# Coast Salish Woolly Dog

> History of the extinct Coast Salish woolly dog, bred by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest for wool they wove into blankets. Brad covers Mutton, the only confirmed specimen, what a 2023 study of his pelt found about the breed's ancestry, and why Coast Salish people reject the cheap-blanket explanation for its disappearance.

Let's look at the Coast Salish woolly dog. Along with alpacas and llamas, it's one of the few animals in the Americas known to have been bred for its fleece.

This wasn't a hunting dog or a village dog. For thousands of years, the Coast Salish peoples of present-day Washington state and southwestern British Columbia kept this smaller, long-haired dog for its wool, apart from their other dogs so the lines wouldn't mix. A woolly dog was a little bigger than an American Eskimo dog, with pricked ears, a curled tail and a pointed, foxlike face. It howled instead of barking. Only high-status Coast Salish women could keep them, and a woman's wealth could be measured by how many she had. Elders describe special food set aside for them, such as salmon, elk and certain local plants, to keep them healthy and their coats shiny. Their hair was woven into blankets, often mixed with fiber from mountain goats, waterfowl or plants, and those blankets were important trade goods and gifts.

The practice declined through the 19th century, and by the early 1900s the dogs were considered extinct. The only confirmed woolly dog specimen left is Mutton, whose pelt has been at the Smithsonian since he died in 1859. He was the companion of George Gibbs, a naturalist on the Northwest Boundary Survey, who likely got him while working in Stó:lō territory in present-day British Columbia.

In December 2023, a team led by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, with Coast Salish elders, knowledge keepers and master weavers among its co-authors, published its study of Mutton in *Science*. Here's what his DNA showed:

- His maternal line split from that of another ancient British Columbia dog an estimated 1,800 to 4,800 years ago, which fits the archaeological record. The lineage was kept apart from other dogs for millennia.
- His genome shows the kind of inbreeding that only comes from careful selective breeding over a long time.
- He carried variants in genes tied to hair and skin, including KRT77 and KANK2, which are linked to woolly hair in humans.
- About one eighth of his genome, roughly one great-grandparent's worth, came from European dogs brought by settlers. Even so, he's the latest dog the researchers know of with that much precolonial ancestry.

So what happened to the woolly dogs? The old explanation was economics: once companies like the Hudson's Bay Company sold cheap manufactured blankets, nobody needed to keep wool dogs. Coast Salish people reject that. The blankets carried the history of their families and communities, as Musqueam master weaver Debra qwasen Sparrow told the researchers, and people say they would never have given up their dogs willingly. The researchers and Coast Salish knowledge keepers point to colonialism instead: government policies that suppressed Coast Salish cultural practices. Stó:lō elder Xweliqwiya Rena Point Bolton told the researchers: "The dogs were not allowed. (My grandmother) had to get rid of the dogs."

Mutton can't be cloned, because his DNA is far too degraded after more than 160 years. Some Coast Salish would like to see woolly dogs return to their families, and the researchers say a new woolly dog could be bred through selection and care. Mutton's genome may also help identify dog hair in old museum blankets, which Coast Salish weavers want to study to revive the old techniques. As Michael Pavel, an elder of the Twana/Skokomish Tribe, put it: "The wool dog is still very much a part of our life."

Source: Audrey T. Lin, Logan Kistler and Chris Stantis, Smithsonian, December 15, 2023, republished from The Conversation (https://www.si.edu/stories/woolly-dog-mystery-unlocked). The study is Lin et al., "The history of Coast Salish 'woolly dogs' revealed by ancient genomics and Indigenous knowledge," *Science* 382 (2023): 1303-1308.

## Details

- **Category:** Topics
- **Tags:** breeding, coast-salish-woolly-dog, extinct, genetics, history, preservation, weaving, wool, woolly-dog

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