People and dogs have shared their lives since the Ice Age, and the partnership has produced some remarkable stories. Meet breeds named for the wrong country, famous dogs whose legends outgrew the facts, working dogs that guard penguins and sniff out whale droppings, and the scientists learning how dogs read our faces and voices. Along the way you will find a guard dog buried by an Egyptian king and a border collie who knew 1,022 names.
Every tile in a Dogs game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
The poodle is the national dog of France, yet its name is German: it comes from pudeln, meaning to splash in water. Poodles were bred to retrieve ducks and other waterfowl for hunters, and that famous fancy haircut began as working gear. A full, heavy coat slowed a swimming dog, so owners clipped much of it away. They left puffs of hair around the joints and upper body to protect the joints and vital organs in cold water.
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Despite its name, the Great Dane has no known connection to Denmark. The breed was developed in Germany at least 400 years ago to hunt wild boar. In 1876 it was declared the national breed of Germany, where it is still called the Deutsche Dogge, or German mastiff. The English name comes from one of its French names, Grand Danois, meaning big Danish. Why the French linked this German boarhound to Denmark is a mystery nobody has solved.
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The Labrador retriever did not come from Labrador. Its ancestors were St. John's water dogs of Newfoundland, which hauled nets and long lines for fishermen and dove after cod that slipped off the hook. Ships carrying salted cod docked at Poole on England's south coast, where the dogs showed off by retrieving objects from the water. The Earl of Malmesbury watched, bred them for duck hunting, and his family called them Labrador dogs. The American Kennel Club suggests his grasp of Canadian geography was a little fuzzy.
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In October 1860, during the Second Opium War, the Summer Palace near Beijing was looted. Captain John Hart Dunne of the 99th Regiment came away with a tiny dog and, back in England, presented her to Queen Victoria. She was named Looty, an ironic nod to how she was acquired, and she was one of the first Pekingese in Britain. When the artist Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl was asked to sketch her, he was told to include something to show her size, because she was remarkably small. In his portrait she sits on a red cushion before a Japanese vase.
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On a speaking tour of Japan in 1937, Helen Keller visited Akita Prefecture and asked about Hachiko, the famously loyal Akita. She said she would like an Akita of her own, and before long she was given a puppy named Kamikaze-go. She called him an angel in fur. He died young of distemper, and Japan's government sent her another Akita as an official gift. Keller is credited with introducing the breed to the United States through these two dogs.
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For decades, fanciers believed golden retrievers descended from Russian circus dogs. The tale probably began with Colonel W. le Poer Trench, a leading early breeder who insisted they be called Russian Retrievers, and breed clubs in England and America accepted it until the 1950s. Then Lord Tweedmouth's handwritten stud books came to light. They showed he bought a yellow retriever named Nous from a cobbler in Brighton and bred him with Belle, a Tweed Water Spaniel. Their 1868 litter, raised at his Highland estate, Guisachan, founded the breed.
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In Aztec belief, the Xoloitzcuintli, or Xolo, led the souls of the dead to Mictlan, the underworld, ferrying its master across a deep river on its back. The dog took its name from Xolotl, a god of death. Centuries later this ancient Mexican breed had nearly vanished. In the mid-1950s a team of dog experts searched remote countryside and found just ten Xolo-like dogs, which became the foundation of its revival. The American Kennel Club registered one in 1887, then recognized the breed again in 2011.
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The Basenji comes from the rainforests of the Congo in central Africa, where it hunted birds and small animals in near silence, flushing them into hunters' nets. Instead of a normal bark, it makes a yodel-like sound, thanks to its unusually flattened larynx. Working in thick jungle, these quiet hunters often wore wooden bells with monkey bones for clappers. An ancient breed, the Basenji sits at the base of the dog breed family tree, and scientists use its genome as a reference for comparing other breeds.
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Dalmatian puppies are born white, and their spots usually begin to appear at around two weeks old. The breed became famous as a carriage dog, trotting alongside horse-drawn coaches. When firefighters used horses to pull their engines, Dalmatians ran with them and barked ahead like living sirens, clearing people out of the way. At the fire they kept the valuable horses calm and made sure no one took them. Long after trucks replaced horses, the spotted dogs kept a place of honor in the firehouse.
