Breed is a Social Construct

Dogs Need us to Evolve our Thinking

Social construct does not mean “imaginary thing” Money is a social construct. And marriage. And national borders. These things are real and have consequences.

But they are not natural phenomenon.

Sometimes a social construct is so engrained in a culture that it feels like part of nature. Like gravity. Immovable.

For a long time people believed marriage could only happen between two people of the same race. In most of the west, this thinking has changed. Our social construct of marriage has evolved.

Humans invent social constructs and humans can change them. In fact, sometimes the need to change them is a moral imperative.

Dog breeds are a social construct. The boundaries between them, and the rules that maintain those boundaries, are human decisions. With big consequences for dogs.

For the vast majority of the 15,000+ years dogs have lived with humans, there were no breeds. There were types. There were regional populations now called land races, shaped by geography, climate, and function.

Village dogs across Asia, Africa, and the Americas lived alongside humans, bred freely, and were loosely selected by the humans who kept them. The dogs that were good at guarding, guarded. The dogs that were good at herding, herded. Nobody checked papers.

These populations were genetically diverse. They blended into each other at the margins. A pointing dog in one valley might look somewhat different from a pointing dog two valleys over, but there was no hard line between them.

Mixing happened organically and with minimal human involvement. Dogs moved with people.

This is how roughly 75% of the world’s dogs still live today outside of the US and Europe.

Then came the Victorians.

In the mid 1800s, primarily in England, dog fanciers began doing something new. They took these loose, overlapping populations and carved them into rigid categories.

The Golden Retriever was created by crossing Flat coated Retrievers, Tweed Water Spaniels, Irish Setters, and Bloodhounds . The Brittany was assembled from French spaniels and English Setters. The Pointer was built from Spanish Pointers, Foxhounds, Greyhounds, Bloodhounds, and Setters.

Breeders defined precise standards for height, coat, color, head shape. They held competitions to see whose dog best matched the written description. And critically, they closed the stud books.

There was a real practical reason for closed registries. Dr. Alison Skipper, a veterinarian and historian at the Royal Veterinary College in London, has traced this history in detail.

Before DNA testing existed, the only way breeders could identify carriers of recessive genetic diseases was through test breeding - mating a dog to a known carrier and seeing what the puppies looked like. If you bred your dog to a carrier and none of the puppies were affected, your dog was probably clear. This was slow, expensive, and wildly unethical by today’s standard, but it was all they had.

Within a closed population, this system worked. Breeders could gradually map which lines carried which problems and breed away from them. The Irish Setter community used exactly this approach to eliminate progressive retinal atrophy over several decades.

But the system had a critical vulnerability: outcrossing. If you brought in a dog from outside the breed, you had no idea what recessive mutations it carried. You’d potentially be reintroducing diseases that had taken generations to eliminate, and the only way to find out was to produce sick puppies.

So the opposition to outcrossing was rational. It was a strategy that made sense given the available technology.

The problem is that the technology changed and the culture didn’t.

We now have DNA tests that can identify hundreds of disease causing mutations from a cheek swab. We don’t need to produce affected puppies to find carriers. We can screen before we breed. The entire practical foundation for closed registries has been removed, but the emotional and cultural commitment to them remains fully intact.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

Generations of breeders have organized their entire lives around the closed registry system. They’ve spent decades learning pedigrees, tracking lines, building relationships within their breed community, campaigning dogs at shows, and policing the boundaries of who’s in and who’s out.

The whole structure of purebred dog culture from the shows, to the titles, to the breed clubs, to the mentorship chains, to the language of “reputable” vs. “backyard” is built on the premise that the closed stud book is sacred.

If breed is a social construct, if the line between “purebred” and “mixed” is a human decision rather than a biological fact then a lot of that investment feels threatened.

Not because it was wasted, but because it rests on a foundation that turns out to be a choice, not a law of nature.

That’s a hard thing to sit with. And when something feels threatening, people look for reasons to defend it.

This is where you start seeing people reach for scientific sounding arguments to justify what is fundamentally a cultural commitment.

Someone recently posted a detailed argument in the field trial world claiming that crossing breeds , even closely related ones like Brittanys, Pointers, and Setters risks creating “Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities” and “mismatched regulatory interactions.”

These are real concepts in evolutionary biology. They describe what happens when populations have evolved independently for so long that their genomes become incompatible. They’re documented in fruit fly species that diverged millions of years ago. They are a cornerstone of speciation science.

They have absolutely nothing to do with dog breeds.

Dog breeds diverged 150 to 300 years ago. The breeds being discussed — Brittany, Pointer, Setter were literally created from each other in the 1800s. They share identical chromosome numbers, the same ecological niche, and massive amounts of common ancestry.

No study has ever documented Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities between any domestic dog breeds. Because the mechanism requires evolutionary timescales that dog breeds don’t come close to meeting. This isn’t a gap in the research. It’s a category error.

The largest genomic studies of dog health consistently show the same thing: inbreeding is the problem, not outcrossing.

None of this means purebred dogs are bad or that breed standards are meaningless. It also doesn’t mean that mixed breed dogs are always healthier or that COI is all that matters.

It means that closed gene pools have genetic consequences, and pretending those consequences don’t exist because the system feels important is not a scientific position. It’s a cultural one.

Saying breed is a social construct isn’t an attack. It’s a description.

The boundaries are human decisions. The rules are human rules. And they need to be evaluated, questioned, and updated when the practical reasons for them no longer apply.

In every context where a dog’s actual performance matters more than its papers, crossbreeding is standard practice. Service Dog Organizations have been crossing Labs and Goldens for decades because the cross produces better service dogs.

The most competitive sled dogs in the world, Alaskan Huskies, are purpose-bred mixed breed dogs selected entirely on performance. Military and detection dog programs use whatever cross produces the best working dog, pedigree be damned. And outside the dog world entirely, crossbreeding for hybrid vigor is so normal it’s barely worth mentioning. The cattle industry runs on it, the entire history of agriculture runs on it.

It’s time for the companion dog world to leave Victorian ideas behind.

Dogs deserve it.

**References:**

Parker et al. (2017). “Genomic Analyses Reveal the Influence of Geographic Origin, Migration, and Hybridization on Modern Dog Breed Development.” *Cell Reports*.

Bannasch et al. (2021). “The Effect of Inbreeding, Body Size and Morphology on Health in Dog Breeds.” *Canine Medicine and Genetics*.

Shannon et al. (2015). “Genetic structure in village dogs reveals a Central Asian domestication origin.” *PNAS*.

Donner et al. (2018). “Frequency and distribution of 152 genetic disease variants in over 100,000 mixed breed and purebred dogs.” *PLoS Genetics*.

Worboys, Strange, & Pemberton (2018). *The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain*. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Alison Skipper’s work on breed registry history is available via the Functional Breeding Podcast and the Origins 2025 conference.