Salish Wool Dog: The Managed Population Colonial Policy Ended

What the Salish Wool Dog was, and what it was not

The Salish Wool Dog was a small white long-coated dog kept by Coast Salish peoples of the Salish Sea region for a fleece that was shorn and spun, and it is extinct. It was never a breed in the registry sense, because no standard and no studbook ever existed for it.

The search results for this name tell you how thin it is as an entity. Of the ten organic results Google India returns, one is Wikipedia, four are museum or newspaper coverage of a single 2023 study, one is the study itself, and one is a Reddit thread. There is no commercial layer at all, which is unusual for a dog name and is the first evidence on this page that nothing is for sale.

Two claims about this animal are both true and are usually treated as if only one can be. It was managed as carefully as any pedigree population in Europe, kept apart from village dogs on islands and in pens so it would breed true, and the genome of the one surviving specimen shows that management worked for millennia. It also had no written points, no height range, no weight range and no register, at any point in its history. This page holds both of those at once, because the interesting thing about the Salish Wool Dog is exactly the gap between them.

The animal is described in the 2023 Science study as one of three kinds of dog Coast Salish communities kept: hunting dogs, village dogs, and the woolly dogs kept separately for their coat. Its wool was blended with mountain goat hair, waterfowl down and plant fibres such as fireweed and cattail fluff to make blankets that worked as regalia and prestige items rather than as everyday cloth. Wearing one was treated as spiritually transformative, because it linked the maker, the wearer and the community.

The names, and why the plural matters

The dog carried at least five names across Coast Salish languages: sqwema:y, ske'-ha, sqwǝmey, sqwbay and QebeO. English sources add Comox dog and Clallam Indian Dog. That is six or more names for one animal, which is worth stating early because this project has repeatedly found that a literature search on one name form finds a fraction of what exists. The PubMed audit for this page makes the point sharply: the phrase 'woolly dog' returns zero records and the phrase 'woolly dogs' returns zero, while Salish combined with dog returns the two papers that matter.

The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the physical animal as small, usually white, long-haired, with prick ears, a curled tail and a fox-like face. That is a spitz outline, and it is the reason a modern reader looking at a reconstruction thinks immediately of a Samoyed or a small Siberian Husky. The resemblance is real and the relationship is not, which the genetics section below settles.

Why this page exists for an Indian reader

Nobody in India can buy this dog, and this page quotes no price for it. Its job is to convert an extinct animal into three things a reader in Chennai or Pune can use: what a shearable double coat actually costs an animal in Indian heat, what the living thick-coated substitutes cost across two Indian price lists that disagree by more than a lakh, and what Indian import law does to any offer involving a rare foreign dog.

It also does something no ranking page does. It runs this site's breed test against the animal and reports that the test comes out negative for a population that plainly held its type for about five thousand years. That result says more about the test than about the dog, and saying so is the honest thing to do with a test you apply everywhere.

The evidence base, document by document, and what each one is worth

Everything reliably known about the Salish Wool Dog rests on four kinds of evidence of very unequal weight: one physical specimen, a peer-reviewed genome built on it, Coast Salish oral testimony recorded formally, and a set of museum and encyclopedia summaries that mostly restate each other.

Separating those matters, because the ranking pages treat them as interchangeable. A sentence traceable to a sequenced pelt and a sentence traceable to an unattributed passive are not the same kind of sentence, and this page marks which is which.

The research paper did not arrive unreviewed either. Science published a Perspective alongside it in the same issue, summarising the work as DNA and traditional knowledge together revealing the history of an extinct dog bred for its wool. That is an independent editorial judgement on the study rather than a second body of evidence, and it is weighted here accordingly.

What is not in this page, said plainly

One category deserves a note of its own. Coast Salish oral history is treated on this page as primary evidence rather than as colour, because that is how the 2023 study treats it: seven Elders, Knowledge Keepers and weavers were interviewed formally, and their testimony is what establishes the husbandry system, the social role of the dogs and the mechanism of the loss. A genome can tell you an animal was reproductively isolated. Only oral history tells you who did the isolating and why.

There is no breed standard to quote, because none was written. There is no registration figure, because no register held the name. There is no lifespan study, no screening data and no body of clinical literature, because the entire PubMed presence of this animal is two papers from a single issue of one journal in December 2023. Where this page gives a health or lifespan number it is describing a living breed an Indian reader could actually acquire, and it says so in the sentence.

One more absence is worth naming. The 2023 study reports body measurements for no population, because a single specimen is a data point rather than a range. Any page giving you a confident height and weight range for the Salish Wool Dog has taken it from somewhere other than the evidence.

Bonbeno's two-condition test, applied to a managed Indigenous population

To count as a breed on this site an animal needs two documents: a written breed standard and a studbook. The Salish Wool Dog had neither, at any point, so it fails the test. It is also the clearest case this site has met of an animal that fails the paperwork and passes the substance.

Most extinct dogs here fail the test because nobody ever got round to writing anything down about a loose regional type. This is a different case. Reproduction was controlled deliberately, continuously and successfully for roughly five thousand years, and the proof is genomic rather than anecdotal. The test still comes out negative, because the test asks about documents.

The registry half of the test was checked rather than assumed. Four registers were read in full and each returned its own control breeds while returning nothing for this name: the Royal Kennel Club's complete Breeds A to Z, the American Kennel Club's full index, the FCI's letter S nomenclature index and the FCI's provisional register.

What the failed test actually shows

The test is a proxy. A written standard and a studbook matter because between them they define a target and control who breeds with whom, and a population with both is predictable. Coast Salish keepers achieved the same two things with islands, pens and selective culling, and held the result for far longer than any European kennel club has existed.

So the honest reading is that this population met the *purpose* of both conditions and neither of the *instruments*. Calling it a breed imports a nineteenth-century European filing system onto a five-thousand-year-old Indigenous institution. Calling it merely a type understates what was going on. The page files it as a type and says exactly why the label is uncomfortable.

There is a second, sharper way to see it. The genomic result is itself the studbook. An 84 percent pre-colonial ancestry reading in 1859 is a record of breeding decisions taken over generations, written in the animal rather than on paper, and it is a more reliable record than most nineteenth-century stud entries, which depended on a breeder's honesty.

What the 2023 genome actually proved, figure by figure

The 2023 Science study sequenced the nuclear genome of one preserved pelt to a mean 3.4x depth and produced four results worth stating separately: an ancestry proportion, a dietary history, a set of candidate coat genes, and a negative result about living breeds.

This is the part of the story every ranking page mentions and none of them itemises. The figures below all come from the paper's own text, read in full from the PMC author manuscript rather than from a summary of it.

It is worth naming what kind of study this is. Ancient DNA work on a museum specimen is not the same as sequencing a living dog: the material is degraded, the coverage is low, and the conclusions are stated as proportions and candidates rather than as certainties. Read against that standard, an ancient DNA result of this quality on a dog that has been dead since 1859 is unusually good.

The comparison set, so you can judge the negative result

The independence claim is only as good as what it was tested against. The study compared the specimen with 59 modern dogs representing 21 breeds, three modern coyotes, an ancient dog from Port au Choix in Newfoundland dated about 4,020 calibrated years before present, and an ancient dog from Teshekpuk Lake in Alaska dated about 3,763 years before present. The European ancestry estimate used six modern breeds: the Chinese Crested, English Cocker Spaniel, Dalmatian, German Shepherd, Lagotto Romagnolo and Portuguese Water Dog.