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More than 4,000 years ago, an Egyptian king gave his guard dog a funeral fit for a noble. In 1935 archaeologists at Giza found a limestone block, reused in a later burial chamber, that tells the story. "The dog which was the guard of His Majesty. Abutiyu is his name," it begins. The king ordered a coffin from the royal treasury, fine linen in great quantity, incense, perfumed ointment and a tomb built by gangs of masons, so the dog might be honored before the god Anubis.
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Barry, a dog at the hospice on Switzerland's Great St. Bernard Pass, is said to have helped rescue 40 people and was famous even in his lifetime. Legends grew around him. One says he carried a lost boy to safety on his back; the Natural History Museum of Bern, which displays him, says no dog could manage such a feat. Another says a French soldier killed him, mistaking him for a wolf. In truth Barry retired to Bern and died there in 1814. His mount was remade in 1923 to look prouder, but the coat is original.
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Meriwether Lewis paid $20 for a Newfoundland dog named Seaman, who went west with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Seaman caught squirrels swimming in the Ohio River, and a Shawnee man once offered three beaver skins for him, which Lewis refused. Yet the first published account of the journey, in 1814, left the dog out entirely, and later editions of the journals printed his name as Scannon. In 1985 historian Donald Jackson pointed out that Lewis had named a creek Seaman's Creek, spelling his dog's name plainly.
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The story goes that a Skye terrier named Bobby guarded his master's grave in Edinburgh's Greyfriars Kirkyard for 14 years, from 1858 until his own death in 1872. A statue on a drinking fountain honors him, and Walt Disney filmed his tale in 1961. Historian Jan Bondeson of Cardiff University argues it was a Victorian business stunt: Bobby was a well-fed stray kept at the graveyard, and when the first Bobby, an old mongrel, died in 1867, a purebred Skye terrier took his place.
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In 1869 a Missouri hunting hound named Old Drum was shot near the farm of Leonidas Hornsby, who had vowed to shoot dogs he blamed for killing his sheep. Owner Charles Burden sued, and after several trials, at the last jury trial in Warrensburg in 1870, lawyer George Graham Vest closed with a tribute to dogs, calling a man's dog "the one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world." Burden won $50, and the Missouri Supreme Court upheld it. The speech helped popularize the idea of the dog as man's best friend.
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In 1888 a scruffy terrier mix named Owney began sleeping on mailbags at the post office in Albany, New York. When the bags moved, so did he, first onto mail wagons, then onto Railway Mail Service trains across the country. Clerks marked his travels with tags and medals on his collar, and when there were too many, Postmaster General John Wanamaker gave him a harness to hold them. In 1895 he toured the world by mail steamer. Owney is preserved at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, and in 2011 he got his own stamp.
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Nipper, the dog gazing into a gramophone horn, was a portrait of a dog already gone. Artist Francis Barraud inherited him from his brother Mark and noticed how the dog listened to his phonograph. Nipper died in 1895, and Barraud finished the painting three years later, renaming it His Master's Voice. The Edison Bell company reportedly turned it down, saying dogs don't listen to phonographs. In 1899 the Gramophone Company paid £50 for the painting and £50 more for the copyright, once he swapped in one of their gramophones.
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In 1925, sled dog teams relayed diphtheria antitoxin 674 miles to Nome, Alaska. Musher Leonhard Seppala's 12-year-old lead dog, Togo, covered more than 260 miles, while the other teams averaged about 31. But the fame went to Balto, who led the final 53-mile leg and soon had a statue in New York's Central Park, even though Seppala had thought Balto not ready to lead a team. Togo's mounted body now stands at Iditarod headquarters in Wasilla, Alaska, and he got his own New York statue in 2001.
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Months before England hosted the 1966 World Cup, the Jules Rimet trophy was stolen from a stamp exhibition in London's Methodist Central Hall. A week later, on March 27, Thames lighterman David Corbett was taking his mongrel, Pickles, for a walk from their home in Upper Norwood when the dog began sniffing at a package under a bush. Inside the newspaper wrapping was the trophy. Pickles became a celebrity, turned his nose up at a plate of caviar and appeared in the film The Spy with a Cold Nose. No one was ever convicted of the theft.
