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"Although many animals have served people across the length of history, only one of them chose us. Only one was willing to leave its own kind and walk beside us instead. Every other working animal had to be captured, confined and broken to the task; the dog arrived at the fire on its own feet and stayed."

"Archaeologists and cynologists keep pushing the date of that arrangement further back. Dogs lie in human graves. They appear in the earliest art. They served the hunter and the shepherd and the soldier, guarded the doorway, hauled the load, and walked the whole distance of a human life as a companion and nothing else. Whatever the exact millennium, the partnership is old enough that both species have been shaped by it."

"The question that gave this site its reason to exist is not how dogs came to live with us but why they came to look so wildly unlike one another. No other domestic species varies so far. A Chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound are the same animal in the way a rowing boat and a container ship are both vessels."

"The answer is almost always work. A breed is a record of a job, written in bone and coat and temperament by people who needed something done and had generations in which to get it. The Lundehund grew a sixth toe and a neck that folds backwards because someone needed a dog small enough to enter a cliff crevice and flexible enough to turn around inside it. The Bullmastiff is dark, silent and heavy because an English gamekeeper needed to find a poacher in the dark, knock him down and hold him there without killing him. The Galgo Espanol is built the way it is because the Spanish hare is fast."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for thebreedsofdogs.com:

Why So Many Breeds?

The Rare and the Overlooked

How to Use This Reference

A Word on Sources

The Reference

Owning a Dog