E6: The dog you actually live with
Listen to episode 6. Available wherever you listen to your podcasts.
None of us ended up with the dog we originally had in mind. Bruce wanted a Rottweiler, ended up with Judge, a Pomeranian. Ben wanted a Husky, ended up with Bowie, a Pomsky, which he considers close enough. Annika spent months reading about Shibas, concluding they were genuinely not right for a first-time owner, and then got Makenzie anyway. Breed mattered at the start of each of these stories. It just did not end up being the point.
What this episode keeps circling is a different question: who is the dog you actually live with? Not the summary on the breed page. The one who has worked out exactly which noise stops the humans from asking anything of them. The one who will walk straight up to a German Shepherd three times his size and squeak a toy directly in his face, not aggressively but with a kind of confidence that is hard to misread. The one who, in a Seattle dog park at eleven months, bypassed every dog her own size and went straight to the Great Dane in the corner, the one all the other dogs had been quietly ignoring.
Research on the genomics of dog behavior found that breed accounts for roughly 9% of behavioral variation between individual dogs. The rest is individual. That is not a reason to dismiss breed, which does shape tendencies in real ways, but it is a useful correction to the instinct to explain a dog entirely by the category they came from. The gap between the profile and the animal in front of you is where most of the actual relationship happens.
All three of us describe moments in this conversation when the breed explanation ran out. Judge is not a yappy dog, which is the first thing most people predict about Pomeranians. He is, however, a dog who startles himself with his own flatulence and spins around to investigate the source. That detail is not in any breed standard. Bowie is vocal when he wants to be and quiet when he does not, which fits his Husky heritage loosely and his own personality precisely. He has also established himself, by some negotiation with Kane the German Shepherd that neither Ben nor Annika fully witnessed, as the one who sets the social tone in the house. That happened between two specific animals over time. Makenzie is the dog Annika most readily reaches for breed language to describe, partly because the Shiba profile is so recognisable and partly because it keeps not quite covering her.
What each of our accounts shares is that the breed gave us an orientation, a rough set of expectations to walk in with, and then the dog proceeded to be a more specific thing than that. The Pomeranian who startles himself. The Pomsky who runs the room. The Shiba who chooses the largest dog available.
Breed is the chapter heading. The dog is the book.
Has the idea you had about your dog ever shifted once you started living with them? What did you begin to notice instead?
If you would rather sit with this on the page than in your ears, the companion essay is “On breed, appearance and the dog we eventually have to live with”.
If something here stayed with you, the next essay and the next episode arrive every other week, in your inbox. Subscribe here.