any of them. The latter two are different lines of the same stock. It was very similar in the old days in North America.

The Euro-invaders combined all the dogs together and called them “Indian dogs” without regard to which tribe used and bred them for what. Today’s politically correct version of “Indian” dogs” is “Native American dogs”, but same difference; it is almost a deliberate un-recognition of their tribal individuality, doggie racism. Could that be possible? Nah….

Mexica Itzquintle

Think of it in reverse. Suppose that several North American countries, Say the Mexica from the south and the Iroquois Federation from the north, Some Cherokees from what is now known as North Carolina, competitively invaded Europe, destroyed most of the Europeans and put the remnants on “Euro-reservations”, usually in the same Territory they had originally called their “country”. Thus most of the French tribe, were still on tiny reservations located in their former French “Territory”.

Most of their dogs disappeared into the North American gene pools and were replaced with North American dog breeds as known in various different countries in North America, Iroquois terriers, or Mexica Itzquintles, or the famous Tahltan Bear dogs.

Tahltan Bear Dog

Then 500 years later a single person in Europe wants to start a dog breed that recreates “the original European dog”. So s/he finds some remnants of dogs with floppy ears, breeds them into a recreated Native European dog. It probably looked like something between a spaniel and a retriever, because any kind of floppy ears was the standard. Of course, it really was a generic mutt compared to the old Euro lines of dogs, but it was a good line of dogs, well behaved and trainable, and the idea of having the old breeds around again appealed to those who were fond of the remnants of Euro civilization or were even registered as being descended from some Euro-tribe or another. Or just a wannabee euro-lover, who loved to hear about Euro-civilization before the North American Conquest changed everything and destroyed European civilization.

The “Native European Dog”

Perhaps reversing the story helps to see it shows a lack of sensitivity to the fact that there were countries and citizens in North America and hundreds of languages, and hundreds of lines of dogs, now all boiled down to one word, “Indian”or “Native American”, and I hope my “Euro-dog” example shows it is a simplistic way of looking at native American dogs.

It is also why I dismiss the two breeds I know of out there with generic names. If they were the real thing, they would belong to a tribe, but we have lost track of most of that, especially with the last known Tahltan bear dog most North American breeds were lost to record books.

File:Tervueren.jpg

Above: l-r German shepherd, Malinois, Tervuren.

There is nothing wrong with creating a new line of dogs and calling them anything one wants to call them and breeding them to look any way they want, but there really is no such thing as a “Native” or “Indian” dog, BUT those are just Euro-names for another dog breed invented in the last 50 years that looks more wolfie, because a lot of people love the wolfie look and try to get a version of the look into their line of dogs.

Next: Are the native dog lines extinct? Who actually said what about that.

Landrace “Mutts” Compared to “Purebred” Dogs

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Kate

Mutts compared to “Purebred” Dogs or

Landrace dogs compared to Eugenically Bred Dogs

Or Natural Dogs compared to AKC style “Accelerated Selection/Evolution” dogs.

Those three pairs are three ways to categorize this one subject. It just depends on one’s viewpoint. All three terms compare landrace breeds against “purebreds” and they can be mixed up among the ones on their side of the comparison. I have used quite a bit of variation in the two sets of terms in this piece.

Natural dogs:

I will use the third pair, first; natural dogs compared to Accelerated Selection/Evolution dogs. Natural dogs are dogs that are minimally differentiated from wolves in looks, but are true dogs in relationship to people. This kind of natural dog is the basic blueprint for all further changes in dog types and has held steady from the beginning of this unique relationship between woman and dog to the beginnings of agriculture and permanent towns. The dog in the photo to the right is from Petfinder, labeled as a husky/shepherd.

When the first settlements were popping up all over the place, they already had dogs, but when one could live in the same place for at least half the year, it was much easier to accommodate the weird sports that would crop up in the local dog breedings. A short muzzle or short legs could reasonably be expected to have a life in a place where it was raised in a permanent home and community, for instance and thus a whole variety of dogs was developed out of recessive anomalies in the wolf’s genetics.

