Dachshunds come from Ancient Egypt. Yes, there are people who believe this!
Have you ever gone through one of those compendium dog books that lists or tries to list every breed? Have you ever read the de rigueur “Origins” or “History” section that accompanies every breed’s entry?
Well, most of what you are reading in those histories is unsubstantiated lore, and sometimes outright falsehood.
The golden retriever once had in its official history that it descended from Russian circus dogs that were crossed with bloodhounds. This story is so nonsensical that it is amazing that anyone would believe it. However, with that story lay the ability of the golden retriever fanciers to deny any relationship with the flat-coat. Its whole existence as a separate breed required an adherence to a story that was absolute malarkey. I’m sure it was easier to get the KC to recognize the breed as distinct if they believe it was some exotic form of canine and not just a color-selected strain of the flat-coated retriever.
This story was debunked when Lord Ilchester, the 1st Baron Tweedmouth’s nephew, discovered and perused carefully the kennel records. They were meticulous, and they were unequivocal. The golden retriever was a color selected strain of the wavy or flat-coated retriever. Not only that, it was bred very closely to the top strains of the wavy or flat-coat of its day, which meant the golden shared a close common ancestry with the flat-coat.
However, the Tweedmouth strain started in the 1860’s, when the principles of scientific selective breeding were well-established. We can trace every golden back to the foundation dogs “Nous” and “Belle,” just as we can trace every GSD back to “Horand von Grafrath” and every boxer to “Flora” and “Boxer” and the other Munich bullenbeiser types.
Those breeds all have a recent heritage. The documentation of their bloodlines is well-known, and any bullshit stories made up about them can easily be debunked.
But how can you debunk more ancient and more poorly-documentedcanine lore?
How likely is it that the Ancient Romans had dogs exactly like Rottweilers?
How likely is it that Dachshunds are from Ancient Egypt?
How likely is it that Dalmatians even come from Croatia?
How likely are Catahoula curs to descend from de Soto’s war mastiffs? (I think they are descended from the Beauceron-type dogs but not Spanish war mastiffs.)
And who can forget the Chinese crested dog people who think their dog is actually from China and that it once killed rats on Chinese junks during the golden age of Chinese navigation. (Here’s the truth!) That’s a good case of people simply making it up, and even today, when confronted with the truth, they still don’t accept it.
The truth is we often get dogs because of what they say about us. I know this is silly, but we are humans. We select things, both consciously and unconsciously, to reflect our image.
We also long to reconnect with our past. The way we live now is vastly different from the way our forebears did. We use dogs as a way of reconnecting with the past.
Both of these tendencies lead dog people into thinking about dogs in terms that are fanciful and romantic and, at the same time, horribly unsubstantiated or horribly unfalsifiable.
We use these romantic histories as way of saying that I own a part of the past,and this part of the past says something about my character.
I am guilty of this human foible. I am not denying this.
However, I like to think I’m not as extreme as some people are.
I’m wating for someone to write a fanciful history of the Mississippi leg hound.
Because they’re just good fish stories.
A breed’s history is part of it’s identity. Even whe it’s mostly fantasy, the history is part of the appeal to a certain subset of the breed’s fans. (I’m deliberately using fan here rather than fancier; this is hardly limited to ‘show’ people.)
OTOH, sometimes it’s not so much the history that’s ‘wrong’ as that the breed has changed form notably- Cardigans would be an example of this (from mostly brindle, drop eared herders with piebald white to prick eared, colorful herders with irish spotting, but the history of the breed as a local/regional cattledog is pretty well documented.
A breed history tells you as much about what the breed fans WANT the breed to be as what it really is or was. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I questioned an author of one of those dog books that explain the myths and origins of dogs… specifically regarding Queen Victoria and the Rough Collie. I wanted to know what the actual facts were.
Guess what the author’s source was? The AKC!
To quote:
Dear Christopher,
What an interesting email. You’ve raised a very pertinent question about Collie breeds. You may be correct in your evaluation of the photographs of Queen Victoria. We cannot say for sure. And, as our book was The Mythology of Dogs, not a variorum breed book, we can only tell you how we did our research. Mostly from breed clubs throughout the U.S. But we also visited the American Kennel Club Library in New York City — they’ve since moved as you know — and while there we picked up the lively little piece of information on the Queen and her dogs.