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Beware of the dog signs are nearly 2,000 years old. At the main entrance of Pompeii's House of the Tragic Poet, buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 and excavated in the 1820s, a floor mosaic shows a snarling black dog in a spiked collar and chain, with the words CAVE CANEM: beware of the dog. Guarding homes was one of a Roman dog's main jobs, and the Roman writer Columella favored dark dogs, which frighten thieves by day and are harder for trespassers to see at night.
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The first recorded sheepdog trials in Britain were held on a wet, cold October 9, 1873, at Bala in north Wales. R. J. Lloyd Price of Rhiwlas organized them, and about 300 spectators watched ten dogs pen and drive sheep. Most competitors were Welsh, but first prize went to a Scotsman living in Wales, James Thompson, and his dog Tweed. His boasting about Scottish shepherds and dogs stung the local shepherds, who issued a challenge that led to an international contest. The International Sheep Dog Society, founded in 1906, still runs trials every summer.
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In November 1927 the Saturday Evening Post ran an article by Dorothy Harrison Eustis about a school in Potsdam, Germany, that trained dogs to guide blind people. Morris Frank, who was blind, wrote to ask, "Is what you say really true?" If so, he wanted one of those dogs. He trained in Switzerland with a dog named Buddy, and on June 11, 1928, the pair crossed some of New York's busiest streets before reporters. Frank's telegram to Eustis read simply: "Success." Together they founded The Seeing Eye in 1929.
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In 1944 a soldier in New Guinea found a tiny Yorkshire terrier in an abandoned foxhole, and Corporal Bill Wynne bought her for two Australian pounds. Smoky weighed four pounds. On Luzon in the Philippines, crews needed to run a telephone line through a pipe about 70 feet long and eight inches wide beneath an airfield under daily attack. Instead of digging a trench for days, they tied a string to Smoky's collar and sent her through. She also visited wounded soldiers in hospitals and is often remembered as one of the first therapy dogs.
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In 1984 the U.S. Department of Agriculture put a single beagle to work at Los Angeles International Airport, sniffing bags from international flights for plants and animal products that could carry pests and diseases. The Beagle Brigade grew from there. Beagles got the job for their keen noses, high food drive, gentle manner with the public and non-threatening size. A trained dog can check a suitcase in seconds, far faster than an officer opening it. When it finds something, it sits or paws, and its reward is a treat.
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In Namibia, the Cheetah Conservation Fund protects cheetahs by protecting farmers' goats and sheep. Since 1994 it has bred Anatolian shepherds and Kangal dogs, rare Turkish breeds, and placed them with farmers. Raised among goats and sheep, the dogs bond with the flock, and their loud bark is usually enough to warn predators away. A study of more than 1,500 farmer surveys from 1994 to 2018 counted 634 dogs placed, and 91 percent of the responding farmers reported fewer livestock losses. The group credits the dogs with sparing hundreds of cheetahs.
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Sled dogs hauled explorers and scientists across Antarctica for nearly a century, until an environmental agreement ended their service. The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1991, required dogs to be removed by April 1, 1994. One concern was canine distemper, which can spread from dogs to seals. The British Antarctic Survey, which had used huskies since 1945, marked the end with a final sledging journey across Alexander Island by two men and 14 huskies. The last dogs left the continent in early 1994.
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Tucker, a black Labrador retriever mix, rode a research boat in Puget Sound to find floating orca scat. Standing at the bow, he sniffed the wind, and when he caught a whiff he strained over the edge while the boat zigzagged toward the sample before it sank. Conservation dogs from the University of Washington can smell scat up to a nautical mile away on water. The samples hold hormones that reveal an animal's health, and they showed orcas going hungry as Chinook salmon grew scarce. The program's dogs are rescues who work for a ball.
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The Lagotto Romagnolo began as a curly-coated water dog in the marshes of Comacchio and Romagna in Italy, retrieving coots for hunters; in local dialect its name means water dog. As the marshes were drained over several decades, the breed lost its old job and gradually became a truffle hunter, a change its Italian breed club dates to between 1840 and 1890. Between the two world wars, almost every truffle hunter's dog in Romagna was a Lagotto. The club calls it the only breed specialized in finding truffles.
