One of the most bizarre breed origin stories claims that dachshunds came from Ancient Egypt.
I know this is an old theme on this blog, but I think I need to say it again:
Many official breed histories are absolute bullshit.
Official breed histories are actually creation myths.
They orient the entire culture around the breed in question, for virtually all breeders use a sort “original intent” argument to justify what breed standards say and how they are interpreted.
Of course, this actually gives official breed historians an unbelievable amount of power over the breed.
So if an official historian wants a particular type of dog rewarded in the ring, the historian will promote that type of dog as the “original.”
I’ve done a bit of this on the blog, especially in the early days. I’ve since become a bit more nuanced, and I am open to greater diversity in type as being historically correct.
That’s actually a much healthier way of looking at all dogs, but as virtually everyone knows, dog shows and the dog fancy are not about diversity.
They are about conformity. They don’t call them diversity shows. They call them conformation shows. Conformation. Conformity.
So within official breed histories we have the corrupting forces of the origin myth and the power breed historians have to shape how dogs are bred.
And both of those forces have a tendency to Pravda-ize the way this histories are written.
Even the really good histories are like this. I really appreciate Richard Wolters’s historiography on the Labrador retriever, but I found it very breed blind and often dismissive of well-established historical facts– such as the close diplomatic relationship between Portugal and England/UK– for my taste. My biggest complaint is that he fails to realize that St. John’s water dogs were not Labrador retrievers as we know them today and that all the retrievers that were developed in Britain were derived from this stock– not just the Labrador retriever.
But if well-researched history can have these problems, sloppily researched ones are far worse.
And they are even for so if the sloppiness comes from some sort of conscious or subconscious agenda on behalf of the breed historian.
Chinese crested dogs probably have the worst example of this problem.
The official story says these dogs were carried on the Chinese junks. They were used for rodent control, and when the sailors were too far from land to get provisions, they ate these dogs.
Never mind that there virtually no evidence for this claim.
However, there is plenty of evidence that these dogs originated in the United States in the twentieth century.
But the official breed historians and virtually all fanciers of this breed still adhere– almost like barnacles– to the Chinese junk story.
It is a junk story. I will give them that.
The only one of these bogus breed origin stories that has been debunked and has also been accepted by the vast majority of the breed’s fanciers is the old story that golden retrievers are derived from Russian circus dogs.
Lord Ilchester, a nephew of Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth, discussed part of the family retriever studbook in an article in 1952 issue of Country Life. This story was picked up a golden retriever historian named Elma Stonex, and she published the results of her research in a book. In 1959, the Kennel Club accepted Lord Ilchester and Elma Stonex’s work as the official history for the breed. The dogs are derived almost entirely from yellow or reddish wavy-coated retrievers, which were then heavily outcrossed to black wavy and flat-coated retrievers.
And the bogus creation myth was put to rest.
One still runs into people who still think that golden retrievers are Russian or derived from Russian circus dogs. It’s still a much more romantic than the real one.
To make things more complicated, a large percentage of dog breeds are said to be of ancient origin, when they probably are not.
It would be cool to think that the pharaohs hunted with dachshunds or Great Danes, but it’s not likely.
And it’s not what the genetic evidence suggests.
Dog people should be more concerned with what the facts actually are.
Once we get grounded in objective reality in this area, we can have a discussion about objective reality in others.
But we can’t if everyone wants to believe things for no other reason than they sound cool.
So if you’re going to tell me the origins of a dog breed, please provide evidence that is backed up with some sort of scientific evidence.
Gleaning breed origins from historical accounts– especially those from ancient history– is a very dubious undertaking, and dog historians would be wise to be careful in assuming any ancient origin for any breed from a passage in some ancient parchment or inscription.
But if people can’t figure out the origins of Chinese crested dogs, what hope is there for breeds that are at least several hundred years old?
Not much.
People want to belief the folktale.
They want to worship their breed through the creation myth.
And in doing so they train their minds away from objective reality and trying to figure what is actually true.
Objective reality and dogs, LOL! Here is a simple paraphrase of a post that came across the Saluki mailing list I am on:
Salukis were developed by nomads, based on what they needed in a dog.
The Salukis that make up the main foundation for the Western Saluki were bred by nomads and brought the West a hundred years ago.
The nomad culture is pretty much gone in the Middle East. Almost everything has changed there, including the culture and the purpose for the Saluki.
Therefore, Salukis in the ME are no longer Salukis, because the values, culture, and purpose have changed.