Although the dogs were probably able to mate freely, some dog populations had more genes in common due to isolation, and so the long ears, the different muzzle shapes, the different tails or other peculiar dog traits could be uncovered because two recessives now had a better chance of meeting up and when they did, they had a trait that could be selected for by breeding like to like. If they didn’t, the odd dog type they had would die out.

The earliest dog types whose looks changed from the wolf in various ways could be used to create for instance, a line of bigger dogs, then turn that line into mastiffs by choosing the heaviest dogs for fighting work or the tallest into greyhound types with light bodies and long legs for coursing. These two types just happened to have very different but equally helpful traits for their people to use and were two of the earliest accelerated evolution/selection landraces. Once there was a population of a type of dog like a mastiff or an Afgan and they had enough time to establish themselves in a district, they became landrace dogs. This is accelerated evolution, as first guided by humans.

Landrace vs Eugenically bred dogs:

A whole population of dogs that were of a similar type of what they used to call breeds, before the kennel clubs got a hold on the term is still there, but the term has switched to “landrace” dogs for the unregistered. Types of landrace dogs became almost local signatures, like a mascot or the national dog. This is easily seen in the European landrace types that have since been turned in to purebred breeds, terriers, spaniels, hounds, drovers, and drivers, local curs like the terriers or the border collie. What they all had in common was once a kennel club dog fancier got hold of a few specimens of the landrace type, they proceeded to refine it by massive inbreeding using the principles of eugenics to create a type of intense accelerated/evolution via inbreeding.

Not that a buyer really knows that dogs are inbred by eugenic principles. One reason for giving only 4 or 6 generation pedigrees was that the number of same names repeated over and over could be minimized, when it would be very obvious in 10-12 generation pedigrees. The typical purebred dog was based on maybe as many as a few dozen individuals of the original landrace. Though the landrace continues outside the purebreeding program, the purebred population has very few founding individuals and then, the registry closes and only the descendants of the registered dogs can interbreed.

Somehow this sad tale of a racist registry has come to get the majority in the dog loving world to believe that any dog born outside the registry, is a mutt. If so, mutts have many subsets, as many as there are landrace dogs. And if you look at landraces, you can still find a type of dog that suits your needs, but is far less likely to have two recessives of very many genes.

In this blog I want to inform people who didn’t know that North America had landraces of dogs whose types persist today. Even if people scoff at the possibility that there are still original native American dog landraces anymore- with a few exceptions- it is far from black and white or a closed topic yet, as I hope to argue in this blog.

However false ideas characterized by their eugenics-based underpinnings have clouded this issue for a century and a half. There is an academic dogma that decrees that unless a present day dog has a lot of shared genes with older centuries of dogs, it can not be recreated. It must have the same genes as the old stock or it is not authentic.

That sounds very fundamentalist to me and it is not the way nature works, at all. This is eugenics speaking. It is the fear of impure blood by outcrossing their breed to similar breeds. This in turn is the overwhelming eugenic fear at the idea of blood mixing and impure blood between two dogs that aren’t closely related. There is another dogma among purebredists, and that is that if impure blood gets into one’s breed, the breed will reverse its accelerated evolution, eventually devolving to the level of the most common of dogs.

In the case of North American dogs, the common dog was the dog in favor in many places. In the Americas, the common dog today looks to be about the same dog as Grover Allen described in “Dogs of the American Aborigines” a bulletin published by Harvard that brought together a lot of indigenous dog material. Allen described the Common Dog as present all over the US and looking like a wolfy nonwolf. There are still Common Dogs today, in the form of the very many so-called Husky/Shepherd crosses.

I do my dog phenotyping research with Petfiinder. I have been collecting husky/shepherd mix pix for several years and I have a lot of them. I figure the numbers of dogs at the pound is a very small percent of the dogs in any given county. You hardly ever see purebred dogs in the pound, because the breed clubs rescue them. What is left is the “poorman’s dog trifecta”- off-type pittties, husky/shepherd types and Chihuahua types.

The latter two have had a continuous line of representatives in the US back to the earliest times. The third type- the retriever/pit bull type is by far the most common dog in the pound and has no native American equivalent. They are Euro-dog type mutts with folded over ears and a sturdy build. They are mostly pit bull mixes because pit mixes have been the most popular “chain dog” in the country for a generation at least. In my research, I have ignored all the drop eared mutts in pounds, because that is the single most common sign of Eurobreeding.

