Responsible Dog Ownership Month. Britain outlawed working dog carts in 1854 and held its first dog show five years later—your dog's breed possibly came from that show.
I've been reading Victorian-era household and farm manuals for a while now, and the dogs mentioned in them caught my attention. Not for what the books said about the dog, but for how they referred to them. Retriever. Pointer. Setter. A terrier – from terra, earth, a dog that goes into a burrow, for a reason. Each name was a job description. In 1850, no one named dogs according to their appearance, their nature, or their breeder.
So I began to wonder when this changed, and I noticed a distinct change within a single decade.
September is Responsible Dog Ownership Month, and a perfect excuse to ask a seemingly simple question: What is your dog's original purpose? Not what you or most other people use it for nowadays—what was it bred for, built to be a certain way, with intent by the people needing a job done. Every living dog carries within it an answer to a question that, in many cases, hasn't been asked in a century.
The first book written in English specifically about dogs was John Caius's Of Englishe Dogges, published in Latin in 1570 and translated in 1576. He grouped dogs into four categories based on function, not form: hunter, birder, lap dog and rough work such as guarding, herding and cart pulling. Which is how it remained for more than three hundred years. Dogs were judged by their ability to do the job. As long as the dog met its purpose, its appearance did not matter to anyone.
And in some places this was true for a long time. In Belgium, dogs still pulled carts within living memory, as it wasn't nationally banned until 1975. Robert Leighton estimated in 1901 the number of Belgian cart pulling dogs at approximately 150,000, and they worked three hundred days a year—pulling the cart wheels for milkmaids, bakers, and knife grinders on the roads.
Britain banned dogs from towing carts quite early. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1839 prohibited the use of dogs to draw carts in London, and an 1854 statute extended that restriction to English public highways. During the debate on the Bill, the Earl of Malmesbury told the House of Lords that in Hampshire and Sussex alone fifteen hundred people made their living with carts drawn by dogs. It was banned anyway because of its cruelty.
And that is the main point of the story. Great Britain banned dog carts in 1854. Five years later it held its first dog show. In five years, the country began to judge dogs not by their pulling power, but by their appearance.
The dog that came before the breeds — and outlasted every one of them.
The first organized Dog Show in Great Britain was held at the end of a Newcastle upon Tyne poultry show on 28th and 29th June 1859. It was added as a curiosity – an afterthought – to a very successful bird show.
Sixty dogs were entered. Only pointers and setters—twenty-three and twenty-seven respectively—because they were gentleman's sporting breeds, and it was a gentlemen's affair. Men showed their male dogs for other gentlemen to judge. Two local gunsmiths provided shotguns as prizes.
It seems like a small thing. The dogs were lined up and compared against each other for the first time, by appearance, with judges and verdicts. Thirty years later, the idea had its own governing body, its own documentation, and its own national championship.
Eighteen months later, something else happened. In 1860, a woman in Holloway, England began taking in abandoned dogs despite being ridiculed by the national press, and the first dog rescue was created. This story deserves its own article and will be published in October.
In April 1873, a member of Parliament named Sewallis Shirley gathered a group of dog owning gentlemen in a three-room flat to found the Kennel Club. Its first show was held at the Crystal Palace later that year, with 975 entries.
The following year the club did something really important. It published the pedigrees of 4027 dogs that won prizes at shows over the last fourteen years and the stud book was born. Since then, the term “breed” has not referred to a specific type of dog that performs a specific function, but to something more restricted and precise: a dog whose parents are registered in a book.
Charles Cruft was fourteen when he began working as an office boy for James Spratt, a dog biscuit manufacturer. Spratt came up with the idea in 1860 while watching dogs fighting on the Liverpool docks over a ship's abandoned hardtack, and started a business selling “Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes”, which he sold to gentlemen for their hunting dogs.