That is a real comparison set rather than a rhetorical one, and it is why 'no living breed is close' is a finding on this page rather than a hedge. It is also why the outline resemblance to a Samoyed or a small husky is misleading. A white coat, prick ears and a curled tail are a northern-dog package that has arisen more than once.

What 3.4x coverage can and cannot do

A mean 3.4x nuclear genome is enough to place an animal on a tree, measure ancestry proportions, and flag candidate variants. It is not enough to reconstruct an organism, and the paper does not claim otherwise. Anybody telling you the Salish Wool Dog is a candidate for de-extinction is going well past what one moderately covered ancient genome supports.

The accompanying Perspective in the same issue frames the achievement the same modest way, as DNA and traditional knowledge together revealing the history of an extinct dog bred for its wool, rather than as a route back to the animal.

When the Salish Wool Dog actually ended, and why two dates are in circulation

Two extinction dates are published and they are eighty years apart. The 2023 Science study places the last Coast Salish woolly dogs in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The Smithsonian's own American Indian Magazine says the last known animal was said to have died in 1940. This page publishes both and says who says what.

The disagreement is not a detail. It decides whether the animal survived residential schooling and the Indian Act era or was already gone, and it decides whether twentieth-century photographs of white long-haired dogs in Coast Salish communities show the real population or something else.

The 1940 claim contains its own warning label

Read the sentence rather than the date. 'The last known Salish woolly dog was said to have died in 1940' is a passive with no attributed speaker. This project has a standing rule about hedges: when a source hedges, carry the hedge across, and when a downstream source drops it, that is where the error enters. Almost every page repeating 1940 prints it flat, as a fact.

Sharper still, the same paragraph on the same page says herds had disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century. A page that contains both statements is not necessarily wrong, since a scattered survivor can outlast a herd by decades, but it does mean the 1940 figure was never offered as a firm terminal date even by the publication that carries it.

What the science says about the late sightings

The 2023 paper does not simply prefer an earlier date. It gives a reason to distrust the later one: that photographs and records from the twentieth century probably show dogs of mixed ancestry or introduced breeds rather than the managed population. That is a testable claim about a specific class of evidence, and it is why this page treats late nineteenth to early twentieth century as the supported window and 1940 as a report rather than a record.

The honest summary for a reader is short. There is one firmly dated woolly dog, and it died in late 1859. Everything after that is a question about which animals still counted as the same population.

Why the blanket-trade explanation is wrong, and what replaced it

The standard explanation is that cheap machine-made blankets made dog wool pointless. The 2023 study rejects that as insufficient and gives a different account: the people who kept the dogs were removed, restricted and criminalised, and the dogs went with them.

The old explanation has an obvious appeal and a specific weakness. Dog-wool weaving was not a commodity industry that could be undercut. Blankets went into naming ceremonies, weddings and funerals, and they carried status that a trade blanket could not A Woolly Tale: Salish Weavers Once Raised…. A practice held for five thousand years for reasons that were social rather than economic does not stop because a shop opens.

The paper puts it plainly: given the role of woolly dogs in Coast Salish societies, it is unlikely the entire tradition would have been abandoned simply because imported textiles became available.

The Smithsonian describes the same shift in the historiography, noting that historians and economists looking back first attributed the disappearance to simple capitalist forces, namely the availability of cheap manufactured blankets from firms such as the Hudson's Bay Company. The 1827 opening of Fort Langley is the date that account hangs on. It is a real date and a weak cause.

The single most important sentence on this page

It is not a statistic. It is a recorded memory, quoted verbatim in the study: "They were told they couldn't do their cultural things. There was the police, the Indian Agent and the priests. The dogs were not allowed. She had to get rid of the dogs.";

That is a first-hand family account of a specific mechanism, from a named person, published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is stronger evidence about why the population ended than any of the market explanations, and it is the part almost no summary reproduces.

Why this matters beyond one dog

Breeds die in two different ways and the difference is usually invisible in a sentence like 'the breed became extinct'. Some die because demand moves, which is what happened to the working dogs elsewhere on this site whose jobs were mechanised. This one died because a society was dismantled. Writing it up as a fashion change is not a neutral simplification, it is a wrong causal claim, and the study was written specifically to correct it.

What the Salish Wool Dog looked like, and the measurements nobody actually has

The Salish Wool Dog was a small white long-coated spitz-type dog with prick ears, a curled tail and a pointed fox-like face. No height range and no weight range exist for it, because the evidence is one pelt, some nineteenth-century images and oral testimony rather than a measured population.

Two independent museum sources agree on the outline. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives a small, usually white, long-haired dog with prick ears, a curled tail and a fox-like face. The Smithsonian adds that woolly dogs were kept separately from the larger village dogs to prevent interbreeding, were a little larger than a modern American Eskimo Dog, and, instead of barking, howled.

That last detail is the one worth carrying, because it is behavioural rather than cosmetic and it is the sort of thing an artist reconstructing the animal cannot invent.

Why the missing measurements matter more than they look

A height and weight range is not decoration on a breed page. It drives food quantity, drug dosing and crate sizing, and this project has already caught Indian breed pages assigning a dog the wrong size bucket entirely and propagating the error into feeding advice. For an extinct animal with no population measurements, the correct output is a blank, and this page prints a blank.

It also explains something about the ranking pages. Where confident numbers appear for this breed on aggregator sites, they are usually a template default rather than a reading of any document, and the tell is a spec card that gives a height, a weight, a lifespan and a coat-colour list for an animal that has been gone for well over a century.

The one thing an Indian reader should take from the description

Every feature that made this dog valuable is a feature that makes a dog struggle on an Indian plain. A dense woollen undercoat is insulation, prick ears and a foxy muzzle come with a northern build, and the whole package was selected in a place whose hottest month averages 17.34 C. When you meet those features on a living dog in an Indian pet shop, they are the same trade-off, and the Samoyed and Norwegian Elkhound pages price it honestly.

Registry recognition today: none anywhere, checked with in-document controls

No kennel club on earth recognises the Salish Wool Dog, and four registers were read in full to establish that rather than assumed. Each absence below sits beside control breeds that returned in the same document, so a reader can reproduce every row.

An absence is a strong claim and this site makes it often, so it has to be earned. A search that returns nothing because it was never run is not evidence of anything, and the cheapest way to tell the difference is to search for something you know should be there in the same fetch.

One retrieval warning worth reproducing

The FCI letter indexes have been observed to return Spanish breed names on one fetch and English names on another from the same URL, and a breed can file under a different letter depending on which language you got. The fetch behind the table above returned English, and that is recorded in the citation rather than left implicit. An absence read off a letter index without recording the language is weaker than it looks.

The FCI's own provisional register is the other trap. A page that reads like the definitive nomenclature can serve the provisional list instead when JavaScript does not run, and the tell is that a Labrador control returns zero on it. Here the provisional list was fetched deliberately, so a Labrador absence on it is correct rather than diagnostic.

