Is the Wool Salish Dog an actual breed?  Maybe, but we don’t really know. Still, we think you may find this interesting.

It’s known through oral history and personal accounts that for generations, the Coast Salish people of Canada, and the Pacific Northwest exclusively breed a dog (also known as the Salish woolly dog) for its fleecy undercoat and long outer hairs. Eighteenth century European travelers described encountering dogs among these people that were shorn once a year like sheep, but it wasn’t a certainty.Many dismissed the claim that Salish blankets contained canine hair, but by 1900, the Salish woolly dog had vanished, and it seemed like we would never really know. Then came a 2006 DNA analysis that analyzed a small sample of Salish textiles. It was inconclusive.

Later research (and updated science) used mass spectrometry to analyze nine blankets woven in the 19th or early 20th centuries by the Coast Salish. Protein fragments matching peptides from the hair of sheep and mountain goats was found, as expected. But some of the peptides in five of the nine blankets woven in the first half of the 19th century indicated that the blanket peptides came from dog hair.  In most cases, the weavers had combined dog fiber with the highly prized fiber from mountain goats to make a mixed yarn.  It was felt that the new study erased doubts about the accuracy of the Salish oral tradition.

Image: “A Woman Weaving a Blanket” (1850-1856) by Paul Kane from Royal Ontario Museum. The painting is said to show a Salish woolly dog and a Salish woman weaving a dog-fur textile.