American Common dogs are basically the same general type as a wolf with the prick ears and relaxed tail, though a bit of curl to the tail is acceptable. I have a range of photos from 1937 – the Indian couple above- to the present with what I consider to be the most beautiful native American common dog type with a mask and silver coloring. The earliest photo is a coincidence that helps prove my point, the second photo is my girl, Pearl with her litter in 1977, and the third photo is Pearl’s descendant after an almost 35 gap between them and about ten generations.

Pearl and Kodiak 1975

Even though the silver is my favorite color, half of Pearl’s pups were more golden with stray black guard hairs, like her mate’s. This is a variation on so called “yellow dogs” and is very common with other variations, too.

The picture to the right was taken a few weeks ago of a family member’s dog. I really don’t care what the experts think, some version of the common dog is still to be found today with very small differences in their phenotypes, so I will continue to present evidence and pix as I find them. Meanwhile, though I may seem to be a bit odd in pursuing this topic, what I am saying is correct.

I say, let go of the fear of outcrossing every generation; a landrace will be consistent from generation to generation, unlike show dogs whose breed looks can change radically in one human generation – or from one outcross.

Mutts and Common Dogs. Breeding “mutts” is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, it is easy to breed the common dog type… You get one and then outcross it to another husky/shepherd type. Both the so called shep/husky mix and the so-called deer Chihuahua, are types phenotypically indistinguishable from the ancient dogs, though they may have few characteristic breed type genes in common due to the many decades of purebred huskies and shepherd types into the mix. Even a purebred husky mated to a purebred shepherd will produce the common dog in one generation. Thereafter, continued outcrosses to other shep/husky types, will virtually bury the recessives as long as the outcrossing continues.

Just because I say breeding mutts is easy does not mean I am a breeder or advocate that just anyone should be a breeder; I do not. I don’t even think there should be professional breeders at all. But, but,but, the AKC goes on breeding their dogs in the face of so-called the political correctness of not breeding dogs and they are the worst dog breeders the world has ever seen(!) because they are trying to maintain extremely inbred lines.

There are many beautiful common dogs in pounds where they are known as Husky/shepherds and many toy dogs that are known as deer chihuahuas, that have already been born and need a good home. Few of them are problem dogs, they are most often at the pound due to the death of an old owner, or because a young family has to suddenly relocate where they can’t take dogs and other such good reasons.

Right now, according to the statistics of the big dog institutions like HSUS, less than 2% of all dogs in the USA end up dead by dog pound euthanasia in a year. This figure used to be higher, but the rehoming movement is placing almost every good dog. 2% is probably as low a statistic possible to get, so rehoming works. However, rehoming does not supply the entire demand for dogs in the US, so corporations are churning out corporate puppy farm puppies, all AKC registered and totally inbred. And thousands of dogs are imported from Mexico every year because corporate (and other) puppy farms in the US, can’t breed enough dogs under the industrial standards to meet the demand for puppies in the USA.

The terrible outcomes of Accelerated Selection/Evolution breeding in closed registry systems is the opposite of the accelerated selection of landrace dogs. This why I ask for a return to breeding the beautiful, old types of natural and landrace dogs. People will breed dogs, so we need a dialog that can accommodate the idea that some deliberate landrace dog breeding is OK and that random dog breedings are still politically incorrect. As long as that death by pound rate stays at 2% or lower, there is reason to advocate some breeding, but what kind?

Landrace to purebred dogs:

Many purebreds are derived from landraces and could be returned to to the landrace they were from before purebreeding. Some AKC breeds should be combined again, as in smooth and rough coats, or color variation in a breed, or short and long haired, and other such subdivisions of many breeds. Though it may be convenient to separate all the varieties in a breed to achieve consistent dogs for sale, this practice has exacerbated the accelerated evolution of the original landraces into a series of genetic self-consuming dead ends. This kind of inbreeding is unhealthy and unnatural.

