On Doodles, The Spartans, and Republican Dogs
It’s 2025. Do you know what your dog is?
Toward the end of August, 2024, my parents adopted a six(ish) month old dog from a rescue in West Virginia and named her Harriet. Little was known about her, except for the fact that she was extremely cute and, due to her short legs, probably had some Dachshund in her lineage. I, a dog nerd, insisted we shell out for an “Embark” test to figure out what her genetic makeup actually was. I predicted that, in addition to the Dachshund, she’d have some Miniature Poodle in her, because her face is very Poodle-like. My mother predicted some Border Collie because of her adorable herding instincts. My nephew guessed Beagle because of her predilection for sniffing. We swabbed her precious little cheek and sent her DNA out to the foremost dog scientists on the planet and we waited, all the while observing her, looking for clues about what on earth this beguiling creature actually was.
Everybody wants to think their dog, like their child, is utterly unique. But, having had two Bull Terriers now, I know that there are many things about my darling Mango that are hard-wired into her. Some examples of this include spinning around in circles when she gets excited (colloquially called “hucklebutting”), standing under certain trees and foliage with her eyes glazed over (colloquially called “trancing”), stamping her feet when she doesn’t get her way, and, of course, making the noise of a Harley Davidson when she is not receiving enough attention. These are things that her predecessor, Zeena, did before her. Look up videos of Bull Terriers online, and you’ll find them spinning and trancing in ways that are uncannily similar to each other. Where these behaviors come from, or what their natural purposes are, I could not begin to tell you. But it’s clear that a lot of what I love so dearly about Mango is simply a Bull Terrier thing.
Similarly, my twin sister’s Havanese dog, Basil, does many things that are specific to his breed. According to the Havanese Club of America website, the breed was created in large part to perform in Cuban circuses in the 1600s. Though Basil has never had any formal circus training, his love for acro is certainly in his blood. He seems to find great pleasure in standing on his hind legs and balancing for comically long amounts of time. He never quite figured out how to stop shitting inside, but he can leap deftly through a hoop in the garden, spin on command like the little ballerina he is.
In her book “Pit Bull” Bronwen Dickey speaks at length about the “nature” vs. “nurture” aspects of the dog. Most of the book is about the public opinion of the wildly polarizing Pit Bull, considered by many to be inherently violent; the baby-killing, chihuahua-mauling gene imbedded deep in its DNA. Dickey wonders how much of a dog’s personality, its instincts, its being, is hard-wired into it when it is born. How much of the proliferation of violence among Pit Bulls, for instance, is due to the breed’s unchangeable inner mechanics? Is it possible, she wonders, that the Pit Bull simply attracts owners who want to use the dogs for nefarious reasons; blood sports, for instance? Dickey seems to conclude that “nurture” is a hell of a lot more important than “nature” when it comes to dogs, that Pit Bulls are not inherently violent, but shaped into violent creatures because of an unjust world, a populus confused about dogs, unwilling to learn. When I finished the book, I looked at the dogs in my life, and weighed my experiences against the science she presented. I remained unconvinced.
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When Harriet’s results came in, we gathered around my mother’s phone and looked at the pie chart that told us who our dog was. We learned that Harriet had a whopping twenty four breeds in her, one for every hour of the day. She is 11% Chihuahua, 10% Golden Retriever, 9% Yorkshire Terrier, 8% Beagle, 6% Australian Cattle Dog, 6% American Hairless Terrier, 6% Treeing Walker Coonhound, 5% Australian Shepherd, 4% Pit Bull, 4% Rat Terrier, 3% Miniature Pinscher, 3% Poodle, 3% Pomeranian, 3% Boston Terrier, 2% Toy Fox Terrier, 2% Manchester Terrier, 2% Dachshund, 2% Bluetick Coonhound, 2% Miniature American Shepherd, 2% Pekingese, 1% German Shepherd, and 1% Miniature Schnauzer. When people ask, we just say she’s a Golden Retriever mix.
But what do these results actually mean about her? Harriet has a long ferret body and short, ridiculous legs. She has a pointy snout and floppy ears. She’s black, with white socks and an endearing white beard. Since she has only a speck of Sachshund in her, and only a bit of Chihuahua, it’s hard to understand how this hodgepodge of breeds came together to create the (stunning, glamorous, heartbreakingly beautiful, devastatingly chic) physical specimen that she is. But, of course, we know that there is more to it than just looks. The truth is, Harriet acts like a dog with too much computer input. She nips at ankles like a herding dog, she points at prey like a pointing dog, she defends her humans against paper cups and grasshoppers like the vicious Pit Bull she is. She barks like a little terrier, she sniffs insatiably like a hound, and she oozes with love and friendliness like a retriever. She adores fetch with all her heart, but is unable, mentally, to drop the ball. She buries treats under blankets. She adores cabbage. She burps more than any dog I have ever met, and yet I have never heard her fart. In these traits, I like to imagine different pieces of the dogs that came before her, the burping Beagle in her background, the cabbage-loving Coonhound looking lovingly down at her from the rainbow bridge.