What this means for the Kennel Club of India

India is a full member of the FCI, represented by the Kennel Club of India in Chennai, and the KCI issues pedigrees against FCI nomenclature. Since the Salish Wool Dog holds no FCI number, there is no KCI pedigree route for it and there never can be one. That is not a criticism of the KCI. It is the mechanical consequence of a name no international register holds.

It is also worth stating the KCI limitation honestly in the other direction. The KCI publishes no public breed list, so a query against it returns nothing for this breed and nothing for every control breed too. That is a broken instrument rather than a finding, and this page reports the FCI route instead precisely because it is checkable.

Could it be brought back? What one genome at 3.4x coverage can and cannot support

No. Bringing back the Salish Wool Dog is not possible with the evidence that exists, and the reason is worth understanding, because the same reasoning applies to every revival claim an Indian buyer will ever be shown.

The question is being asked in public, which is why this page answers it. It sits in the headline of a national newspaper feature on the 2023 study, and the study itself is careful in a way the coverage is not.

Three separate walls, and only one of them is technical

1. Coverage. One nuclear genome at a mean 3.4x depth is enough to place an animal on a tree, estimate ancestry proportions and flag candidate variants. It is not a blueprint, and the authors describe their coat findings as candidate variants rather than as an established cause.
2. Carriers. There is no living population to breed back towards. Across 15 hair-related variants known in living dogs, the specimen carried the ancestral allele in every case with data apart from one widespread long-hair mutation, which means no modern breed is sitting on a partial copy of this coat.
3. Husbandry. The dog was the output of a social institution: island and pen isolation, selective culling, and knowledge held and transmitted by specific women in specific households. That system was dismantled deliberately. Recreating an animal would not recreate the thing that made it, and the 2023 study is a study of both.

Point three is the one that gets left out. A breed is a population plus a practice. Reconstructing a coat gene would give you a fluffy white dog, which the world already has several of.

There is also no gene pool left to work from. A revival programme normally starts by gathering the surviving carriers of a rare population and breeding back towards a type, which is how several living breeds were rebuilt after wartime collapses. Here the gene pool is one pelt in a museum drawer, and the paper's own comparison against 59 modern dogs from 21 breeds found no living animal holding the package.

The pattern to recognise, because you will meet it in India

Revival claims follow a shape, and it repeats across extinct breeds worldwide. Somebody produces a litter, asserts partial descent from the lost population, and prices it accordingly. The Canadian Kennel Club's own account of the Tahltan Bear Dog records exactly that: a Yukon seller in 2010 advertising puppies whose grandfather was claimed to be five eighths Tahltan Bear Dog, and a historian who had spent years checking such claims concluding that the breed cannot be recreated.

The Indian version of this pattern is usually simpler and does not bother with genetics. A seller attaches a rare or evocative foreign name to whatever puppy is in stock, and this project has documented Indian listing sites printing an identical price point across breeds they do not stock at all, in carousels containing none of the named breed. The defence is the same in both cases: ask what document supports the claim, and check that the document is about this animal.

What is genuinely being revived, and it is not the dog

Coast Salish weaving is active, and the 2023 study exists partly because weavers and Knowledge Keepers took part in it. That is a living practice with living practitioners, and it is a better answer to the revival question than any breeding programme could be. The dog is gone. The knowledge it served is not.

Price in India: there is none, and any figure you are shown is invented

The Salish Wool Dog has no price in India, no price anywhere, and no lawful route to a price. This page quotes no rupee figure for the animal, because the only ways to produce one are to convert a foreign number or to make one up, and both are fabrication.

Saying this in the first line rather than the last is deliberate. A reader who arrived here typing a breed name into a search box is usually deciding whether to buy something, and the useful answer is the shortest one.

Three separate facts close the question

1. The animal does not exist. The last firmly dated woolly dog died in late 1859 and the best-supported window for the population's end is the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.
2. No register holds the name, so no pedigree can accompany a dog sold under it, and the Kennel Club of India issues against FCI nomenclature that does not contain it.
3. Import is closed even in principle. DGFT Trade Notice 22/2022-23 places live dogs under ITC(HS) 01061900 as a Restricted import, permits entry only for a pet with a valid pet book in the importer's name, for research with CPCSEA recommendation, or for Defence and Police use, and states that applications for trading or breeding purposes shall be duly rejected.

Between them those three mean no lawful supply chain can form for this name in India, now or later. That is a stronger statement than 'the breed is rare' and it is the one the documents actually support.

What you are being offered instead, if somebody quotes you a price

This project has documented the mechanisms often enough to list them. An Indian listing for an absent breed is usually one of four things: a different breed under a borrowed name, an auto-generated shell page that exists identically for every breed the site does not stock, a carousel of unrelated puppies at a recurring house price point, or merchandise. That last one is easy to miss because the number looks plausible, and this page's sibling on the Toy Bulldog documents an Indian commercial result set made almost entirely of soft toys.

The test is unglamorous and it works. Before treating any rupee figure as a price, confirm that the listing is for a live animal, that the page names the breed you searched, and that the number appears in the page's own markup rather than only in a search snippet or an AI summary.

The conversion test, run and reported

Where an Indian price list does exist, it is worth testing whether the figures are Indian at all. Forty-seven distinct rupee figures between Rs 1,000 and Rs 5,00,000 from the two Indian price lists cited on this page were divided by the exchange rates this project has caught converted lists using. None divides to a whole number of US dollars at 84.38, none at 74.00 and none at 91.00.

Twenty-six appear to divide cleanly at a flat 80.00, and that proves nothing, because 1,000 divided by 80 is 12.5, so any figure ending in three zeros passes by construction. The quotients it produces include 15, 25, 50 and 75, which is not a price anybody would print for a dog. The conclusion is a negative result and it is reported as one: these are rupee-native round numbers, not a converted American list.

What the living thick-coated alternatives cost in India, and where the sources disagree

Two Indian price lists read on the same day disagree about the Siberian Husky's ceiling by a full lakh, and publishing that spread is more useful than picking one. PawSpace gives Rs 45,000 to Rs 2,00,000 and above. Wrapinfur gives Rs 40,000 to Rs 1,00,000.

Nobody can buy the dog this page is about, so the price section that matters is the one covering what a reader will actually be shown when they walk into a shop asking for a white fluffy northern dog.

Four identical bands are one data point, not four

The Rajapalayam, Mudhol Hound, Chippiparai and Kanni share a byte-identical Rs 8,000 to Rs 30,000 band on one list. Identical bands across several breeds are a template signature, and this project has repeatedly found Indian sites assembling cost rows from a small set of preset lines rather than costing any animal. Treat that band as one statement about how the site prices Indian breeds, not as four independent readings of four markets.

The same caution runs the other way. Where two unrelated sites agree to the rupee on two separate quantities, that is evidence against independence rather than for it, because genuinely independent sources disagree at the edges. The one lakh gap on the Husky is what real independence looks like.

A lifespan figure on those price lists to distrust

One of the two lists prints a lifespan beside each price, and at least one of those figures is a long way from the best available evidence. It gives the French Bulldog 10 to 12 years. The UK VetCompass life tables, built on 30,563 dogs that died between January 2016 and July 2020, put the French Bulldog's life expectancy at age 0 at 4.53 years, the shortest of every breed analysed, against 11.23 years for dogs overall.

