VIDEO: Walking around a dog show while pondering the history of dog domestication
Two-legged mammals get dressed up with other two-legged mammals to primp and preen and compare their four-legged mammals
There was a celebrity in the Fraser Valley recently who I was invited to meet.
Her name is Atzi and 2024 was a very good year for her, 2023 was pretty great, too.
She was number one in all of Canada in 2024 for what she does and number two in 2023. In fact in 2023, Atzi was the number one bitch in Canada and the top-winning bitch of her kind in the world.
Yes, Atzi is a dog, and is a breed you may have never heard of or seen and even if you have, I’ll bet a dollar you can’t pronounce it: Xoloitzcuintli. It’s something like “sholoit-squintly.”
According to her owner Joanne Kowalchuk, Atzi is the top-winning Xoloitzcuintli in Canadian history and she was ranked number one dog out of all breeds after her first show in 2024 and held that title for the entire year.
She had 31 best-in-show performances in 2024.
Fraser Valley resident Barbara Turpin got in touch with me a couple of months ago to let me know Atzi was coming to town and she was showing her for owner Joanne Kowalchuk.
Atzi the ghost
I did go to the dog show at Heritage Park in Chilliwack that weekend but I never did see Atzi.
If you’ve never been to a dog show and you love dogs you should attend one some time, it’s fascinating. And if you don’t like dogs but you are curious about unusual hobbies and anthropology, you should really go.
It’s a giant barn of two-legged mammals getting dressed up to hang around other two-legged mammals all of whom are washing and primping and preening their four-legged mammals, or someone else’s.
It’s great. If aliens arrive at a dog show they’ll have no idea who’s in charge.
“We are a strange bunch, that’s for sure!” Barbara told me after I suggested the above.
Despite missing Canada’s best dog for 2024 and the top-winning Xoloitzcuintli in Canadian history, I walked around Heritage Park as I have many times before. For some reason I was walking around looking at the preparations areas, the showing, hearing some of the conversations in between, all in the context of thinking about the history of dog domestication.
Never mind aliens arriving, if a homo sapiens or an early canis lupus familiaris 10,000 years ago saw a dog show in 2025 they wouldn’t believe their eyes.
When you see a woman brushing the hair on a pomeranian or you get a sideways stink eye from a pug it’s hard to comprehend that all domestic dogs are descendants of an extinct population of gray wolves.
Dogs were domesticated thousands of years before the agricultural revolution back when all humans were hunter gatherers, but most amazing of all is that dogs actually domesticated themselves somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.
The predominant theory is that wolves began following hunter-gatherer tribes to scavenge on food scraps the way hyenas follow lion packs in Africa.
Over time, dangerous wolves might have been scared off or killed while the tamer wolves were tolerated, started to be treated well, became part of the tribe.
A divergent theory that, if more accurate, likely paralleled the self-domestication is that humans intentionally bred the tamer wolves over and over, breeding more familiar and co-operative wolves, different tribes ending up with diverse traits: smaller skulls, different ears, varied coat colours and types.
Early dogs were hunting companions, guards, companions, even used as pack animals in some regions, think huskies in the north.
As humans spread over the planet, dogs came with them hence the vast variety of canis lups familiaris on Earth.
“Wolves were the first animal with which humans formed a mutualistic relationship, eventually giving rise to dogs,” according to an abstract of a scientific study Origins and Genetic Legacy of Prehistoric Dogs.
“While there is little consensus regarding when, where, and how many times domestication took place, the archaeological record attests to a long-term and close relationship to humans.”
It’s a bizarre, complex, and ancient relationship, but dogs and humans truly belong with one another.
Dogs and handlers at a dog show at Chilliwack Heritage Park on April 20, 2025. (Paul Henderson photo)
-30-
Want to support independent journalism?
Consider becoming a paid subscriber or make a one-time donation so I can continue this work.
Paul J. Henderson
pauljhenderson@gmail.com
facebook.com/PaulJHendersonJournalist
instagram.com/wordsarehard_pjh
x.com/PeeJayAitch
wordsarehard-pjh.bsky.social