It was developed by followers of Sir Francis Galton, the original inventor and proponent of eugenics. I say inventor, because it was entirely made up by Galton who took advantage of his distant cousin’s Theory of Evolution to gain credibility at a time when genetics was barely a gleam in the eye and aristocratic people could use those half-baked ideas of eugenics to support their own superiority by virtue of the “good breeding” in their own backgrounds. Eugenics is the fancy Greek/Latin translation of “good breeding” which was a topic under discussion by the gentry to the aristocracy for untold years or centuries or millennia.

Eugenics was the perfect justification for a highly stratified social system, by which the aristocracy “proved” its claim to natural superiority in every way. They were the best bred, the purebreds of civilization. This is exactly the same system as codified into kennel club style breeding practices which in turn uses these practices to achieve purebred status in dogs – which can be thought of as a whole new accelerated selection/devolution in dogs. Another term, “dysgenics”, meaning “poorly bred” better describes the dog “eugenics” kennel club breeders have achieved.

Getting the Eugenics Out of Dog Breeding.

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Kate

Getting the Eugenics out of dog breeding. A look at the bio-social movement of eugenics as applied to breeding registered kennel club dogs.

In order to relate to what I am saying, first you must understand that the individual dog breed clubs and kennel clubs of America have used principles of eugenics as a foundation for all their other breeding choices in picking two dogs to breed to get registered AKC pups.

Eugenics generally has a bad name and it is for several good reasons. First, the Wikipedia definition:

Eugenics is the applied science of the bio-social movement which advocates practices that improve the genetic composition of a population, usually a human population.^[2][3] It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of more desired people and traits, and reduced reproduction of less desired people and traits.^[4]

Lets just take the word “human” out of the equation and substitute “dog”. Then we get:

Eugenics is the applied science of the bio-social movement which advocates practices that improve the genetic composition of a population, usually a dog population.

It is (also) social philosophy advocating the improvement of canine hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of more desired dogs and traits, and reduced reproduction of less desired dogs and traits.

The half-baked ideas of a man with some street cred became popular in the 1850s, because he was vaguely related to Charles Darwin and was aristocratic, these concepts became very widespread among upper class and well educated people starting in the 1850′s. First off, eugenics explained their own superior position in life. It was their “breeding” that was superior. And the higher one’s rank in society, the better the breeding. And of course, the same was true of their dogs especially, though other domesticated animals got experimented on to “refine” the “breeding”. They, themselves already were examples of fine breeding

This is racist, or course, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom and is still the true foundation of racism- that one’s breeding is superior to another’s. Fear of mixing blood created the anti-misogyny laws where they were enacted widely across the United States. And besides the less evolved apes people, there were the poor and misbegotten. Some people advocated the second part of the equation as well in the form of forced sterilization, even in the US. But when the Nazis became big time followers of Galton’s ideas, the majority of Europe and the US immediately put a stop to doing these kinds of things to humans. And since then, eugenics has had a very bad name and has been completely discredited by science. Only a few, creepy people (who do not believe in science?) still believe in its precepts any more.

Except with dogs. Dogs became the subjects of eugenics experiments immediately upon Galton voicing them. People realized they could change rough local landraces and curs of various types into sleek looking dogs with more and more exaggerated features such as long hair, wrinkles, shape of the skull, etc. The standard is a breeding standard to which club members must refer. So they did what could never be done with people. They closed the studbooks of their own breed clubs and no dog that was not a descendent of a dog “registered” in their stud books could enter their exclusive breed clubs. The 1850’s began an intense period of people creating breeds from scratch or taking working stock and refining its looks. Breed clubs only went on looks to create a dog a champion. They did not go on health or refraining from exaggeration. In fact, these manipulators of dog flesh delighted in the odd and grotesque. A breed would be created by the club, then the club would proceed to exaggerate the distinguishing features of the breed in further generations.

Many dog breeds’ looks have changed over time. Usually not for the better and that trend is still in full force, today, though registered dog entries into kennel clubs have dropped to levels seen in the 1950’s from its high point in the 80′s-90′s. It looks like a lot of dog people do not want AKC dogs because total numbers of dogs in households have increased over the same period.

The other trend of breeding working dogs for looks created a split in the two types, the natural and the artificial breed. Landrace terriers, collies or spaniels that became the originators of the registered version of a given breed, in their show dog forms were soon criticized for not being able to do what the landrace animals did. The often lost their function as part of being bred for looks. And that is still the complaint, today.

