TThroughout most of time, the origins and ancestry of our dogs has been a story passed down by the generations, shared and told to new breed fanciers by the old foxes. The modern day allows us new perspectives through the lens of DNA, and historical documents have never been more readily available on a worldwide basis. We know that the dog breeds we see and think of today are more or less modern inventions (even if some breed fanciers will hold onto the claim that their breed is truly ancient).
In ancient times, dog breeds had a different meaning than it does today. Dogs had jobs to perform, and the performance was important as it could become expensive to feed a dog that didn't pull its share. Breeding for performance was the standard and this would create what we today might call landraces - dogs that excelled in specific tasks, looked more or less a certain way, but wasn't bound by a standard or a name. A dog meant to guard the home and livestock would be large, intimidating and fearless, but stay close to home so it wouldn't wander away from its post, and it must recognise its master. A dog meant to sniff out prey would have an excellent sense of smell, high curiosity and light feet to follow the deer into the woods. A dog used to hunt hares over open desert needs to be fast footed and agile, following its prey with the eyes and not just its nose to catch up. A farm dog could round up sheep the same way it would stalk prey in the wild, but it could never go for a bite that would harm the animal.
Every now and then over the years there would show up dogs that truly excelled at their job, more than any of their mates. These exceptional dogs would be used as breeding dogs in intrinsically planned out breeding schemes, sometimes spanning hundreds or thousands of dogs. Over time choosing the best dogs in different disciplines would create dogs so different from each other that were an alien to land on earth today, it'd be hard pressed to tell a pekingese and a greyhound were the same species.
With time these dogs with specific talents and looks would be given different names to tell them apart. Take note, for most of history these names were not breeds in our modern understanding of the word, but rather a descriptive term of the dog's job or origin. There wasn't an ideal of purity, rather, an ideal of the greatest features for a specific job, and breeders took this very seriously, only coupling the truly best.
The lapdog
But there is one type of dog that sticks out among the many. A type of dog that took to the modern day life better than any other, because for a thousand years it had already learnt and perfected the job the modern sheepdogs and guardian dogs struggle so profusely to get used to - being a spoiled little freeloader!
As I brushed upon lightly, a dog without a job was a mouth to feed that didn't pull its own weight. Having “pets” was an expense very few can afford. And so it would be unthinkable for most to have a dog that did not bring in game, helped or even hunted rats on the farm. Only one group in society could afford such a thing, which meant, the lapdog was from the very start destined to be a symbol of status.
True, a small dog is not the most expensive dog to keep. A small dog needs much less to eat than a larger dog, which makes it more attractive in all levels of society. Even the larger breeds usually look small next to their wild cousins, the grey wolves. But there's a fine line between economical and no longer fit for its purpose. Too small and the dog is easily parried by an invader, too short and it will be outrun by the bigger dogs on the hunt and lose the prey. The working dog group that have been successfully small are ratting dogs, a job that requires more agility and tenacity than size and speed over distances. As such, size is not the only thing that sets the lapdog apart from the common working dogs. The lapdog was a woman's dog.
Small, maybe because it's cuter, maybe because it would be considered easy enough for even a lady to handle during a time where the assumption was that women couldn't handle things such as riding bicycles and read*. (the author notes that this example is a joke as the time for bicycles is about a thousand years too late for the creation of lapdogs and such we can't possibly know if men of that time would think women's reproductive organs would fall out if they sat on one, but the misogynistic ideas of women as frail children unable to handle normal things are not.) Perhaps the first pet dog that ended up as such was the runt of the litter, a farmer unable to sell it as a sheepdog but too big hearted to put it down and offering it to the lady of the house instead. What is indisputable though is that without an aristocrazy with extra money to spend, small pet dogs would never have been able to establish themselves outside of individuals.
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