Labrador Retriever

🌍 Overview

The Labrador retriever held the AKC number one spot for 31 straight years until the French Bulldog overtook it in 2022, and it still ranks number 2. Originally bred in Newfoundland, Canada, to retrieve fish and waterfowl for fishermen, Labradors were refined in England into the versatile working and companion dogs known today. Their exceptional trainability, gentle temperament and strong retrieve drive make them among the most common breeds used as guide dogs, search-and-rescue dogs and therapy animals worldwide, and there is a genetic thread connecting that trainability to the breed's weight problem: the POMC deletion that drives food motivation runs at a 45 percent allele frequency in assistance dog breeding stock against 12 percent in the general Labrador population.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

The founding population was cut off early. Newfoundland's St. John's dogs reached Britain aboard trading ships in the 1830s, and the Earls of Malmesbury built a kennel around them at Heron Court. A meeting between the Malmesbury family and the Duke of Buccleuch in the 1880s produced the transfer of two dogs, Ned and Avon, whose descendants are the foundation of everything that followed. Then the supply closed: Newfoundland taxed dogs that were not kept for herding, and British quarantine rules on imported dogs shut the Atlantic route, leaving breeders to work with the animals already in Britain. The Kennel Club recognized the Labrador as a separate breed in 1903 and the AKC registered it in 1917.

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