That is not a rounding difference. It is a gap of seven years on the single figure a buyer is most likely to act on, and it is worth knowing that a page confident enough to print a price band is not necessarily reading anything when it prints a lifespan.

Monthly cost of ownership in India for a heavy-coated dog of this size

Budget roughly Rs 6,500 to Rs 13,000 a month for a 15 to 30 kg double-coated dog in an Indian metro, built from named line items rather than taken from a single quoted total. Every line below was priced from its own source on 9 September 2026.

The round monthly totals Indian breed pages publish are frequently assembled from a small set of preset components rather than costed against any animal, so this page names each line and its source separately. A figure built that way can be checked line by line. A round total cannot.

The four priced lines come from four different sellers and authorities: parasite cover and deworming from a national pet pharmacy Supertails product page, vaccination and grooming from one veterinary chain's published rate cards Vetic, pet grooming Delhi price list, and registration from two municipal corporations Greater Chennai Corporation. None of them was taken from a breed page.

The two lines Indian buyers routinely underestimate

Parasite cover is the first. A West Bengal study of 584 client-owned dogs screened by real-time PCR found Babesia gibsoni in 76.54 percent, Anaplasma species in 55.75 percent, Hepatozoon in 28.94 percent, Babesia canis in 27.10 percent and Ehrlichia canis in 16.61 percent, with 72.9 percent of the dogs carrying two or more pathogens at once and 34.9 percent carrying three or more. Those dogs were presenting at a clinic rather than sampled from the street, so the figures describe caseload pressure rather than population prevalence, and they are still the reason monthly cover is a fixed line in India rather than a seasonal one.

Drying is the second, and it does not look like a cost until it becomes one. A dense undercoat that is washed and left to air dry in Indian humidity stays wet at the skin, and that is how hot spots and ear infections start. Budget for a proper blaster or for salon drying every time, not for shampoo.

The municipal line almost nobody pays

Delhi's Municipal Corporation charges Rs 500 to register a pet dog and Rs 500 to renew, with a late fee of Rs 100 per month and a one-month grace period tied to the anti-rabies certificate's expiry. Greater Chennai Corporation licenses a pet animal at Rs 50 and issued 9,115 licences in 2024. Chennai's figure is the better bargain by a wide margin, and the corporation's own veterinary department runs municipal clinics across the city zones.

Suitability for the Indian climate, measured against the actual homeland

The Salish Wool Dog came from a place whose hottest month averages 17.34 C, which is 6.75 C cooler than Chennai's coolest month. That single comparison decides the heat rating, and it applies unchanged to every thick-coated northern breed an Indian buyer is offered instead.

The figures below come from NASA POWER climatology for 2001 to 2020, queried by explicit latitude and longitude rather than by a place name, with the cell elevation echoed back and checked against the town's real elevation on every point. That check matters: this project has repeatedly found the model returning a mountain cell for a coastal town, and a wrong homeland baseline corrupts the comparison exactly as badly as a wrong Indian one.

Victoria, British Columbia, inside the Salish Sea region, returned a cell elevation of 52.13 m against a real elevation near 23 m, an error of about 29 m, so the cell describes the town and the figures are usable. Nanaimo, further up the same coast, returned 158.92 m against a real 20 m and was not used, which is recorded here rather than quietly dropped.

Two Indian months that catch people out

Delhi peaks in June, not May, at 35.88 C, and Bengaluru and Pune both peak in April, at 28.37 C and 28.93 C. Bengaluru and Pune are also coolest in December rather than January. Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata genuinely do peak in May, so a page that blanket-labels every Indian peak as May is right more often than not and wrong where it matters most, which is Delhi.

That detail is not trivia for a heavy-coated dog. It moves the hardest fortnight of the year, and a Delhi owner planning around a May peak will be caught by June.

What the gap actually means

Bengaluru is the mildest Indian city in this table and its annual mean of 23.74 C is still 13.18 C above the homeland's 10.56 C. Chennai's coolest month, January at 24.09 C, is 6.75 C hotter than the hottest month Victoria manages. There is no Indian plain that resembles the Salish Sea, and the hill stations that come closest sit at elevations where this model's grid cells are wrong by hundreds of metres, so this page does not offer one as a substitute.

Calling such a dog heat-sensitive is not a soft judgement, it is what the arithmetic says: an animal selected for insulation in a place that never exceeds 17.34 C in its warmest month is heat-sensitive anywhere in India by construction, before any individual variation is considered.

For a living double-coated dog that translates into a specific routine rather than a verdict: exercise before sunrise and after sunset, indoor cooling through the hot months, water and shade available at all times, and a plan for power cuts. The Siberian Husky and Alaskan Malamute pages carry the same arithmetic for animals you can actually buy.

Humidity and wet-bulb load, where the usual argument about coastal breeds is wrong

The homeland of the Salish Wool Dog is more humid than most of India, not less. Victoria runs 80.92 percent annual relative humidity against Chennai's 72.39 and Mumbai's 67.39, so damp air is not what would have troubled this dog. Heat is, and heat combined with humidity is worse.

This correction matters because the standard sentence written about any northern or coastal breed in India is that Indian humidity will finish it. For an Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic or Pacific Northwest breed that is usually a reasoning error rather than a data error, and the numbers below show why.

The right measure is wet-bulb temperature, because it combines heat and humidity into the thing that actually limits a panting animal. Every wet-bulb figure here is computed by the Stull method from POWER's own T2M and RH2M for 2001 to 2020, and the method is named because two different wet-bulb sources are in circulation and they disagree by more than a degree.

Read the two columns against each other

The homeland is more humid than every Indian city in the table at 80.92 percent annual relative humidity, and carries the lowest wet-bulb peak by a margin of more than seven degrees. Kolkata's June peak of 27.09 C is 12.85 C above Victoria's August peak of 14.24 C. Delhi, the driest city here at 45.56 percent annual humidity, still reaches 26.50 C in July, because it is hot enough that even modest humidity produces a high wet bulb.

So a page telling an Indian reader that a Pacific Northwest breed will struggle because India is humid has the mechanism wrong. India is not more humid than the Salish Sea. It is very much hotter, and heat with any humidity at all is what closes down evaporative cooling in an animal that cannot sweat.

Two Indian cities share a wet-bulb peak, and both figures are right

Chennai in May and Ahmedabad in June both come out at 26.11 C, to the hundredth, from two entirely different monthly profiles: Chennai at 31.51 C and 64.5 percent humidity, Ahmedabad at 33.62 C and 53.7 percent. That is a coincidence rather than a copied figure, and it is recorded here because an identical value appearing twice is exactly the sort of thing that gets 'corrected' by somebody who recomputes neither.

What an owner does with this

The practical rule for any heavy-coated dog in India follows the wet-bulb column rather than the thermometer. In Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi, the risky window is a humid morning after a hot night, not the hottest hour of the afternoon, because the dog has not been able to shed heat overnight. Bengaluru and Pune are genuinely easier, and their peaks fall in April and June rather than May.

Exertional heat illness, not a hot car, is the dominant trigger. Of 1,259 heat-related illness events in 905,543 UK dogs, 879 had a recorded trigger, and 652 of those, or 74.2 percent, were exertional, against 12.9 percent environmental and 5.2 percent from vehicle confinement. Those percentages are computed on the 879 with a recorded trigger, not on the 1,259, and the distinction is worth keeping because most repetitions of this statistic get the denominator wrong.