…
um yeah, brilliant… we’ll write a book debunking dog myths and our primary source will be the breed clubs which perpetuate and create most of the myths!
If my eyes could roll any more they would.
I do hate to tell you this, Christopher, but the vast majority of the materials stored at the AKC library? Are not AKC publications. They’re archival materials, pedigrees, dog books from every publisher under the sun. Unless the AKC is ripping the pages out and replacing them with their own versions, it’s highly unlikely that the presence of the books in their library invalidates them as a source.
While I realize that you have a very vested interest in insisting that your BCs were the ‘original’ collie, a significant portion of research seems to indicate that the original collie is long gone, but several branches of the tree remain – neither mine nor yours is inherently a better dog by sheer fact of history. (A better sheepherding dog? Surely. A better companion? I would say so.) But human selection caused those- not some divine ‘our dogs are descended from the dogs of kings’ birthright, as romantic as that sounds.)
The BC is one strain of “original collie.” Each region in Britain had its own variety.
The BC is one of the strong-eyed strains, but I don’t know whether we could say that Queen Victoria had a border collie. One of her dogs was of the Cheviot, which is in the Borders region. But whether that dog was like the modern BC in terms of behavior, well, all we have is speculation.
The English shepherd is probably closest to the “original,” IMHO.
Let me clarify my biases:
* I don’t have a particular interest in proving that my collies are the original. If anything, my collection of information shows that ‘the little black and white welsh dogs with strong eye’ were a different strain before anyone was keeping good records. The “original” collie is most certainly lost to time and the Border Collie has been as forecfully steered in its breeding since 1900 as any other breed.
* My own personal fight is not to link my dogs with age and tradition and “original” anythings. I’m a breeder who believes that modern desires and conditions are sufficiently different than the past to necessitate breeding for new concerns. There are plenty of BC people who think you are evil if you’re not breeding for sheep trial success, you’re harming the breed, etc. I am not one of them. I am perfectly supportive of a free market defining the breed and RE-defining the breed.
* I think it’s more important to maintain a diverse gene pool than to maintain conformity to any one standard.
This makes me a heretic among both the show and trial community (they call themselves the working community, but most should be called the hobby trialers), and even the true working community. Many of these folks, much more than I, have a vested interest in tying their activities to history and tradition.
My understanding of breed histories tells me that fashions and priorities change and in many cases the historical purpose for breeds become rare and even die out, but the breeds remain. I recognize that this is because there are many qualities in our breeds that we love for reasons other than “original purpose.”
My own love for Border Collies has little to do with their ability to push sheep, and I don’t believe in the rampant desire to continually shrink the gene pool for that purpose. Unlike other breeders, I do not demand that the entire breed begin to look like my flavor, and I never will. I am fine with people breeding for sheep or farm work, etc. as well as for show and especially for sport. But the limit of my “you should do it this way” campaigning has to do with ending the obsessive use of inbreeding and line breeding and the fanatics desire to separate the gene pools using registry politics.
I want the freedom to breed from as many border collies as possible, and even to bring in new blood. Neither the show nor the “working” community is concerned with this. They have already established which dogs are “royalty” and pretty much all dogs that are competing at the highest level are preselected from those lines, so there is really no chance that “new” blood will ever rise to the top.
And if it does happen, it will immediately be bred so much as to counterbalance the benefit.
… so, long story short, my exposing of Queen Victoria’s dogs as not really rough collies the way we think of them is not to elevate Border Collies to the status of “dogs of kings’ birthright” to replace the rough collie, but to call in to question that entire line of thinking as it has been used to wrongly justify the history of the rough collie.
With respect to Queen Victoria, she had her dogs a good 50 years before the working or show registries really got going and to my knowledge none of her dogs can be traced to any of the founding Border Collie stock, and I don’t believe that any of the dogs she writes about so fondly can be traced to the rough collie dogs either… although I’m sure it’s possible to find links back to some of the dogs in her kennels.
The United Kennel Club “standard” for the English shepherd — which was, apparently, written by a UKC employee who had never seen one — begins with the phrase “According to legend.”
No shit. I could not make this up.
It then goes on to fantasize about Roman droving dogs brought to Britain …
I didn’t say that the AKC’s library is invalidated! I specifically pointed out the BREED CLUBS as being entirely suspect.
