Before Makenzie was vaccinated, she would stand outside the small dog park opposite our building in Seattle, pressing against the fence and wanting to get in. At four months old, she was finally allowed. She loved the small park, but her daily happy place was the larger one a few minutes up the hill. That park had dogs in it twice her size. Upon entering she ignored all of them and made a line for the biggest and furriest dog she could find. One visit she went straight for the Great Dane in the corner that the other dogs had been avoiding for weeks. He was a huge boy whose owners had nearly stopped coming because no one would play with him. She ran up to him, invited him to play, and they went chasing each other wildly, ignoring everyone else in the park.
I had read a great deal about the Shiba Inu before she arrived: They are independent, aloof, stubborn. They are not a dog for first-time owners. They are prone to aggression if not trained correctly, with the added problem that the literature simultaneously described them as untrainable. I was genuinely frightened by what I found. We got one anyway. None of the literature told me about the Great Dane. None of it told me about the way she could be a completely different dog from one hour to the next: present and cheerful one minute, adamant she needed the afternoon alone the next. I was reading a Shiba Inu summary. She kept showing me what it left out.
In the sixth episode of the Pawplexity Pawdcast, we talk about the dogs we actually live with: not the breed description, not the easy or difficult label, but the personality that shows up in the kitchen and on the walk and in the spaces where the summary runs out.
Bruce had wanted a Rottweiler, specifically because his friend had one who was exceptional: obedient, loving, just a good boy. He came home with Judge instead, a Pomeranian: the one breed he had ruled out entirely. Judge is now the dog love of his life. He is also a dog who, from across the street, will bark at a dog twice his size, and go completely quiet the moment that dog gets anywhere near him. Bruce calls it showing his true colours. It is information: exactly how far distance functions as armour, and exactly where that armour stops. Judge is, as Bruce says, pretty easy to read. The mystery was not in the breed description, it arrived with the dog.
In a study with more than 18,000 participating dogs, breed ancestry explained only around 9% of individual behavioural variation: the majority of the differences between any two dogs came from somewhere other than the breed alone. Some tendencies were more predictable in dogs bred specifically for a task, like herding, pointing, howling. But for most everyday behaviours, including the ones we reach for breed to explain, the label was a poor guide to the individual. Two dogs of the same breed can differ from one another more than either differs from a dog of a completely different breed.
Ben had always wanted a Husky. Living in a city apartment at that time, he got a Pomsky instead, what he describes as the mini version. Bowie has since moved with Ben, after Toronto and London, into the family home in Southampton, where he now shares the house with his grandparents and three dogs, all considerably larger than him. His cousin Kane, a trained German Shepherd, takes Bowie’s whole head in his mouth when they play, and has never once used the size advantage it gives him. Bowie, the smallest and newest arrival in that house, ended up at the top of it anyway. He will walk up to Kane, ball in mouth, press the squeaky toy directly into his face at close range, and wait. Kane does nothing. Ben has never had to work particularly hard to understand what Bowie needs. Bowie has always just told him.
Research measuring behavioural tendencies across large numbers of dogs has found that these are consistent enough to be tracked and described, but they don't fully map onto the categories the breed description uses. What a dog scores for fearfulness is not the same as what a breed profile says about boldness. What they score for sociability is not the same as what a generalisation about the parent breeds predicts. The dimensions along which dogs actually differ are more specific than the summary allows for.
There are also associations between a dog's physical form and certain behavioural tendencies: body size, skull shape, and weight have all been found to correlate with differences in reactivity at the population level. Smaller dogs, statistically, score higher on certain fear and aggression measures. This is not stereotype: it is a pattern across many dogs, visible in the data but not reliable for the individual. It is not reliable, either, for the people trying to identify it after the fact: visual breed identification by shelter and adoption staff has been found unreliable against DNA testing in the large majority of cases.
It is also, in places, the law. Germany still lists the Rottweiler, exactly the breed Bruce wanted before Judge found him, as dangerous by breed in Bavaria and Hesse. For a purebred Rottweiler, that is straightforward. For anything else, with parents unknown, a local authority has to weigh appearance, temperament, and the way the dog moves, all three at once, often settled only by an official veterinary opinion, and German courts themselves disagree on how strictly that call should be made. The UK now measures a dog's shoulder height to decide a version of the same question. France goes further: its Category 1 covers any dog merely morphologically similar to an American Staffordshire Terrier, a Mastiff, or a Tosa, pedigree or not, and buying, selling, or bringing one into the country is a criminal offence. Italy tried a version of this too, a list of seventeen breeds presumed dangerous, and abolished it in 2009 for having, in the government's own words, no scientific foundation.
Somebody still has to look at the dog in front of them and decide what it is. Research comparing shelter breed labels against DNA testing has found that visual identification is unreliable even among people who do this professionally: in one study, over 90 percent of dogs labelled with a specific breed did not have that breed as their actual predominant genetic makeup. Most dogs are not one thing. The law, in each of these countries, still asks someone standing on a pavement to decide what one thing this dog is.
Judge barking from across the street and going quiet the moment the other dog arrives is consistent with that pattern. It also tells us almost nothing useful about Judge specifically, nothing we would not learn from five minutes of watching him.
I used to say, fairly often, "that's just Shiba." I would say it when Makenzie walked away from something instead of engaging with it, or when she expressed a preference I found inconvenient, or when she communicated something in a way I didn't quite read in time. That sentence let me off the hook for paying closer attention.
She is loyal, intensely so, and selective about it. She is not untrainable: she has always had strong opinions about what is worth doing and why. She does have that side in her that the warnings described, and it can come out if too many of her boundaries were not respected. The breed gave me a shape. But the dog inside that shape was her own. She is easily overwhelmed by too much stimulation and very good at managing herself when she is allowed to. She loves a big dog with calm energy. She is probably just as introverted as I am, which I misread as aloofness when she was younger. The closer I have paid attention, the less the word Shiba has explained. She keeps being more specific than any sentence I could reach for.
Somewhere along the line, for all three of us, the breed stopped being the point. It matters, as a rough indication of territory, the general conditions the dog was shaped by. But the dog who arrived in each of our lives had their own sentences. None of them were the ones we had read.
The breed description gives a starting place. The dog dismantles it on arrival, and keeps going.
This is the Pawplexity Treat for episode 6 of the Pawplexity Pawdcast „Beyond the breed: the dog you actually live with“. The audio reading of this post is available in the Pawplexity feed. Find it here.