Temperament: what the record supports, and the confident claims it does not

Almost nothing is established about the Salish Wool Dog's temperament, and the honest page says so three times rather than borrowing a description once. What the record does support is a picture of an animal kept in managed groups, handled routinely for shearing, and living alongside people who valued it highly.

The temptation on an extinct-breed page is to fill this section from a resembling breed. That is the exact failure this project has documented repeatedly on content farms: a spitz outline becomes a spitz personality, and a reader ends up with the Samoyed's temperament attached to an animal nobody living has met.

What can be said from the record

• Handled routinely. A dog that is shorn is a dog that stands still to be handled by people, repeatedly, through its life. That is a real inference about tolerance of restraint rather than a guess about friendliness.
• Kept in groups. Woolly dogs were held in numbers by individual households, and wealth was reckoned in how many a woman had, so the animals lived with conspecifics rather than singly.
• Kept apart from other dogs. Island and pen isolation was the husbandry, which means the population's normal social experience was other woolly dogs and its own household, not the village dog population.
• Vocal in a particular way. The Smithsonian records that instead of barking, they howled. One source only, so it is reported rather than established.

What cannot be said, and is said anyway on other pages

No source consulted for this page supports a claim about the breed's trainability, its behaviour with children, its guarding instinct, its prey drive or its separation tolerance. Those five are precisely the five that a template breed page fills in automatically, and when you meet them attached to this name you are reading generated furniture.

The distinction is not pedantry. This project has documented an extinct-breed page carrying a full temperament profile, a lifespan and three recommended health screens for an animal that no longer exists, on a site that had simply published a different real breed under the target name. Where a page has no evidence and prints confidence, the confidence is the evidence about the page.

The useful transfer for an Indian household

The transferable lesson is about management rather than personality. This was a population whose predictability came from controlled reproduction and from a household that knew exactly what it had. An Indian buyer gets the same predictability from the same two things: seeing the parents, and buying from somebody who can tell you what the parents are like at four years old rather than at four months.

Where a reader wants a known temperament in a thick-coated northern dog, the living pages carry it. The Siberian Husky is high-energy and a poor guard. The Samoyed is sociable and loud. The Indian Pariah Dog is the climate-matched option with a temperament that thousands of Indian households can describe from experience rather than from a standard.

Training a heavy-coated northern dog in India, since this one cannot be trained

To train the kind of dog this page describes, plan around heat before you plan around obedience. Nothing is recorded about training the Salish Wool Dog, so this section covers the living double-coated breeds an Indian reader will actually own, and the one training decision that matters most in an Indian summer.

The single most useful adjustment for a thick-coated dog in India is the timetable, not the technique. Exertional heat illness is the dominant trigger of heat-related illness in dogs, accounting for 652 of the 879 events with a recorded trigger in a 905,543-dog study, or 74.2 percent. Training sessions are exertion, and enthusiastic recall work at eleven in the morning in May is the exact shape of the risk.

What works, in order

1. Move sessions to dawn and after dark. Between April and June in most of India that is not a preference, it is the whole safety margin.
2. Keep sessions short and repeat them. Three five-minute sessions beat one twenty-minute session for retention, and they cut heat load at the same time.
3. Reward with food rather than with a chase game. A tug or a fetch sequence raises core temperature fast in an animal that cannot shed it.
4. Train indoors during the hot months. Scent games, mat settles, handling practice and grooming tolerance all work on a cool floor.
5. Practise being handled. For any coated breed the most valuable trained behaviour in India is standing calmly to be brushed, dried and checked, because that is what happens every week for the animal's whole life.

What a northern coat resists

Northern spitz-type breeds are commonly described as independent rather than biddable, and Indian owners who arrived from a retriever expect a retriever's response rate. The gap is real and it is not disobedience. Build recall on a long line for months rather than weeks, pay well every single time, and never call a dog to something it will dislike.

The one piece of overseas advice to discard is any suggestion of long endurance work to settle a young dog. That is written for a climate where a two-hour walk is neutral. In Chennai in May, with a wet-bulb peak of 26.11 C, it is not neutral.

What Indian law says about the tools

The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules, 2017 are worth reading before buying equipment or accepting advice from a trainer. Second Schedule Part IV requires separate housing for a vicious or aggressive dog and forbids the use of sedation to control behaviour. A trainer or boarding kennel proposing chemical restraint for a difficult dog is proposing something the Rules address directly.

Daily exercise requirement, and the Indian version of it

For a heavy-coated northern dog in an Indian city, plan two sessions a day totalling 60 to 90 minutes, both outside daylight, and treat the total as a ceiling in April to June rather than a target. Nothing is recorded about the Salish Wool Dog's exercise needs, so this section covers the living substitutes.

Exercise advice written overseas transfers badly to India, and this is one of the clearest cases. A northern breed page written in Britain or Canada will tell you the dog needs a great deal of work and gets destructive without it. Both halves are true. Neither accounts for a May afternoon in Chennai, and following the first half in Indian conditions is how a dog ends up on a drip.

The Indian schedule

• Before sunrise: the main session, 30 to 50 minutes, at whatever pace the dog offers rather than a set distance.
• After dark: the second session, 20 to 40 minutes, slower, on a surface you have touched with your hand first.
• Through the day: mental work indoors. Scent searches, food puzzles, settle practice and grooming handling all count as work and cost nothing in heat.
• April to June: cut the totals rather than the frequency. Two short outings beat one long one.
• Monsoon: shorter and drier. A soaked double coat in humid heat is worse than a dry one in dry heat.

Test the ground with your own hand

Indian tarmac and concrete hold heat long after the air cools, and a paw is in contact with it for the whole walk. Put the back of your hand flat on the surface for seven seconds. If you want to lift it off, the dog does too. This single check moves more walks to grass and to later hours than any thermometer reading.

Why lean matters more than fit

Condition is the heat variable an owner actually controls. In 905,543 UK dogs, being at or above the mean bodyweight for the breed and sex carried 1.42 times the odds of heat-related illness, and dogs over 50 kg carried 3.42 times the odds. Coat cannot be changed and climate cannot be changed. Weight can, and it is free.

The corollary is uncomfortable for owners who use exercise to manage weight: in an Indian summer you cannot run a heavy dog thin, because the running is the risk. Weight comes off through the bowl in the hot months and through the legs in the cool ones.

The alternative nobody suggests

Swimming is the one form of exercise that reduces heat load rather than adding to it, and access is the limiting factor in most Indian cities rather than cost. Where a safe, clean, shaded body of water is available, a double-coated dog will take far more work from it than from the same time on a road, and it needs a thorough dry afterwards to avoid the skin and ear problems the monsoon already encourages.

Grooming: the one breed on this site whose coat was the product

The Salish Wool Dog is the only animal in this encyclopedia whose coat was harvested rather than maintained. It was shorn like a sheep, and the fleece was spun into blankets. That inverts the usual grooming section and it makes one point about Indian coat care unusually clearly.

Everywhere else on this site, a dense undercoat is a cost. Here it was the entire reason the population existed. The wool was blended with mountain goat hair, waterfowl down and plant fibres including fireweed and cattail fluff, and the resulting blankets functioned as regalia rather than as bedding.

