Defence of the mongrel

September 16, 2024

MANILA – When—in a now-viral incident—the Balay Dako restaurant in Tagaytay turned away an “aspin” named Yoda, they were re-enacting a longstanding bias against local dog breeds in favor of foreign ones. “Ano pong breed nya?” pet owner Lara Antonio claimed she was asked, when she sought an explanation.

Dogs have been in the country for a very long time, and they appear to have been valued companions. In a 2018 paper published in the International Journal of Osteoarcheology, Timothy Vitales of the National Museum of the Philippines noted how dogs were buried alongside humans in a 12th- to 15th-century Common Era gravesite in Manila—and we have evidence from the epics, like the hero Lam-ang of having a magical gray dog.

As the historian Ian Christopher Alfonso writes in the commendable “Dogs and Philippine History” (2023), such esteem for local dogs persisted during the colonial period, but eventually—especially from the 19th century onwards—dog breeds began to fall under a hierarchy that curiously and unfortunately mirrored the ways in which human “races” were categorized. As I wrote in a SAPIENS essay back in 2021:

“Colonizers brought with them the idea of valuing ‘purebred’ dogs, which had emerged in England during the Victorian period, around the same time as the rise of scientific racism. Advocates of these ideas held that some dogs had fixed breeds or lineages and that these ‘pure and ancient’ breeds were superior to ‘mongrels.’ Popular breed designations, however, were based on arbitrary characteristics perpetuated by invented classifications and breeding practices.”

During the American period, moreover, as I wrote in the same piece, “Filipinos were exoticized and pejoratively described as