What is a 'Village Dog'?

I think when I say I have a village a lot of people back home picture a mutt or a stray, or they don’t know what to picture. Isn’t it just a dog that lives in a village?

Fair enough, but where did it come from? Where did this village dwelling creature originate? Does it even matter?

For me at least I had pictured dogs from the colonial era that escaped and just started breeding out in the bush.  You know, kind of like the American Mustang.  Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. 

Do any of you have a subscription to National Geographic? Good, grab the issue from February of this year, the one with all the tons of pictures of dogs in it.  Now flip to the very end of that article and read the one page bit about village dogs.  Cool huh?

For those of you who don’t have National Geographic let me paraphrase for you.  A couple of folks came and ran DNA tests on different village dogs in Ghana. They found that the dogs were as closely related to domestic dogs as to wolves.  What exactly does that mean? It means they are kind of their own thing, not really domestic, not really wild, they have been getting by on the edges of civilization for millennia. They are perfectly adapted for this way of life.  Honed for centuries into the village dog and you can tell it too.

They differ from domestic dogs in a few ways.  Probably the most obvious is coat colors. Domestic dogs are full of diversity, black labs, harlequin great danes, aussie shepherds, brindle, etc, we live in a world of color there. Here things tend to range between tan and dark brown.  Every now and then you might see something a little different but tan is really really common. Makes sense, good for camouflage and doesn’t stand out too much.  Some dogs even have that trademark ridge you see on the Rhodesian ridgeback and some take that to the extreme.  Instead of having the two swirls that make the ridge, her mother has 4, a massive patch of crazy hair on her back.

Body type is very even, perfect for moving, nothing like a weiner dog or a corgie.  Most dogs are about 24-28” tall from the top of their heads.  Tails are usually long and straight, sometimes curly.

A lot of dog breeds you can point to them and say, “this dog was bred to do this…”

Like a greyhound is a runner, a mastiff is a guardian, a Chihuahua…well you get the idea. The village dog is the perfect all around dog. Everything about them says this dog is a generalist, a survivor. 

I have seen the dogs here live through things that by all means should have killed them.  Dora fell in the chim for two days and had canine distemper at 6 weeks old, her father regularly kills monkeys and comes out with cuts that should get outrageously infected and kill him, the female dogs here are walking skeletons when they have puppies and yet the keep going.  They are amazing.  I am constantly impressed by their immune systems. Dora might just outlive me.

So in a word, what is a village dog?

Indestructible.