That distinction is worth holding onto when a groomer in Pune offers to clip a Husky down for summer. The coat is a manufactured product of long selection in a specific climate, and shortening it does not convert a northern dog into a tropical one.

What shearing tells you about the coat

A coat that can be shorn and spun is a coat with a fine, crimped, densely packed undercoat under a coarser outer layer. The 2023 study identifies candidate variants for that structure in KRT77, a keratin gene family member, plus a unique mutation adjacent to the KANK2 site that produces woolly hair in humans, and additional candidates in CERS3, PRDM5, HAPLN1 and GPNMB. Those genes govern hair-follicle and skin integrity, which is a coherent package rather than a list.

The practical translation for a living double-coated dog is that the undercoat is the part that matters. It is the layer that mats, the layer that holds water, and the layer that has to come out seasonally.

The Indian double-coat routine, in order

1. Line brush to the skin, twice a week minimum and daily in a moult, working in sections and lifting the top coat so the tool reaches the undercoat rather than skating over it.
2. Use an undercoat rake rather than a slicker alone, because a slicker mostly grooms the guard coat and leaves the mat forming underneath it.
3. Bathe less often than you think and dry far more thoroughly than you think. A wet undercoat in Indian humidity is the problem, not the dirt.
4. Dry with moving air to the skin, either a blaster at home or salon drying. Towel-dry-and-leave is normal advice in a cool country and wrong in an Indian monsoon.
5. Plug and dry the ears whenever the dog is washed or swims, because ear canals that stay damp are where the trouble starts.
6. Never shave the coat down for heat. Line brushing removes the trapped dead undercoat that actually causes overheating; clipping removes the insulation and the sun barrier together.

What this costs in India

Professional bathing in Delhi starts at Rs 934 against Rs 1,099, a full haircut at Rs 1,359 against Rs 1,599, add-on services including nail clipping, anal gland expression, ear cleaning and tooth brushing at Rs 99, and a complete bath and styling package at Rs 1,869 against Rs 2,199. A double-coated dog needs the bathing and drying line regularly and the haircut line essentially never, so the realistic monthly figure sits at the low end of that list plus your own time with a rake.

The overseas advice that does not transfer

Breed clubs in cool countries routinely say to towel a dog and let it air dry. In an Indian monsoon that instruction is the direct route to moist dermatitis and otitis, because a dense undercoat in humid air simply does not dry. Where a club's grooming guidance assumes a climate, ask which one, and change the instruction rather than repeating it.

Health and lifespan: no data exists for this breed, and here is what does exist nearby

There is no lifespan figure, no screening data and no disease prevalence for the Salish Wool Dog, because the entire literature is two papers published in one issue of one journal in December 2023. Every health number below describes a living breed an Indian reader could acquire, and each says which.

Stating the absence is the correct output rather than a failure of research. A page that borrows a spitz breed's hip figures and attaches them to this name has invented data, and this project has caught exactly that on extinct-breed content farms, complete with a recommended annual hip evaluation for an animal that no longer exists.

The scale of the gap is worth showing rather than asserting. UK life tables built on 30,563 dogs that died between January 2016 and July 2020 give a life expectancy at age 0 of 11.23 years for dogs overall, with the Jack Russell Terrier longest at 12.72 years and the French Bulldog shortest at 4.53 years. A separate longevity study covering 584,734 UK dogs, of which 284,734 had died, produced breed-level medians across 155 purebred breeds. Between them those two papers cover a large share of the breeds an Indian buyer will meet, and neither contains this one, because neither could.

The literature search, run properly and reported

The search behind that table is worth showing, because it demonstrates a trap rather than just a result. The exact phrase 'woolly dog' returns zero PubMed records and the plural 'woolly dogs' also returns zero, while Salish combined with dog returns the two papers that exist. Either phrase alone would have produced a confident, wrong conclusion that no literature exists at all.

The wider term 'Coast Salish' returns 28 records, almost all anthropological rather than veterinary. The control run in the same session, Labrador combined with hip dysplasia, returned 108, so the instrument was working and the near-absence is real rather than an artefact of a broken query.

The one health finding the 2023 paper does support

It is not a disease. Across 15 specific variants linked to hair characteristics in living dog breeds, the specimen carried the ancestral allele in every case with data, apart from one widespread FGF5 mutation conferring long hair. That is a statement about independent evolution rather than about health, and it is the only genotype claim this page makes.

One number worth carrying to any Indian vet visit

Anaesthesia is the health topic most often exaggerated on breed pages, and the best recent evidence argues against most breed-level claims. A prospective multicentre cohort of 55,019 canine anaesthetic procedures, reduced to 54,542 after exclusions, found overall mortality of 0.69 percent, or 378 of 54,542. Crude rates were higher for some breeds, but after adjustment for the animal's ASA physical status only two breeds retained excess risk, and brachycephalic dogs, whose crude mortality was higher at 0.82 against 0.65 percent, attenuated to a non-significant relative risk of 1.19. The authors' own reading is that between-breed differences largely reflected case severity rather than breed.

That is worth knowing because it cuts against the conventional wisdom rather than for it, and because it means the useful conversation with your vet is about the individual dog's condition rather than about its breed label.

What to screen in the dog you can actually buy

For the living northern breeds an Indian buyer reaches for instead, the useful questions to a seller are narrow and answerable. Ask what hip and elbow scores the parents hold and from which scheme. Ask what eye testing has been done and when, since eye certificates expire. Ask what the parents died of, if they have. A seller who can answer all three has records; a seller who answers with a temperament description does not.

The Indian health picture a heavy-coated dog actually walks into

Two Indian studies published in 2026 give the clearest recent picture of what a dog faces here, and both point the same way: tick-borne infection is the dominant local pressure, co-infection is normal rather than exceptional, and microscopy alone misses a large share of it.

This is the section that a page written for a British or Canadian audience cannot supply, and it is the reason an Indian encyclopedia is worth writing at all. The overseas health section for a northern breed will discuss hips, eyes and coat. Neither of those is what most Indian dogs are treated for.

West Bengal: 584 dogs, five pathogens, and a diagnostic gap

A study at the State Animal Health Centre in Salt Lake, Kolkata, screened 584 client-owned dogs between July 2024 and December 2025 by both microscopy and a five-target real-time PCR panel. The molecular prevalence figures were Babesia gibsoni 76.54 percent (447 of 584), Anaplasma species 55.75 percent (325 of 583), Hepatozoon 28.94 percent (169 of 584), Babesia canis 27.10 percent (158 of 583) and Ehrlichia canis 16.61 percent (97 of 584).

72.9 percent of the dogs screened carried two or more pathogens at once, and 34.9 percent carried three or more. Note the denominator carefully: that is 72.9 percent of the 584 dogs screened, not of the dogs found infected, and the two claims are materially different.

The diagnostic finding is the one an owner can act on. Microscopy missed 130 of the 158 Babesia canis positives, and the discordant samples had a significantly higher median cycle threshold, meaning microscopy fails at low parasite loads. If a dog is unwell and a blood smear comes back clean, that is not the same as a negative result.

