Canis lupus hominis

This image comes from the Isle of Skye and dates to about 1900.

The dogs on the right are Patterdale/Fell types, but the ones on the left are far more interesting.

On the Isle of Skye,  two terrier breeds were developed– probably from the same landrace.

One of these is called the Skye terrier today, and it’s quite rare. It has a soft coat, and the dog on the far left appears to have something like this coat, although it could be an unstripped wire-coated dog. But wire-coats were never that extreme in actual working terriers, so I think it is that of a soft-coated terrier on Skye.

The other terrier that was endemic to Skye was called the “Short-haired Skye terrier,” but we now call it the Cairn terrier. It was very similar to what was called the Highland terrier, which is why Cairns and Westies are so similar. (I’ve always thought Westies and Cairns were more similar than Westies and Scotties.)

These working Skye terriers have a mixture of features we’d associate with both Cairns and Skyes. One dog, as I mentioned, appears to have a soft coat, but two of the wire-coated dogs appear to have drop ears and are larger in size– features that have historically been associated with Skye terriers. (There still are drop-eared Skyes, but they are quite rare.  It is a bad situation to be rare in a very rare breed!)

The soft-coated Skye became a popular pet among the nobility relatively early on. Many nobles from the Scottish lowlands and town kept them as pets, as Caius wrote that the Scottish nobles took these dogs from “barbarous borders from the uttermost countryes northward” as lap dogs.

So it is very likely that there were actually two types of Skye terrier:   the landrace that gave us modern Skye and cairn terriers and the pet Skye terrier that always had a soft-coat. The people around the Clyde Valley in Scotland also developed a version of the Skye that was a bit smaller, which is sometimes referred to as a Clydesdale or Paisley terrier. That breed is the ancestor of the Yorkshire terrier and its kin.

Rawdon Lee notes that there was some  intense debate as to which coat was correct in Skye terrier. One school believed that the soft-coated dogs were Paisleys and the wire-coated dogs were the “true Skyes.”

I think the dog on the far left is a working soft-coated Skye terrier. They may have never been popular on the island as actual working dog. It is likely that the actual terriermen of Skye, who used their larger terriers on otters, wanted to get rid of these soft-coated dogs and readily sold them to those people with money on the Scottish mainland. Over time, these soft-coated dogs disappeared from the island almost entirely, but when it came to set a “Skye terrier” standard, the vast majority of these dogs were hard-coated– and many had more of what we’d consider cairn terrier features.

And that is a good way to get a hell of a fight going about what the “true Skye terrier” was.

It is likely a very similar situation to the commonly held assumption that all St. John’s water dogs were smooth-coated, when the simple laws of population genetics and the images of English retrievers derived from the water dog clearly suggest that at least some of the dogs imported to England were feathered. (And we have good historical evidence that the Newfoundlanders exported them to England in the nineteenth century. The smooth-coated dogs were more useful in their native land. The golden retriever and the flat-coat are derived from these long-haired dogs).

But because there is always an assumption that remote islands tend to have very little evolution in type and that they likely retain anachronistic forms, it is often assumed that dogs or other domestic animals from those islands are exactly the same as they were hundreds of years before.

It may be true. It may not.

The view that the wire-haired Skye terrier was the only true terrier native to Skye is likely based upon this assumption.

And it’s quite faulty.