Background

In the dim drizzle of a Seattle January, I welcomed a desert wanderer to my doorstep – long-limbed, bronze-eyed, and rather suspicious of my synthetic lawn.

She had already crossed more borders than most humans, though I suspect no one had ever really invited her in before. Certainly not into a house with central heating, a coffee grinder, and a dog bed made of memory foam just for her. She stepped cautiously through the door, but even so, she seemed ready for this. This dog watched. She waited. She stayed.

Her journey had begun near Petra in Jordan, where she was born under open sky and scavenged among ruins of a very different civilization. A crushed shoulder, courtesy of some unknown calamity, set her on a new course. From street to hospital, foster to foster, checkpoint to checkpoint, she made her way across continents with the help of humans who saw in her something worth saving.

On paper, she was a Rat Terrier. Or maybe a Miniature Pinscher. One vet suggested Canaan Dog, which at least got us closer to the right desert. But none of those labels really fit – not her sinewy look, not her trilling vocals, not her direct manners. Though dogs like her make up the majority of the world’s canine population, they rarely appear in breed books like those I pored over as a kid, or options in veterinary databases (apparently). They are hard to categorize and easy to overlook, and in the places they’re most common, they often go unnamed. In the places they’re rare, they’re mistaken for mutts. She wasn’t a breed. She was something older.

What she was, was adaptable. Cautious, but not afraid. Watchful, but never wild. Within days she had negotiated a truce with our intimidating staircase and claimed a spot on the balcony from which to keep watch over the passing Amazon trucks and daytime drama at the bus stop. She made friends with every new person immediately, and mourned when the plumber who gave her gentle pats had to leave for another job. She followed me, not obsessively like my pedigreed Dalmatian or nervously like my foster Chihuahuas, but as if her interests were just happily aligned with mine. She fit, almost eerily well.

I’d fostered many dogs before her – scared ones, scrappy ones, sweet ones trying their best. But this was different. She wasn’t trying. She already knew.

And as I would come to learn, that kind of canine wisdom doesn’t come from breeding. It comes from being a Village Dog.

Wanting to understand what made her and others like her around the world such unique creatures, I dove into research. One question led to another, reading became writing, and soon the journey became literal. This book is the record of that ongoing quest: a winding trail through science, history, conservation, and culture, all in pursuit of the story behind these remarkable dogs.

Maybe you already know about Village Dogs, or maybe, like me, you’re just beginning to realize that dogs weren’t simply made by us. Long before we had the idea, they were making themselves. They still are, though in many places, the dogs who walked with us from the cradles of civilization have been nearly replaced by the tidy, purpose-built forms of manmade breeds.

This book endeavors to be for anyone curious about the dogs that came first, and what they can still teach us.

• Lorien Gremore, Author