But because the foundation dogs of the Western Saluki population were bred by nomads a hundred years ago, Western Salukis, even though they have not been bred under the same cultural, performance, and climate demands for a hundred years, are still Salukis.
Wow, my brain is hurting from all the doublethink in that excerpt.
How the hell do people manage to finagle their brains into considering this plausible? The idea that a breed stops being itself when the origin culture changes, but is perfectly preserved when snatched up by better-than-though westerners and kept in a culture that resembles the origin culture even less than the origin country’s modern culture. Uhg.
A lot of what I’ve seen Jess repeat from the Afghan/Saluki show community sounds like straight-up racist condescention towards both the breed’s native culture and the dogs, in my opinion. The ignorance of both genetics and history are just icing on the cake.
Yeah, don’t you know that Western (and especially American) culture is God’s gift to the world?
I don’t think it’s racist in the way we usually think of racist. I think that casting doubt on the current incarnations of native dogs (by way of the cultures that create them) is a way of compensating for the vast changes in some of the Western dogs which are the result of different breeding priorities. Especially in the Afghans.
There is also a lot of romantic baggage associated with the past of these dogs (royal dogs of Egypt, etc.) It is easy to view things through romantic rose-tinted history glasses. Being confronted, in reality and in living color with photographic evidence, with the not nearly as romantic real lives of the current breeders in the countries of origin is…disorienting and disappointing, I think, for some Westerners.
I have some pictures on my blog, and have been sharing pictures, of current living native Afghan dogs on my FB page, and these dogs do not much look like the romantic stories of wealthy owners on hunting expeditions for Snow Leopards or smuggling jewels in the luxuriant coats of the dogs.
In ‘Gazehounds: the Search for Truth’, by Constance Miller, she writes something about the reality of being a nomad, which is that you make do. You cannot afford, either practically or monetarily, to be too picky. If the dog does it’s job, yay! It’s a good dog. This contradicts the philosophy associated with Western breeding: improvement, breeding to a standard or ideal, etc. It kind of puts the lie to the concept of ‘preserving’ the breed in the West.
I could go on for a long time (see any of my posts about ‘typical’ Afghan hounds on my blog) but the dogs are barking their fool heads off.
I think a lot of racism is unintentional; it’s just an unquestioned bias toward one’s own culture/class as being automatically superior. I think many of these folks even realize they’re doing it.
*don’t think many
I read the same story about Azawakhs: they are extinct in their homeland. The only true Azawakhs are the ones being bred (inbred) by the French. All those recent African imports are nothing but village mutts.
They must think that European aristocrats went over there (wherever), met their foreign counterparts and exchanged dogs. Then the foreign aristocrats went extinct and took their dogs with them.
It’s typical of most humans (not just Western culture) to want to tie oneself to something ancient (The Chinese treasured “antiques”. Ancient Egyptians did too). So if the Egyptians had a low & long hunting dog, it’s easy to somehow figure it “must” be related to Dachshunds. Hence the reference in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachshund
AKC’s official history doesn’t include an “Egyptian” heritage http://www.akc.org/breeds/dachshund/history.cfm
Given that the short legged version of the dog appears to be due to one mutation (http://www.genome.gov/27532750 — “Bethesda, Md., Thurs., July 16, 2009 — A single evolutionary event appears to explain the short, curved legs that characterize all of today’s dachshunds, corgis, basset hounds and at least 16 other breeds of dogs, a team led by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health, reported today” It certainly can be said that the short legged Egyptian dogs and the Dachsund do have some historical connection.
Now is it theoretically possible that dogs carrying the gene for the type of dwarfism seen in Egyptian long/low dogs was transferred to some dog or dogs in the German area and used in part to set up the Dachshund? Certainly. There’s historical evidence of trade in Roman times, Viking period and certainly during the Crusades. Is it likely that the Dachshund (as a landrace) derives in whole from Egyptian dogs? No. For one thing, it wasn’t typical to hunt badgers in Egypt. For one thing, other than the Ratel or “honey badger” there AREN’T any.
In the case of dachshund type dogs, there is of course some visible evidence from ancient Egyptian archeological sites, but who would doubt that today’s dachhunds were a much much later development, not that it matters?
I can’t resist relating the story of poor little mitzi a dachshund bitch who was owned by my friend Alan who lived next door but one during the second world war in 1944 in a working class area of the town.
