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It is International Dog Day, a day to celebrate the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris).
The modern International Dog Day celebration owes its existence to Colleen Paige, a prominent pet and lifestyle expert in the United States.
Paige is the founder of observances such as National Dog Day, National Cat Day, National Puppy Day, National Pet Day, National Wildlife Day, National Beach Day and many more in the US.
These may have been American to start with, but with Pax Americana still very much in place, they have come to be celebrated worldwide.
There are almost 400 breeds of domestic dog in the world today, a testament to the efforts of human breeders who, through careful selection of characteristics, have been able to develop companion animals of differing shapes and sizes — from the Irish Wolfhound to the Chihuahua of Mexico.
The latter is also an intriguing case study as it may be one of the oldest breeds of extant dog.
As is well-known, all dogs are descended from the gray wolf (Canis lupus). The popular theory is that a few lupine individuals who were attracted to the camps of human hunter-gatherers, looking for scraps, ended up being companions for life as well as one-half of one of the oldest partnerships on this planet: humans and dogs.
In her 2019 paper titled Aztec dogs: myths and ritual practice, Izabela Wilkosz notes that the location of the domestication of wolves by humans is ‘unspecified’ and adds that “it is believed that it happened somewhere in the northern parts of Eurasia”.
“From this point forward, dogs followed hunter gatherers whenever they migrated and spread all over the world, to every continent. They accompanied humans from Eurasia to the Americas somewhere during the last glacial period, most probably via Beringia, a land bridge that used to connect Siberia with Alaska. The exact time of this trek is not yet known. These “first Americans” gradually populated both continents, taking their four-legged fellow travelers to every corner of the New World and using them as pets, beasts of burden, means of transport or source of protein,” the paper reads.
Dogs play an important part in the religious landscape of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The concept of a human soul needing to ride the back of a dog while crossing a river in the underworld to finally dissolve into nothingness appears in a number of Mesoamerican cultures.
The last great pre-Columbian Mesoamerican Empire, the Aztecs of the Valley or Basin of Mexico, also had dogs as a primary part of their religion.
A lot of what happened in the Aztec Empire comes to us from Spanish accounts after the Spaniards under Conquistador Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City today).
One such account, writes Wilkosz, is the 11th volume of the General History of the Things of New Spain also known as The Florentine Codex.
“It is considered to be the most extensive compendium on Aztec life on the Eve of the Spanish conquest and included the description of their religion, legends, social structure, astronomy, diet, daily life, politics as well as flora and fauna. It was created by a Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who arrived in the colony of New Spain shortly after the fall of the Aztec Empire. Sahagún mastered Nahuatl, the language of the native inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico, and spent the rest of his life studying Aztec culture while working as a missionary,” she notes.
Wilkosz adds that Sahagun referred to two specific dog breeds: tlalchichi and xoloitzcuintli.
The former was short and bulky in stature; it was bred in order to be fattened and eaten, although Sahagun did not state clearly whether dogs were part of the regular Aztec diet. Possibly, dog meat was special food reserved for festive occasions, Wilkosz speculates.
The Xoloitzcuintli, the Mexican hairless dog, still survives today. It was associated with the Aztec deity Xolotl, the brother of the all-important Quetzalcoatl or ‘feathered serpent’ of Aztec mythology. The ‘xolo’ was the dog associated with leading the soul into the afterlife among the Aztecs.
The other breed, tlalchichi, could well be the ancestor of today’s Chihuahua.
“Both breeds — tlalchichi and xoloitzcuintli — were most probably replaced by their European counterparts brought by the Spaniards to the New World. The genetic composition of the breeds commonly considered to be native to America, such as malamutes or Chihuahuas (which were never mentioned in the early colonial sources), consists in 30% of distinctly European material. This could prove that the Spanish colonists tried to mix native breeds with the ones imported from Europe. It is possible that native breeds died out due to insufficient maintenance and care after the Spanish conquest of Mexico,” according to Wilkolsz.
“The Tlalchichi became extinct during the Colonial Period, but it is possible that it changed constantly over the years and became the Mexican Chihuahua,” Raul Valadez Azua notes in The Pre-Columbian Dog.
The authors of a 2013 paper — Pre-Columbian origins of Native American dog breeds, with only limited replacement by European dogs, confirmed by mtDNA analysis — confirmed that the Chihuahua’s ancestry was located across the Bering Strait, in Asia.
“Importantly, the Mexican breed Chihuahua shared a haplotype uniquely with Mexican pre-Columbian samples, showing genetic continuity over time and geographical region and corroborating the Mexican origins of the Chihuahua. The data also once more confirmed that American dogs have a common origin with Old World dogs, since no distinct haplogroups unique to American dogs were found and all haplotypes fell into the previously described universal phylogenetic clades A, B and C,” they wrote.
So today, when you handle your little canine bundle of joy, remember it is a link to thousands of years of evolution — from the Paleo Indians crossing Beringia to the Aztecs of the Valley of Mexico.