The general concept of AKC breeding is to “fix” the traits they like in a breed of dog by breeding the good example to another good example. The ideal is to get rid of those uncouth dominant genes and keep the refined recessives. Elimination of the dominant form of a trait will cause future generation bred to another recessive of the same kind, to “breed true” and guarantee all future dogs with those recessive traits will look the same in that trait. This kind of gene elimination has had bad side affects in often lowering the general health of the breed. There are things we don’t understand tied to those dominant genes. Sometimes the piling up of certain genes will clearly affect the dog’s physical soundness and health.

Even when some recessives line up in a certain dog and another trait is not liked, the dog is not bred. But what is good for a certain breeding program may not be good for the breed if its genes are not kept in circulation in the entire gene pool of a breed. Because the group of breed-founding dogs tends to be of very few genetically distinct individuals when the books are closed, the breed immediately starts losing genes of those founders.

Inbreeding is the method of choice to fix a trait in a dog. Take the dog with the preferred trait and get as many pups as possible from it which you then breed to each other to spread the new founding dogs’ gene pattern into the entire pool. One way to do this is by picking stud dogs that are winning for their looks in the ring and breeding them to as many females as possible, no matter how close the blood lines.

Well, dogs have wonderfully plastic genes and they can take quite a bit of strong inbreeding at first- if you get rid of the culls. If a bad genetic trait shows up that say, cripples the dog, it will be killed. By breeding the best examples to each other, no matter the relationship, many breeds of dogs have huge numbers of fixed traits and if bred to another dog of the same breed will produce dogs that look like the parents.

When AKC breeders get unfortunate examples of inbreeding, they cull their own litters- usually with a secret sense of shame that their dogs need so much culling. It is mainly for this reason that breeders of AKC registered dogs control the new owner’s breeding rights, for life. When novices get two beautiful registered dogs and the breeding rights are not controlled, the owners of the dogs might breed them -and if they do, it is still likely there will be culls. Novice AKC owners are at risk of having a dog with recessive genes that are detrimental, but may not have the determination to cull.

This is why dog breeding is a mystery and dog breeders insist only someone who knows the breed (themselves) should breed. A purebred dog breeder must cull, though it is not popular to talk about why, because the general public might wise up at the manifest results of ongoing inbreeding. Even though dogs can quickly be refined to a pretty good “Type” by intense inbreeding and culling, eventually all the dogs in a closed registry will share more and more recessive genes in common. Recessives genes have a kicker. Though you can get all your breed looking consistent, when the gene pool of a breed begins to be shared by all, detrimental recessive genes have a much better chance or meeting up.

Most of the hideous genetic problems facing purebred dogs today are from bad recessives meeting up.

Most of the recessives were in the wolf gene pool long before man tamed dog. But because wolves almost always breed with unrelated wolves, the recessives have astronomical chances of meeting up, and when they do, the animal usually can’t live a wolf’s life. All dogs get their genes from the wolf gene pool and recycle them forever except for the rare mutation here and there. But when you take a gene pool of less than 100 genetically distinct founders and close it to new blood forever, even the largest gene pool is going to share a lot of recessives working their ways to the surface. Nowadays in several breeds, every breeding with another dog of the same breed is closer genetically than a sister/brother mating, there were so few founding members of the breeds.

And where did these kennel and breed clubs get these ideas? From eugenics, of course.

My next post will be about landrace dogs and their importance to the doggy genepool.

Native American Dogs vs the Eugenics Movement in Dog Breeding

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Kate

Here I am, changing the name of this blog again. But this name sits well with me. I may not cover 1/10^th of the subjects available to me under this title, but it opens the way to my broadest interests in native American dogs.

If one inquires academia about native American dogs, the response is that there are no more nAds. They were overwhelmed by Euro dogs. They died of diseases the Euro-dogs brought in. Though I can’t find the actual sources that make those claims, they seem to be dogma.

nAd: native American dog is not a breed name thus only “American” is capitalized

nAds may not have been breeds as we think of them today, but they did come in distinct types or landraces that looked very much alike and were close to the wolf archetype in the prick ears and relaxed tails. They came in sizes roughly equivalent to foxes, coyotes and small wolves. No odd mutations marked the common dogs of the Americas, they retained the general shape of the wolf, though the particulars varied. The Harvard scholar , Grover Allen, who studied the entirety of nAd literature at the turn of the 20^th century called the common dogs, Common Dogs. And that is because they were common, and found all over North America. This is the dog depicted in many artworks by 19^th century Euro-artists who painted all aspects of the lives of various tribes.