The notion of a book that is written to debunk common myths using breed clubs — for sure the primary source of any number of those myths — as the primary source to debunk them, is just rather hilarious to me. I can only imagine that most of the “aha!” moments in the book come from comparing one breed clubs’ mythology to another’s.
The same goes for the half-dozen sighthound breeds that all claim any cave painting or hieroglyph portraying a skinny dog proves that -their- breed is older than the Pharaohs. I mean, I’ve even read of the DALMATION being claimed as a dog that originally ran alongside Egyptian chariots! Cuz there are ancient pictures of sleek dogs with -spots-!
ETA: And they’re not even dalmatian-style spots, just large generic black and white spots. They really have to reach to make any connection.
All of my breeds are THE most ancient (Salukis, Azawakh, and Afghan hounds.) I often hear them in out in the yard, arguing about it. Their little doggy egos are quite tied up in who is the FIRST.
Yes, and I’ll tell you that the golden retriever as a distinct breed dates to only 1912 and really 1916, when interbreeding with flat-coats and Labs was banned.
Now, your breeds have been around for awhile, though probably not in a closed registry system.
I am a landrace kinda gal and I usually say I have old breed types. As plastic and adaptable as dogs are, if you could go back in time you would be unlikely to find dogs that are exactly the same as the modern ones, even country of origin dogs.
I’ve always been skeptical of the more outlandish breed origins.
More than a decade ago, I decided to have fun with it. At the time I had Dino, a smooth collie who conformationally was way off the smooth collie standard. After a woman told me at a collie specialty that Dino was the ugliest collie she had ever seen Anyway, I decided to make up a new breed using Dino’s conformation & behavior as standard of perfection. As Dino had pronounced cowlicks, I called the breed the Wavy Coat Collie or just Wavy Collie (WC).
Wavy Collie Standard highlights:
– The long pointy nose was highly prized in old Scotland due to their use in inter-clan warfare – the WC would sneak up behind an enemy clansmen, flipped up his kilt and goosed him good & proper. Points given for the loudness & pitch of the goosee’s yell.
– WC collie heads have no stop (the head should be flat from nose to top of skull) because ancient Scottish graphic designers used the WC heads as rulers to draw straight lines.
– WC Movement was knit & purl: the true test of proper WC movement was to attach yard to the front feet of a WC and send him on a triangle, if he doesn’t end the triangle with a 3 foot scarf, suspect impure breeding. Of course the Ancient Scots used the WC to knit scarves.
I’m an illustrator and back in grad school I took several classes in Egyptian art history, so I decided to create “proof” that the WC was an extremely ancient breed. I drew a vignette of Dino in IIRC the middle kingdom style. Some of the hieroglyphics were made up (I had a poop bag & rawhide hieroglyphic) but I did have his name & “Most High & Beloved Wavy Collie” included in phonetic hieroglyphics.
I found my favorite breed history theory of the Chinese Crested recently: http://www.satamu.com/history-of-the-breed.asp
It’s strange how a breed apparently so ‘revered’ in Asia has no archaeological or written evidence for it’s existence there besides various ‘eyewitness accounts’ from Westerners. Yet, you’ll find tons of cultural artwork and references to Pekes, Pugs, Chins, and all the various other Asiatic breeds that were created in that region. It’s a mystery! =P
This website has one BS story after another.
Your breed takes the cake. It has the best fiction writers ever! The Mongol Khans wives had them?
What is Canis africanus? I thought it was an ancient species of wolf that once lived in Africa, which is not currently in the genus Canis : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocyon_lycaonoides
It’s just like learning at the Westminster KC show that the Chinese introduced the Chihuahua to Mexico! It is speculated that they made it to Mexico, but the evidence isn’t that good.
Canis africanus = some unique hairless race of dogs that supposedly arose in Africa. It’s another ‘origin theory’ of the breed. For some reason a lot of people are desperate to deny any link to the Xolo, even though simply LOOKING at Cresteds from 20+ years ago shows that family resemblance clear as day. Perhaps the current generation of breeders just doesn’t want to admit how much they’ve changed the breed from what it originally was.
I read an interesting blog a while back (which seems to be abandoned, unfortunately) which speculates that the original Chihuahua (not the modern apple-heads but the ‘deer-head’ types) were descendants of the coated variant of small Xolos: http://pearlsndance.blogspot.com/2009/06/mystery-of-my-naked-chihuahua-americas.html