***
In a world where we supplant real personalities and interiority with signifiers like cars and clothes, it stands to reason that we would use dogs for the same purpose. We want to be individuals, but to belong to neatly identifiable categories at the same time. Dogs have become no different than Stanley Cups and Ugg slippers in that regard. I know that I judge people by their dogs constantly. The corporate girlie with the Frenchie is addicted to shaken Espressos from Starbucks. The bald meathead with the Belgian Malinois is addicted to Creatine. The older dude with the two Dachshunds is a wife guy. The middle aged woman with the muzzled Pit Bull is the nicest person you have ever met, but she also has some absolutely insane political beliefs. The middle aged woman with the Bernadoodle is on Klonopin. The woman with the rescue greyhound is a Democrat. The guy with the unfixed Borboel is a Republican. I go to dog shows whenever I can find one, and the difference in handlers from breed to breed is also wildly apparent. You can always spot the Shih Tzu breeders before you see their dogs; they tend to opt for velour suits, and they wear butterfly clips in their hair that match their pets’. The Italian Greyhound breeders are usually nervous men who prance instead of walking. And, of course, the Bull Terrier breeders are instantly recognizable; scarily attractive women wearing fancy Kentucky derby hats and Thin Blue Line patches on their jackets.
In “Pit Bull,” Bronwen talks about the hierarchy of breeds, how, just like people, some belong to a higher class, and some, a lower. Last year, I received a notification on my Ring Neighbors app that read something like: Homeless man on Chicon Street walking around with Vizsla. Anyone know whose dog that is?? The idea that the Vizsla in question actually belonged to the homeless man did not seem to occur to anybody. The message was clear. A man of such low status has no place walking around with a dog of such high status.
***
I did the “human version” of doggy DNA a couple years ago and learned that I am mostly Scottish, British, Irish, and a quarter Greek. None of this surprised me, except perhaps the fact I’m more Irish than I am Scottish or British. My (British) mother said, “take the test again!” when she saw the sheer levels of Irishness running through my blood (her reaction was not dissimilar to her discovering that Harriet was partially Pit Bull). But what do these results actually mean?
I often make fun of my British teeth, which are comically jagged and riddled with gaps and constant cavities and loathed (loved?) by dentists. But what else about me is notably British? I think I feel an intrinsic connection to the gloomy climates of the United Kingdom; the rain and the cold and the wind of the moors suit me far better than the heat, which turns me immediately red and makes me nauseous and anxious and angry. But then there’s my Greekness. How much of my personality is Greek? The only real Mediterranean thing about me that I can conjure up is my addiction to fish. My Greek ancestors are from the Peloponnese (aka the “Spartan”) region, which explains certain things about my brother, namely the fact he is Spartan-like in his athletic prowess, his fearlessness, the fact he could have definitely survived on the roof as a newborn. But then, how do you explain the fact my sisters and me get panic attacks whenever our phones ring? Don’t we have the same level of Spartan in us as our brother does? Shouldn’t we?
Looking at 23andMe, I begin to wonder if all this self-knowledge is a good thing. How useful is it, really, for me to know that I have less than two percent Neanderthal DNA? And how good is it for the world, really, that there’s a service that has my DNA, and wants to charge me extra so it can tell me my genetic probability of getting different types of cancers? Probably not great?
For a while, I was very interested in what made Harriet, well, Harriet. And, as a dog nerd, I was frustrated when her traits did not fit neatly into any of the twenty-four breeds she apparently was. But I wonder if our obsession with categorizing dogs and creating new ones and introducing new and improved breeds into the AKC every year and creating horrible merle mutant variations of any dog we can think of is just another symptom of a capitalist society that pretends to value individuality under the sickly guise of consumerism. And whether all of this is a symptom of our troubling and perverse need to create something that fits all of our exact specifications, whether that’s a German Shepherd that does not shed or a Rottweiler that’s pocket sized. Sorry! Anyway, Harriet has recently decided she needs to take her toy lamb up to bed with her every night. And I don’t know what that says about her, but I’m deciding not to care. Next week, I will go to the dentist and one of my British teeth will be temporarily fixed. I will go home and silently gag as I walk by the basket of potatoes, even though genetically I should like potatoes, shouldn’t I? My brother will be in Virginia, doing Spartan shit, and Mango will be in Texas, spinning in dizzying circles because she needs to poop, and Harriet will be sitting in front of the fire, holding her toy lamb in her mouth, being Harriet.