These dogs all shared a phenotype, the general phenotype of the wolf. None of them shared the same “genotypes” with each other, because they were very outcrossed. There must have been times when dog populations got a bit inbred compared to free ranging wolves, due to a lack of fresh blood within a group, but these times rarely lasted and new dog blood was always welcomed.

The concept of sharing a genotype to be a true example of a breed or type of dog arose out of the Eugenics Movement as it was quickly applied to dogs. The most elite of the Victorian era, the royalty, and to some extent, the nobility had kept a closed registry on themselves for many generations previous to the expression of the Eugenics movement by Sir Francis Galton, an unfortunate relative of Darwin and quite inbred, himself. That is, the Eurostocracy bred from within themselves, a small, elite group of people who sought to contain the power of European thrones amongst the smallest group of people possible. This narrowing of purity in the royal bloodlines actually arose out of the idea of keeping royal power intact.

Sir Francis Galton, Father of the Eugenics Movement cousin of charles darwin

Darwin ca time Galton invented eugenics.

Generation after generation of these royals and nobles had married cousins and by Victoria’s age, the results of such inbreeding for many generations had begun to manifest in deadly ways. Deeply buried recessives started to couple up more and more often resulting in genetically based problems such as hemophilia and the “Hapsburg jaw”. The absolute worst of these genetic problems piled up in Carlito, the son of Phillip of Spain (ca 1700). Phillip himself was handsome and healthy in appearance, but his bloodline was so messed up, he could not produce a healthy, fit heir to the throne. Carlito was a dwarf, with diminished mental capacity and the most exaggerated of the Hapsburg jaws. He was also an emotional tantrum throwing mess who could not entertain a real concept of rulership.

Carlito of Spain.d. ca 1700 the first real monstrosity of Hapsburg inbreeding.

Charles II was moderately more inbred than the average among the offspring from brother-sister matings.
.http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/04/inbreeding-the-downfall-of-the-spanish-hapsburgs/#.UR_81uijzn4

About the time the royals were figuring out that they needed new healthy blood and began to marry non-relatives or at least, distant relatives, Darwin published his theory of evolution. He was clueless that genetics was the basis of how evolution happened, let alone how genes worked, though he got the basic principles right.

So a big piece of the puzzle was still missing when Darwin’s so-called genius of a cousin, Francis Galton, seized upon his cousin’s work with a bunch of half-baked ideas about how to breed “better” people using the principle of “survival of the fittest”. He called his new theory of people-breeding, “eugenics”. He was still embracing the idea that royals should breed to royals as much as possible and nobles should try to upgrade their own bloodlines with royal blood, even if it was not legally recognized. He also thought that the unfit should be culled and prevented from breeding.

Well, these ideas soon ran into problems when applied to people, so the Galtonites who had focused on controlling the breeding behaviors of humans were soon recognized for what they were and disparaged, if not made illegal.

Strangely enough, while these ideas of pure breeding the best people and culling the others was soon squashed, those same principles were embraced by the dog breeding elite who were, of course, all influenced by the aristocratic Galton’s ideas. The idea of purebreeding elite dogs out of rough country stock dogs was the very expression of eugenics and dog breeding was the ultimate manipulation of “purebred” dogs and the “closed registry” was the ultimate expression of the principles of eugenics.

On the other hand, nAds were generally so outcrossed, weird genes hardly ever doubled up and became manifest, and though this seems to have happened many times, the general tendency was for the odd dog’s genes to melt back in to the general population within a generation or two. Although there were exceptions, this was the dominant tendency and so nAds tended to remain generally wolflike from large to small dogs.

Although purebred dogs can be said to share “genotypes”, this is an entirely new concept in dog breeding in the last 150 years. This word is a cleaned up way to say, “overly inbred” However, even people who disparage the closed registry policies of kennel clubs, if they have AKC dogs, they believe the genotype should be maintained as an intrinsic part of the breed.

