Caroline Kisko: Why Britain’s Iconic Dog Breeds Need Us to Look Beyond Fashion

When I sat down with BBC Radio West Midlands in the summer of 2019, the conversation turned to something that had been quietly worrying me for some time. The Kennel Club had just added the Old English Sheepdog to its At Watch list. The Scottish Terrier, once a fixture of British family life, had all but vanished from our streets. And while I was no longer at the Kennel Club, the questions raised in that interview have not gone away.

This is a slightly expanded version of what I said on air that morning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv6OgU5O1kI

A Quiet Disappearance

The Old English Sheepdog is one of those breeds that feels woven into the fabric of British life. For decades it stared back at us from paint commercials and family albums. So when the numbers being bred started to drop year on year, it was not just a statistic. It was the slow disappearance of something familiar.

The Scottie was the example I kept coming back to. Where did they all go? A breed that everybody once recognised, reduced to a rarity. The same pattern was visible across a handful of other breeds that most people would have assumed were safe simply because they were so well known.

Lifestyles Changed, And Breeds Did Not Always Fit

Part of the explanation was straightforward. Our lives had changed. Homes were smaller, gardens were rarer, working hours were longer. A breed developed for a particular kind of country life did not always slot neatly into a one-bedroom flat in a city.

That was not the fault of the breeds. It was the reality of modern living. But it meant that families looking for a dog naturally gravitated toward animals that suited the lives they actually had, rather than the lives their grandparents had lived.

The Pull of Fashion

The harder part to talk about was fashion. The Cockapoo and the Labradoodle had become enormously popular, and people who chose them often felt they were doing something unusual or distinctive. The truth was rather the opposite. The market for those crosses had become so large that choosing one was, by then, following the herd.

I saw the same effect with the Siberian Husky and the Alaskan Malamute. Their numbers climbed sharply on the back of Game of Thrones. A television series, however brilliant, is not a good reason to bring a dog into your home for the next decade and more.

Crossbreeds Are Not Mongrels

One distinction I always wanted to draw clearly was between a crossbreed and a mongrel. They are not the same thing.

A Cavapoo or a Labradoodle is a direct cross between two known breeds. People often imagine they will get the best of both parents, or a predictable look, as if the cross were itself a breed. It is not. You might get the strengths of one parent and the weaknesses of the other. Two Cavapoo puppies from different litters can look and behave quite differently.

A mongrel, in the older sense, was a dog with many breeds in its background, the result of generations of mixing. Those dogs were once common because so many dogs lived on the streets. They are far rarer now, because our dogs are no longer street dogs.

This is why the pedigree dog still matters. With a purebred dog you know, broadly, what you are going to get in terms of size, temperament and care needs. That predictability is not a small thing, particularly for a first-time owner or someone nervous around dogs.

Advertising Did Not Save Breeds, And Celebrity Did Not Help Them

It is sometimes assumed that putting a breed on television will rescue it. In practice, advertising rarely translated into puppy sales in the numbers needed to sustain a breed, and that was probably for the best. I would never have wanted families buying a puppy because they had seen it on a billboard.

The exception was celebrity ownership, which could and did drive sudden spikes in demand for particular breeds. Those spikes were almost always bad for the dogs. They led to rushed breeding, poor matches between dog and owner, and dogs ending up in rescue once the novelty faded.

What Prospective Owners Should Actually Do

The advice I gave that morning is the same advice I would give today. Before you bring any dog home, do the research. Properly.

Find out what the breed was originally for. Find out how much exercise it needs, how much grooming, how it tends to behave around children or other animals. Talk to owners. In 2019 I recommended visiting Crufts or Discover Dogs, where you could meet the breeds and the people who knew them best. The principle holds whether you are doing it in person or online: speak to people who live with the breed every day.

If you are drawn to a crossbreed, understand that you are accepting a degree of unpredictability. That is fine if you go in with your eyes open. It is less fine if you have been led to believe you are buying a known quantity.

Saving the Old English Sheepdog Was, In The End, About Demand

People asked me how we could bring the Old English Sheepdog back from the brink. The honest answer was supply and demand. Breeders would not breed on speculation. They needed to know the puppies had homes waiting.

So if you wanted an Old English, the route was to contact one of the breed clubs, register your interest, and be patient. That patience was, in a quiet way, what kept a breed alive.

A Final Thought

Looking back at that conversation, what strikes me most is how little of it was really about dogs. It was about how we choose, how we are influenced, and how easily something familiar can slip away while we are looking at the next fashionable thing.

The breeds that were under threat in 2019 were not under threat because anything was wrong with them. They were under threat because we, collectively, had stopped choosing them. That was always within our power to change.