Cruft was a very capable man. By the age of twenty-six he was managing the firm and traveled extensively, bringing him into contact with dog lovers across Europe. In 1886 he became the show director of the Allied Terrier Club and, from 11 to 13 February 1891, held the first show under his own name at the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington – and the first show to which all breeds were invited. There were 2,437 entries across thirty-six breeds, and Queen Victoria entered six Pomeranians.
A note on the latter: the sources I have come across contradict each other. Some cite Beppo, Fluffy, Gilda, Lulu, Nino, and Mino as the six dogs who participated, and the following year, Beppo took third. Another mentions a Pomeranian named Gena tying for first in 1891. All I can say for sure is that she entered with six dogs.
The Pomeranian that I can be certain about is Marco. Victoria bought him in Florence in 1888 – a little red Pomeranian, and is widely said to be her favorite. He was the dog in the painting in the dog breed video and was a fashion icon: everyone wanted one after seeing the Queen holding a red Pomeranian. He was not one of the six dogs at Crufts, but he did more for the breed than any other dog.
Omi was today years old when she learned that the world's most famous dog show was founded by a man who sold dog biscuits – and that the pet food and the pedigree dog industries grew up together, each feeding the other. Spratt wanted clients who saw their dogs as special. The shows created that exact customer base.
There's a final chapter, and it's not a pleasant one, so I'm putting it here instead of putting it in a two-minute video that can't be explained properly.
When the stud book closed, it closed out of the breed any dog not named in it. A pedigree breed, by definition, is a group that no longer accepts new members. Today, every registered dog of most breeds is descended from a small group of Victorian-era founders named in that book in the 1870s and 1880s. Geneticists use the term effective population size to determine how at risk a dog is for health issues due to inbreeding, and for purebred dogs, the numbers are alarming: Kennel Club research has shown that the effective population size of pedigree dogs ranges from about 17 to 114. An effective population of 50 is considered moderate risk. In many dog breeds, more than 90% of genetic variation is lost within six generations.
This is the mechanism behind many of the health problems associated with purebred dogs – and it is made worse by another Victorian invention, written breed standards, which describe what a dog should look like. Today's pedigree dogs are the result of 150 years of selective breeding based on appearance, from a closed genetic pool.
I want to be honest, because it's easy to make a quick decision. The situation has improved. A review of all 215 breeds registered with the Kennel Club between 1980 and 2014 shows that most inbreeding has been reduced to more stable levels since 2000, and genetic diversity has slightly recovered in some breeds. Breeders, veterinarians and breed associations have treated it as a real issue to be taken seriously, instead of a scandal to ignore.
And it's fair to say that none of these reasons justify thinking less of anyone's dog. Your dog is not a statistic. But when choosing a puppy, it's a good idea to ask the breeder what health tests they do and what the coefficient of inbreeding is on the litter.
Retriever: fetches shot waterfowl. Pointer: freezes and points at game. Setter: crouches, or “sets,” so that a net may be thrown over the bird. Spaniel: flushes them out of their hiding place. Terrier: burrows into the ground. Collie: from the Scottish word for sheep. Dachshund: means “badger-dog”. Jack Russell: named after the Devon parson who used them for hunting foxes.
Few dog breeds are still doing their “jobs”. They kept the name, appearance and usually the instinct. A dog bred for three hundred years to work a full day outdoors, or to go down a burrow, or to move a flock across a hill, is carrying instructions it cannot simply switch off. Many breeds fit the saying, “If you don’t give your dog a job, they will come up with one on their own and you probably won’t like it.” Knowing what it was selectively bred for tells you more about why it digs up your garden, herds the children, or stares intently at you when it's time for its walk than any amount of training advice will — which seems to me the most useful thing Responsible Dog Ownership Month could share. Responsible Dog Ownership Day itself falls on Saturday 19 September.
Tell me in the comments what breed your dog is, and what it was originally bred for. I would like to know how many of us are living with a “redundant professional”.
Get Omi’s notes — one sourced 19th-century method each week, and what the books actually say.
Filed under How Curious
