There are so many breeds of dog that it is almost impossible to list them all and some dogs are so strange looking that it can be hard to credit that they belong to the canine family at all but what is a breed and what is its function?

Dogs of all sorts are thought to be descended from the tame wolves that attached themselves to human settlements in the earliest times. Their keen senses allowed them to warn people of approaching strangers and for this service they were fed by people and adopted as domestic animals. From these beginnings there is now such variety in the dog world that it is difficult to imagine the wolf in some of these animals and this owes a lot to the very nature of the breed idea.

:Basically a breed is created when certain identifiable and repeatable traits appear in a family of dogs. If these traits are valued by owners and breeders then steps are taken to preserve them in a dogs gene pool and the more pure that gene pool the greater value is attached to the animal. For this reason most breeds of dog have pedigrees or family histories associated with them because this is the proof of how strongly they retain the information that makes breeds different from each other.

 

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