Southern India: a different profile and a seasonal peak

A second 2026 study screened 120 clinically affected dogs in southern India between November 2023 and September 2024, all showing pyrexia, anorexia and thrombocytopenia. Babesia species were found in 66.7 percent (80 of 120), with co-infection of B. gibsoni and B. vogeli in 76.3 percent of the Babesia-positive cases, while E. canis appeared in 5.0 percent, A. platys in 1.7 percent and H. canis in 1.7 percent. No Rickettsia was detected.

Cases peaked in the pre-monsoon months of March to May. That is a genuinely useful planning figure for an Indian owner, and it is the opposite of the intuition that monsoon means ticks. Both of these are clinic caseloads of dogs already showing signs rather than population surveys, and they must be read that way rather than as prevalence in the general dog population.

What this changes about the monthly budget

It converts parasite cover from an optional line into a fixed one. At about Rs 1,103 a month for combined tick, flea and worm cover in the 15 to 30 kg band, that is the single largest recurring veterinary cost for most Indian dogs, and skipping it in the cool months is a false economy given a pre-monsoon peak.

A dense undercoat compounds the problem in a way a short-coated dog does not share, because a tick attached at the skin under a thick coat is genuinely hard to find. Line brushing is a parasite check as much as a coat routine.

Feeding: what the isotopes showed, and what a double-coated dog needs in India

Feed a heavy-coated dog in India to keep it lean, because weight is the heat risk factor an owner controls. The one dietary fact recorded for the Salish Wool Dog comes from stable isotope analysis of the surviving specimen, and it describes a colonial surveyor's dog rather than a traditionally kept one.

The 2023 study ran carbon-13 and nitrogen-15 stable isotope analysis on bone collagen and hair keratin from both the woolly dog specimen and a contemporaneous village dog from the same region. The village dog's values matched archaeological dogs from the Pacific Northwest, indicating a traditional marine-based diet built on salmon. The woolly dog's values showed a more terrestrial, C3-rich diet.

The authors read that difference as a life history rather than as a breed trait: the specimen had lived and travelled with the naturalist George Gibbs from an early age, so its bones and hair record his provisioning, not Coast Salish husbandry. That is a careful reading, and it is worth copying, because it is exactly the kind of inference that gets flattened into 'the breed ate a terrestrial diet' by a page in a hurry.

What that means for a page like this

It means the only surviving dietary evidence for this animal describes one dog's unusual circumstances. Sources elsewhere describe Coast Salish keepers feeding woolly dogs on salmon, and the village-dog isotope values are consistent with a marine diet being normal in the region. The page states both and claims neither as the breed's diet, because one specimen with an atypical life is not a population.

Feeding a living double-coated dog in India

• Feed to body condition, not to a chart. You should feel ribs easily under a thin layer and see a waist from above. In an Indian summer this is a safety measure, not a cosmetic one, given the 1.42 odds ratio attached to being at or above breed mean weight.
• Split the daily ration into two or three meals, and move the largest to the cool end of the day, because digestion itself generates heat.
• Feed after exercise, not before, with a settled gap either side, which is standard advice for deep-chested dogs and doubly sensible in heat.
• Keep water available in more than one place, refreshed rather than topped up, since a dog drinking less in the heat is a dog heading for trouble.
• Do not add oil to fix a coat before a vet has looked at the skin. A dull coat in Indian humidity is more often a skin problem than a nutritional one.

The Indian availability question

Large-breed and all-life-stage complete diets are widely available in Indian metros through the same retailers priced elsewhere on this page, and the practical constraint is usually storage rather than supply. A large bag opened in a humid Indian kitchen goes stale and can grow mould, so buy the size you will finish in about a month and keep it sealed and off the floor.

No current Indian retail food price is quoted on this page. A stale food figure is worse than no figure, and food is the fastest-moving line in the whole budget.

Month by month through the first year, for the dog you can actually buy

No Salish Wool Dog puppy timeline exists or can exist. This timeline covers a heavy-coated northern puppy in an Indian city, and it is built around two Indian constraints the overseas versions ignore: the eight-week legal minimum, and the month the puppy meets its first hot season.

The single most important date is not on this list. It is the date of birth, and an Indian buyer should ask for it in writing before anything else, because Rule 8(1)(a) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules, 2017 prohibits the sale of pups less than eight weeks of age.

Two things the law says that a seller may not mention

Beyond the eight-week rule, the 2017 Rules prohibit in-breeding and incest breeding, defined at Second Schedule Part II paragraph 6(3) as mating between relatives of the second to fourth grade within the first four generations, including uncle to niece, nephew to aunt, cousin to cousin and grandparent to grandchild, and separately mating between parents and children or between brother and sister. A seller who cannot describe the relationship between the parents cannot tell you whether the litter complies.

The same Schedule at paragraph 6(8) makes tail docking, ear cropping, de-barking, de-clawing, branding, dyeing and any change of appearance by artificial means strictly forbidden. None of those apply to a northern coated breed's standard, which is why this page can say so plainly rather than hedging.

The month that decides the first year

Whichever month the puppy arrives, work out when it will be six to nine months old and check that against the climate table. A puppy that hits its first adult moult and its first 35 C week in the same fortnight, in Delhi in June, is a much harder first year than one that reaches the same stage in November.

Indian law: import, breeding and housing, and the clause about creating breeds

Three Indian instruments settle every practical question about this name. Import of live dogs is Restricted, breeding to create new breeds is prohibited outright, and outdoor housing of a dog unsuited to local temperatures needs written veterinary approval.

None of these were written with an extinct North American dog in mind. All three reach it, and more usefully they reach the revival claims, the imported northern breeds and the boarding arrangements an Indian reader will actually encounter.

1. Import is Restricted, and trading applications are rejected

Directorate General of Foreign Trade Trade Notice No. 22/2022-23 places live dogs under ITC(HS) 01061900 as a Restricted import subject to Policy Conditions 7 and 8. Entry is permitted in three narrow cases: a pet accompanying its owner with a valid pet book in the importer's name, research use with a CPCSEA recommendation, or Defence and Police use. The notice states at paragraph 6 that applications for trading or breeding purposes shall be duly rejected, and it limits entry to six ports. DAHD added a seventh port, Cochin International Airport at Kochi, for pets arriving under the baggage rules in October 2024. The full route is set out in how to import a dog to India.

That closes the commercial route for every rare foreign dog, not merely this one, and it is the single most useful legal fact on any rare-breed page written for India. A seller who says an import authorisation is being arranged for a rare foreign breed is describing a document the notice says will be refused, so ask which of the three permitted grounds the application is being made under before any money changes hands.

2. Creating a new breed is prohibited

Second Schedule Part II paragraph 6(9) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules, 2017 reads, in a single sentence: breeding to create new breeds of dogs or unusual looks shall be strictly prohibited. Note the citation form carefully, because it is a Second Schedule paragraph and not a Rule. The Rules themselves stop at Rule 13, so any citation reading 'Rule 21' or 'Rule 6(9)' is wrong by construction.

This clause is the one that reaches a revival programme. Anybody proposing to recreate an extinct breed in India by crossing living dogs towards a target is describing exactly the activity paragraph 6(9) prohibits, and saying so is more useful to a reader than any argument about whether the result would be authentic.