They believe the genotype is everything! This is entirely racist thinking intimately connected to the true identity of the dog in question. Native American dogs are not about genotypes! They are about phenotypes. Genotypes are an aspect of Galtonian thinking. Phenotypes can sustain a large variation in genotype, yet all look similar.

A belief that genotypes must match is behind the claim that nAds are extinct. This is an idea based on a eugenics theory that to be a true Native American Dog, your genes must match the genes of dogs who were here before the Conquest to a high degree even if a dog looks like a typical nAd. As I said before, this whole idea of requiring matching genes to be declared an aNd is pure eugenics theory put into practice.

I know that practically 100% of the American Indian Nations had dogs and loved dogs. One thing about dog people is that many fancy the different looking dog, so when Euro dogs arrived, they were probably embraced by any native who could get one. No doubt the new dogs, most with dropped ears, bred freely with the native stock. I would even guess the Euro-type dogs spread out more quickly than the Euro peoples, being that the entire continent was a vast intertwined network of trade and trading routes. I even think that grandfather of a breed, the St John’s Water Dog, could have arisen from an early mix of native and Eurodogs. Crosses with Eurodogs probably contributed to a lot of American hound breeding, too.

Eurodogs is my word for European created dog breeds.

There are many examples of dogs that look like the old native American common dogs still showing up in animal pounds across the nation. They are practically always called “husky/shepherd mixes” by the pounds. I am sure that some are husky shepherd crosses and that a few are other crosses that create a similar phenotype. The funny thing is, that if you took two such mixes and bred them, the offspring would retain the same phenotype as the parents, though there will be variations in tail set and ear set and/or size, coat length, texture and color, or the spitz tail can show up now and then. No matter what shows up, breeding the next generation from unrelated dogs with the husky/shepherd phenotype will produce more husky/shepherd lookalikes. It is a surefire formula to produce dogs that look more like wolves than any but a few brand new breeds of dogs. They can look very wolfy, but it is easy to see that are not wolves.

Indian_couple_will_ride_horses_across_continent

Indian couple will ride horses across the continent. ca 1937

Transformation

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Kate

It is 6:04 am and I have not slept tonight. It has been so long since I thought about dogs, that my mind filled up with bubbles of dog subjects rising to the surface and popping into consciousness. I have not been able to think about dogs very much in weeks, but I do have a lot to say on this subject. It is time to move into 2013.

First off. Where did the statement that there are no more Native American Dogs come from? It seems to be the general wisdom on the subject, along with stories of mass dog extinctions after the Spanish and later, other Europeans brought illness to dogs as they did to people. Yet I have not seen any references to primary source material on these claims. We know tribes were decimated by disease, but hundreds of tribes still exist, even if in diminished numbers.

What does this statement about no more nads mean? That all native American dog types are extinct? Well, that is a lie, for there is at least one provable nAd gene that still exists and was used as the foundation of two AKC breeds. I am speaking of the hairless gene, a gene well documented to have arisen in Mexico 1000 years, bce. The gene was not lost and even if it was applied to otherwise Europeanized dogs, it still exists. It is also possible if not provable that the ancestors of the AKC chihuahua were Techichi dogs. These little deerlike doggies have not changed their general phenotype at all – even if some Eurodog genes have been replacing the native ones.

Even if Euro dog genes are the only ones available, dogs looking very much like the original native American dogs are easily bred from simple outcrosses between a spitz or husky type and a natural shepherd type and the pounds across the nation calls them husky/shepherd mixes, but they most resemble the old fashioned “common dog”

I weill elaborate on these points in later posts

Big Dogs, Little Dogs

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Kate

These two posts on size are still being edited but they go to an area of dog breeding that is little understood, “Where did those little dogs come form? Truly, most people who think about it assume that we bred the average dogs down to the small sizes by selecting for the smallest dogs in every generation to breed to each other.

The strange but true story is that small dogs overwhelmingly have a small dog “twist” on the size gene. The dogs with this twist, which affects insulin production or something strange like that, become small dogs and this gene variation is missing in big dogs.