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In 1914, quarry workers at Oberkassel, near Bonn, Germany, uncovered a 14,000-year-old grave holding a man, a woman and a dog. A 2018 re-examination found a tooth from a second dog and showed the first was a puppy about 27 weeks old. Its teeth suggest it had canine distemper, with repeated bouts of severe illness over about six weeks. Without care, a dog that sick dies in less than three weeks, so researchers suggested people kept it warm and clean and gave it water. A puppy that ill was no use for work, which hints at a bond of care.
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Dogs descend from gray wolves, domesticated during the Ice Age at least 15,000 years ago, but today's wolves are cousins rather than ancestors. A 2014 genome study found dogs came from an older wolf population not well represented by any living wolves. In 2022 a team led by London's Francis Crick Institute analyzed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning 100,000 years. Dogs were closer to ancient wolves from Asia than to those from Europe, and at least two wolf populations contributed. The exact ancestral population has still not been found.
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Wolves eat mostly meat, but dogs carry genetic changes that help them digest starch. A 2013 study led by Erik Axelsson of Uppsala University compared 60 dogs with 12 wolves and found signs of selection in genes for starch digestion, including the one for amylase, an enzyme that breaks starch down. One idea is that early dogs scavenged scraps near human settlements. The picture is not simple: a 2014 study found that dogs not tied to farming societies, such as dingoes, lack the extra amylase genes most breeds carry.
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Dogs have an eyebrow muscle that wolves largely lack. A 2019 study led by Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth found that the muscle that raises the inner eyebrow, creating the classic puppy-dog-eyes look, is present in dogs, while in wolves it is only a scant, irregular cluster of fibers. Around people, dogs made the movement more often and more intensely than wolves. The team proposed that people unconsciously favored dogs with that appealing look. Then came a twist: in 2024 researchers found the muscle well developed in coyotes, suggesting wolves lost it rather than dogs gaining it.
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In 2015 researchers at Japan's Azabu University reported a chemical feedback loop between dogs and owners. When dogs gazed at their owners, the owners' levels of oxytocin, a hormone tied to bonding, rose, and the dogs' levels then rose too. Pairs who shared long gazes showed increases; pairs with short gazes did not. Tame wolves reunited with their owners showed no such effect. A nasal dose of oxytocin made female dogs gaze longer, and their owners' levels rose in turn. The team suggested the loop may have evolved during domestication.
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Chaser, a border collie in Spartanburg, South Carolina, learned the names of 1,022 toys. Her owner, Wofford College psychology professor emeritus John Pilley, trained her four to five hours a day for three years. In a 2011 study with colleague Alliston Reid, Chaser showed she understood names as labels for objects, not commands to fetch. She learned the category word toy, and she could infer the name of an unfamiliar toy by ruling out the ones she knew. The researchers stopped at 1,022 because of their own time limits, not hers.
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In 2016, researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest trained 13 dogs, including six border collies and five golden retrievers, to lie still in an MRI scanner for seven minutes. The dogs heard their trainers say praise words or neutral words, each in an excited or a flat tone. The dogs' reward center lit up only when praise words came in a praising voice, so both the words and the tone matter. The study first reported that dogs, like people, handle words on the left side of the brain, but in 2017 the team corrected it: left and right had been switched.
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Can a puppy follow a pointing finger without being taught? A 2021 study tested 375 eight-week-old puppies from Canine Companions, a service dog organization, while they still lived with their littermates and had spent little one-on-one time with people. Many followed a researcher's point to a treat hidden under one of two cups, and a treat was taped inside both cups so they could not simply follow their noses. Genes explained more than 40 percent of the variation in this skill. Yet few puppies looked to a person for help with an impossible task.
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An old rule of thumb says one dog year equals seven human years. A 2020 study from the University of California San Diego tested it by comparing age-related chemical marks on the DNA of 104 Labrador retrievers with those of people. Dogs age fast at first: a one-year-old dog is similar to a 30-year-old human, and a four-year-old to a 52-year-old. After about seven, their aging slows. As senior author Trey Ideker noted, a nine-month-old dog can already have puppies, so the seven-to-one rule never fit.
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