As well as mitzi, Alan and his mother also had a little scottish terrier called mac. Well it was on a warm saturday summer evening in July and my dad, who had been cooling off outside, called out urgently, “Peter, Irene” (my mum) come and see this. Several people were already gathered out there looking up just as a German V1 flying bomb flew above us. And at that moment the engine spluttered and this thing came down in the gathering dark less than a hundred yards up the road, fortunately killing no one but shattering all the glass in the houses. However there was just one casualty and it was Alan’s little mitzi, her poor little body lifeless against the base of a roadside tree. Ironic that mitzi the little German dog should die at the hand of a German missile while her companion mac was safe inside the house. Then there was an unkind muttering among those gathered relating to the fact that “right dog got it”. Poor mitzi!
While there is certainly extensive evidence of the origin of the Golden Retriever breed in extant records of those such as Lord Tweedmouth, the Culham and the Ingestre strains (as well as some others discovered only fairly recently), there is still the fact that there are a great number of dogs of unrecorded/unknown background entering the pedigrees of Goldens pre- WWII. What these dogs might have been is anybody’s guess. Likely many were unregistered animals of retriever ancestry– but, there are other possibilities as well. Probably a good thing for the breed, on the whole, to have had such a broad base on which to build. Also a bonus for the Goldens, that they have had such diligent historians.
WWII was a disaster for many breeds of dogs, some more than others, but even Goldens lost a number of excellent strains due to the exingencies of war in Britain. Some of the stories would break your heart.
my point in referring to the Bethesda genome study is that the evidence indicates that the dwarfism seen in dachshunds, corgis, etc is due to ONE genetic mutation. The odds are, therefore, that the long/low dogs depicted in Egyptian murals were also dogs that had this same mutation. If that is true, then there IS a connection between modern “dachshunds, corgis, basset hounds and at least 16 other breeds of dogs” and the ancient Egyptian dogs.
It’s certainly possible that we could verify any connections via DNA from canine mummies) that these dogs also had the same mutation. Travel from Egypt to areas of Germany, Britain, etc in ancient times was not so impossible as one might think. There’s plenty of archeological & historical evidence of travel dating back to Phoenicia and extensive travel in the Roman period.
The Dachshund is no more “Egyptian” than a Basset hound or a corgi, but it does, unless DNA lies, indeed have a connection with Egyptian dogs — if only a fairly limited one. When the German “badger hunting” terrier/hound landrace became a dog that we would recognize as “dachshunds” is quite another matter. Sadly the modern conformation Dachshunds are seldom physically equipped to deal with something like a badger, which is a far more pertinent issue than limited connections in history.
Glad to report that badgers are strictly protected in Britain, though I don’t know what the position is in other european countries. It used to be the case in Britain (up to 2004) that so called “terrier men” were part of the fox hunting team. They would follow the hunt in an offroad vehicle armed with spades and a couple of terriers. When a fox ‘went to ground’ these terrier men would go into action digging out the poor fox. To what extent the fox was ultimately dealt with by the terriers or the baying hounds would tend to vary. An illegal offshoot of this was digging out badgers.
A sad irony from the badger point of view after years of successful protection is that in some parts of the country they have been thought to be responsible for the spread of TB in cattle. An experimental cull of badgers is shortly to take place in one particular area as part of a research into it. Critics of this proposed cull point out that when previously done on a restricted basis the culling of badgers actually caused a spread of the disease into surrounding areas as individual badgers which survived a cull in one locality joined up with others in neighbouring colonies.
The point is that dachshunds were never used in these operations even before they became physically less capable due to exaggerated design.
that Dachshunds weren’t used in UK “badger hunts” is no surprise — the UK has other dogs that can do the job. It would be like wondering why German Shepherds weren’t out there herding UK sheep. To my knowledge, the “fox hunt” was never well established in Europe although of course during the middle ages, a “chase” or “hunt” with hounds was common. The dogs were developed in Germany and used there.
Yes point taken. The GSD is of course a modern breed, the show stock of which was virtually ruined when the craze began in Germany for overangulation of the rear end. However, sensibly structured specimens of the breed are still used for police and guarding duties everywhere as we know. Aesthetically, I rather like the white and the longhaired offshoots. My dad had a GSD called Judy which sat by my pram in the garden and was reluctant to let my mum pick me up, so Judy soon went to a new good home.
The UKC in this country recognizes the White Shepherd as a separate breed. The ones I’ve seen at UKC shows include quite a few extremely well-constructed, sound, good-tempered animals, very attractive . On the whole, far better examples than are seen in the GSD show rings.