Anyone digging into a breed’s history may run into a “two things are true at once” scenario making it challenging to tease out the truth. Sometimes, it’s simply that institutions (i.e. kennel clubs and dog shows) aren’t in sync with the people holding the leash.
The West Highland White Terrier’s ‘name journey’ illustrates our point. The Westie had names and strains associated with several estates and two kennel clubs on opposite sides of the Atlantic. They were trying, belatedly, to match what breeders were already saying. The dog stayed the same; the paperwork did not.
To understand how one breed carried two names across the ocean, you have to start with late 19th‑century Scotland. Several closely related white terrier strains, each gritty earth‑dogs, were cultivated on different estates: Poltalloch Terriers bred by Colonel Edward Donald Malcolm; Roseneath Terriers bred by George Campbell, the 8th Duke of Argyll, at his Roseneath estate; and white terriers bred by Dr. Flaxman of Fifeshire, whose dogs became known as Pittenweem Terriers. They shared function, type, and region, but fanciers and owners recognized them as three estate‑linked strains rather than a single breed.
By the late 1890s and early 1900s, these white terriers were appearing at shows under several names. Sometimes they were known as Poltalloch or Roseneath Terriers, sometimes simply in “white” classes, and increasingly under broader geographic descriptors.
That broader naming trend mattered.
‘Poltalloch’ tied the dog’s identity closely to one estate, and ‘Roseneath’ did the same for another; ‘West Highland White Terrier’ did something more useful by describing the dog’s region and color without pinpointing the breed’s identity to a single household.
Meanwhile in Britain, the West Highland White Terrier name was already in circulation by the early show period. On January 26, 1905, a group of thirteen gentlemen met in Glasgow and founded The White West Highland Terrier Club. When a second club formed in England the following year, The Kennel Club pressed for a tidier, unified name, and the words were reshuffled into the now‑familiar West Highland White Terrier Club. In 1907, The Kennel Club formally recognized the breed under that order, and that same year Crufts gave the dogs a prominent public platform under the modern name. By then, the idea of a unified West Highland White Terrier—drawing from Poltalloch, Roseneath, and Pittenweem strains—was well on its way to being codified in the British fancy.
Across “the pond,” however, America was a step behind. When the breed appeared at Westminster in 1906, it was shown as the Roseneath Terrier. It didn’t mean the West Highland White Terrier name didn’t exist; it meant that American show and registration world was still using one of the older estate‑based labels.
The explanation lies in the ‘supply chain:’ the earliest, most prominent dogs imported to the United States came directly from the Duke of Argyll’s Roseneath bloodlines, and American buyers naturally adopted the name they heard from their breeders.
The pattern seemed to hardened as the dogs moved from the ring into the registry. The AKC’s own history notes that the breed’s first registrations came in 1908 and that they were entered under the name Roseneath Terrier. Other, later retellings attach a specific pioneer name to that first stud‑book moment, but unless the original AKC Stud Book entry is flipped open on the desk, it might be safer to point to the institutional one: in 1908, American paperwork still said “Roseneath Terrier,” not “West Highland White Terrier.”
The dogs didn’t get the memo and none had read catalogues on either side of the Atlantic.
Only on May 31, 1909, did the AKC officially change the breed’s name from Roseneath Terrier to West Highland White Terrier. Realizing they were out of sync with the breed’s homeland, American fanciers pivoted pretty quickly. In 1909, the Roseneath Terrier Club of America rebranded as the West Highland White Terrier Club of America, and newly imported dogs began to be recorded under the updated, internationally aligned name. Some accounts single out a bitch called Sky Lady as the first Westie to carry the West Highland White Terrier designation in AKC records; While it makes a fun-fact detail, it’s probably more prudent to present it as an “often cited” detail rather than as an immutable dog‑show fact.
Looked at this way, the apparent contradiction isn’t really a contradiction at all. In Scotland, the breed was already being promoted and formalized as the West Highland White Terrier, supported by a Scottish club founded in 1905 and recognition in 1907 under the now‑standard wording. In America, the same little white terrier arrived and was first exhibited and registered under the older Roseneath name, with those early entries sitting in the stud book as Roseneath Terriers until the 1909 change. For a few years, both things were true: Westie by identity, Roseneath by American paperwork.
It is a useful reminder that breed names don’t always change neatly on both sides of an ocean at the same time. Sometimes the dog arrives first, paperwork catches up later, and a glance in the rearview mirror reveals a short, confusing, but interesting overlap—the kind of wrinkle that keeps breed historians interested, and satiates anyone who loves a good terrier history story otherwise buried in club minutes and old catalogues.