Almost all mutations to come out in dogs since towns began were always in the wolf genome as recessives. Since very little inbreeding took place among wolves, the odds of a wolf couple having a puppy with one of these odd mutations doubled, was astronomical, and when the two weird recessives did meet up, the pups could not live as a wolf and thus died young.

It was only when permanent settlements started occurring in most ancient human history, that the circumstances in which the odd mutations in wolflike dog prototypes were embraced by humans and were kept in the gene pool by selective human breeding. Once you have two recessives in a dog breeding bred to the same two recessives in a mate, you have a purebred trait and the only way to keep it pure was to breed two dogs that had the same trait. Though they did not have the modern language for breeding recessive to recessive, they certainly understood the results. Thus, the proliferation of types in dogs began.multiplying very early on in human history.

Most dogs are 25 pounds and over. Toy dogs are about 11 pounds or under. When people wonder how a dog could get so small, it is assumed that runt was bred to runt every generation to breed the size down. This view does not explain the phenomena as well as the accepted opinion that Middle Eastern wolves, in general and especially the ones from Ethiopia, were small. They can come in the 25 pound size which is half the size of an average 50 pound dog of today.

MtDNA studies have shown that there are at least four distinct gray wolf lineages: the most ancient is that of the African wolf (native to North, West, and East Africa), which is thought to have originated as early as the Middle to Late Pleistocene.^{[34]wikipedia}

Back in the Pleistocene, women were already running with the wolves-as were men. It is generally accepted that Africa’s great rift valley has revealed a succession of humanoids over at least 4 million years since the first upright walking proto-humans were found.They are just getting around to the fact that the wolf bones found in abundance at these sites, but overlooked in analysis, may eventually be realized as humanoids having had relationships with wolves from the beginning of the upright stance. Or – the upright stance helped them gain an edge on wolves, as they both hunted the same species and thus were competitors for eons.

It is probably no coincidence that the smallest wolves known -coyote sized wolves- lived in the same geographic area as the earliest humanoids. The Great Rift Valley and the smallest wolves are both found in Ethiopia. Food for thought, don’t you think?

It is conceded by the scientists who hold the view that dogs evolved in the middle east, that the smaller wolves are probably the wolf gene pool that dogs originally came out of. It would make sense that the earliest humans hanging with wolves and competing with them could choose the smallest wolves to have in their own packs. Paleontology might corroborate that when the wolf bones are studied and the contexts are determined. The first dogwolves were probably 20-35 pounds.

I have discussed elsewhere that the merits of small dogs for humans included the fact they were easy to feed and could often feed themselves on rodent sized animals and scraps. They were hardly equal to a woman in strength except when they were in packs. Large dogs are, and always have been, good back-pack animals in times of abundance. ie a Great Plains-like existence, wherever on the globe those conditions existed. The biggest dogs are and always have been elite pets for people with personal abundance. So people had uses for both bigger and smaller dogs almost from the beginning and probably had both kinds and when they didn’t, it was the small dogs they kept- about Basenji sized dogs, is my guess.

Right now, it is known that small dogs have an allele on their gene for size that makes them small. Big dogs don’t have it. It is also known that wolves already carried the recessives for short legs, flat faces, excess wrinkles, pendulous ears that many pure bred dogs have isolated in their breed and continue to breed for, but when and if these recessives ever met up in a wolf, the pup would not survive until the days of the first settlements when humans could care for the rare dogs with these variations.

Because wolves were the source of the genetic material for all the odd dog breeds, it follows that the gene/allele for smallness was in a wolf population to begin with. I don’t know much about it yet, but it is highly plausible to me that that gene was or is in the wolves of the Great Rift Valley/ Ethiopia or surrounding areas. Genetic testing will probably get down to the details of which wolf populations contributed to which dog populations soon, so I hope to see my thoughts clarified in the next few years.

However this “make me small” allele found its way into dogs, it appears to be ancient. It gives me a whole other way to look at the friendships with and “domestication” of the wolf population during the ages before “man” left Africa. Small wolves put it much more into the realm of possibility for women and children to keep these littlest guys in their camps and easily tote them. And use them to kill the rabbit sized and under, meat.

As usual, this is the germ of an idea. I will follow these ideas in the literature and post more as my understandings change.

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