3. Outdoor housing and heat

Second Schedule Part IV paragraph 21(1) bars keeping in outdoor facilities, without the written approval of the attending veterinary practitioner, dogs not accustomed to local temperatures, breeds that cannot tolerate them such as long-haired breeds in high-temperature locations, and animals that are sick, infirm, aged or young. A long-haired breed in an Indian summer is named in the clause almost word for word.

That is worth quoting to a boarding kennel. It is not a general animal-welfare sentiment, it is a specific condition on housing that a facility is expected to meet.

What the Rules do not contain

Two absences are citable and worth knowing. The Rules mandate genetic-defect testing at Second Schedule Part III paragraph 8(10) for a named list including hip dysplasia and progressive retinal atrophy, introduced by the word 'including' so the list is illustrative rather than closed. They contain no patella-testing requirement and no dental requirement at all, and no mention of deafness testing. Nobody should tell an Indian buyer that the law requires a patella grade, because it does not.

Head to head against the breeds an Indian buyer actually cross-shops

A reader who reached this page is usually choosing among white or thick-coated northern dogs, or has been shown one and wants to know what they are taking on. This table compares the Salish Wool Dog against five living options on the things that decide an Indian purchase.

The Salish Wool Dog column exists to be a baseline of absences rather than a candidate. Every other column describes an animal that can be bought, registered and insured in India today. The price band for the Siberian Husky is given as a range across both Indian lists rather than as a single figure, because the two disagree by a full lakh at the ceiling Wrapinfur, Dog Price List in India 2026.

The column that should decide it

Look at the bottom row rather than the price row. For the extinct animal there is nothing to check, which is the whole argument of this page. For the three living northern breeds there are four checkable things. For the Indian Pariah Dog there is something better than a document, which is the adult animal itself, already the age at which temperament is settled.

The heat row is the second one to weigh. All three living northern breeds sit at the same disadvantage on an Indian plain, and the differences between them are smaller than the difference between any of them and a short-coated local dog. A buyer choosing between a Siberian Husky and a Samoyed on heat grounds is optimising the wrong variable.

Where the extinct dog wins, honestly

On one measure only, and it is not a practical one. The genomic evidence for the Salish Wool Dog's ancestry is better than the documented ancestry of most pedigree dogs an Indian buyer will be offered, because an 84 percent pre-colonial ancestry reading measured in the animal cannot be exaggerated by a seller. A pedigree certificate can be. That is a point about verification methods rather than about dogs.

Mistakes Indian readers actually make with this breed and its substitutes

Seven mistakes recur, and six of them are about the living dogs people buy after reading about this one. They are listed in the order they usually happen.

1. Believing a price. Any rupee figure attached to a Salish Wool Dog is invented, because the animal has not existed for well over a century and no register holds the name. The correct response to a quoted price is to stop, not to negotiate.
2. Treating 1940 as the extinction date. It appears in a hedged passive with no named witness, in a paragraph that also says the herds were gone by the mid-nineteenth century, and the 2023 study argues that twentieth-century sightings probably describe mixed or introduced dogs Lin AT, Hammond-Kaarremaa L, Liu HL.
3. Buying the outline. A white prick-eared curly-tailed dog is a northern-dog package that has evolved more than once. The 2023 study compared the specimen against 59 modern dogs from 21 breeds and found it carried the ancestral allele at nearly every hair variant known in living breeds, so no modern dog is a version of this one.
4. Shaving a double coat for summer. It removes insulation and the sun barrier at once and exposes skin that has never seen Indian sun. Line brush to the skin and dry thoroughly instead, and take the clipper question to your nearby vet.
5. Air-drying after a bath. Standard advice in cool countries and wrong in an Indian monsoon, where a dense undercoat simply does not dry and the result is hot spots and ear infections.
6. Exercising at the wrong hour. Exertion is the dominant trigger of heat-related illness, accounting for 74.2 percent of the 879 events with a recorded trigger in a 905,543-dog study. Move sessions to dawn and after dark from April, and in Delhi remember the peak is June rather than May.
7. Letting the dog carry weight. Dogs at or above the mean bodyweight for their breed and sex carried 1.42 times the odds of heat-related illness and dogs over 50 kg carried 3.42 times. Coat and climate cannot be changed. Condition can, and it costs nothing.

The research mistake, since this page is mostly a research story

There is an eighth mistake and it is the one that produces the other seven: reading a single source and stopping. On this breed alone, a search for the exact phrase 'woolly dog' returns zero PubMed records, the plural returns zero, and the two papers that exist are only reachable through a different query. A reader who ran one search and concluded there is no science would have missed the entire genome.

The same failure mode produces the confident spec cards. A page that gives this dog a height, a weight and a lifespan has not found sources the rest of us missed. It has a template with default values in it.

Adoption and responsible sourcing, when the breed you searched cannot be sourced at all

You cannot adopt a Salish Wool Dog and you cannot buy one. What you can do is adopt a dog that suits an Indian climate for nothing, or verify a living northern breed properly before paying for it. Both routes are set out below.

This is not a disclaimer section. Adoption is the only route on this page that ends with an actual dog, and for a reader who arrived interested in a white fluffy northern animal it is worth saying that Indian shelters hold long-coated dogs too, alongside the short-coated pariah-type dogs that suit the climate best.

The adoption route, in order

1. Start with a municipal or established shelter in your city rather than an online listing. Greater Chennai Corporation, for one, runs veterinary clinics through its own zones and licenses pet animals at Rs 50.
2. Meet the adult animal. This is the advantage adoption has over every certificate: the temperament in front of you is the temperament you get, at an age where it is settled.
3. Ask what the shelter has treated it for. Given Indian tick-borne disease pressure, a shelter that can tell you the animal's treatment history is telling you something more useful than a pedigree would.
4. Register the dog. Delhi charges Rs 500 to register and Rs 500 to renew, with a Rs 100 per month late fee. Chennai charges Rs 50. Both are trivial next to the cost of not being able to prove ownership.
5. Budget the running cost honestly, at roughly Rs 1,103 a month for parasite cover alone in the 15 to 30 kg band, before food.

If you are buying instead, verify these five things

1. Date of birth in writing, because the sale of pups under eight weeks is prohibited under Rule 8(1)(a) of the 2017 Rules.
2. The mother, with the litter, in the place they live. A seller who will meet you elsewhere has told you something.
3. The relationship between the parents, since in-breeding within four generations and incest breeding are both prohibited under Second Schedule Part II paragraph 6(3).
4. Health testing on both parents, naming the scheme and the date rather than the word 'healthy'.
5. A vaccination record with product names and dates, not a card with ticks on it.

What Bonbeno will not do

This site does not recommend breeders, link puppy listings or quote a live price as an offer. It reports published price ranges as editorial content and it does not broker sales. Where a page carries no price, as this one does not for the breed in its title, that is because no honest figure exists rather than because we are withholding one.

The last word on the Salish Wool Dog

The reason to read about an animal nobody can own is that it answers a question about ownership. This population lasted about five thousand years without a single document, held together by households that knew exactly what they had and controlled who bred with whom, and it ended when those households were broken up rather than when a cheaper product arrived. Every part of that is a comment on what actually makes a dog predictable, and none of it is a certificate.

Compare with similar breeds

Salish Wool Dog sits in 3 Bonbeno groups. Each one compares it directly against the breeds it is genuinely an alternative to, on the same figures.