Dogs Were Once Bred for Their ‘Wool’

For thousands of years before Europeans arrived, people in the Pacific Northwest deliberately bred fluffy white dogs for their fur. The unique woolly-dog breed that resulted has now died out. But before domesticated sheep were introduced from Europe, woolly dogs were an important source of fiber for weaving.

"We held these dogs in high reverence," says master weaver Snumith’ye (Violet Elliot), who has ancestral ties to the Cowichan, Penelakut, Snuneymuxw and Stz’uminus First Nations—branches of the Indigenous Coast Salish people—as well as ancestors from Hawaii and Portugal. "They were given the best food… [and] we were thankful for what they were giving us when we shaved them."

It's thought the Salish woolly dogs were the descendants of dogs that entered the Americas with the first humans, perhaps along the Beringia Land Bridge between Siberia and Alaska up to 24,000 years ago. Several thousand years ago, however, it seems some in the Pacific Northwest were deliberately selecting and breeding dogs with a dense, white and fluffy undercoat.

Elliot explains that this involved keeping female woolly dogs separate from ordinary "village" dogs—sometimes on an uninhabited island—so they would only breed with selected male woolly dogs. The wives of hereditary chiefs were responsible for their households' weaving and consequently for the breeding of woolly dogs, she says.

Before Christopher Columbus (who brought sheep with him on his second voyage in 1493), the only sheep in the Americas were wild bighorns (Ovis canadensis). But bighorn wool, when it was available, was much coarser than the fine dog fur, Elliot says. By the time of Coast Salish oral histories—some dating back thousands of years—blankets woven from dog wool were prized objects that represented the wealth of a community: "They were highly valued," she says.

In addition to prayers of thanks for a dog’s fur, prayers were also uttered when the fiber was made into thread and again when the threads were woven together. As a result of so much prayer, the dog-wool blankets themselves were considered sacred as well as practical, and priceless dog-wool garments and ornaments were often worn by Coast Salish hereditary chiefs, Elliot says.

Several dog-wool blankets still survive, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., has the preserved pelt of a Coast Salish woolly dog called Mutton. Mutton once belonged to 19th-century American explorer George Gibbs, who acquired him from a Coast Salish community, but the dog died in 1859. His entire white coat of fur and leathered skin have since been housed at the institution, along with his leg bones. (Mutton’s skull also was once housed there but now appears to be lost.)

In 2023, a team of scientists sampled cells from the pelt and used them to sequence Mutton's genome. They then compared the genome to the genome of a regular Indigenous "village dog" from the Pacific Northwest, so they could identify any differences. The results showed that several parts of Mutton’s genome—specifically genetic structures governing the production of fur from skin—were coded differently than the corresponding genes in the village dog, which the researchers interpreted as evidence that Mutton had been deliberately bred for his long white fur.

Evolutionary biologist Audrey Lin, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History and the study's lead author, says the results also indicate that Mutton had come from a lineage of woolly dogs—that is, dogs that shared and passed on the genetic instructions for woolly fur—that was between 1,800 and 4,800 years old. That aligns with what is known about woolly dogs in Indigenous culture, Lin says.

At the same time, the team also saw evidence that Mutton's genome—and likely the genomes of all Coast Salish woolly dogs—contained some genetic material from European dog breeds. According to study co-author Logan Kistler, curator of archaeobotany and archaeogenomics at the National Museum of Natural History, that is a sign the Coast Salish people had tried to maintain their woolly-dog breed.

"This was more than 100 years after colonization of the Pacific Northwest, and a longer time since the colonization of the Americas in general," he says. "So the fact that this dog had still mostly precolonial ancestry is very indicative of deliberate efforts to keep that lineage separate."

Historians once thought the Coast Salish practice of breeding woolly dogs and weaving dog-wool blankets died out mainly because machine-made blankets became available after colonization and were easier to obtain. But the study by Lin and her colleagues suggests instead that the woolly-dog industry disappeared because of the negative effects of colonization on the people who sustained it.

"We interviewed a number of Coast Salish knowledge keepers, and they said they would have never willingly given up the practice—there was a lot of meaning associated with it," she says. Instead, it seems Indigenous American dog wool ceased to be a thing because European colonialists didn't value it: "The decline was related to all the other impacts of colonization, including persecution and cultural suppression," Lin says.