Why French Bulldogs aren't actually French (and other breed-name lies)

The French Bulldog is not French.

Almost everything you'd guess about the breed's origin from the name is wrong. They were bred in Nottingham, England, by a community of lace workers, mostly as workshop companions. The reason they became "French" is one of the better small stories in industrial history, and it's not the only breed whose name tells a similar lie.

This post is about the surprising origin of five breeds whose names mislead you about where they actually came from.

French Bulldogs: Nottingham, England

In the early 1800s, Nottingham was the lace capital of the world. Hundreds of small workshops, mostly run by skilled lace-makers, produced the fine bobbin lace that dressed half the European aristocracy. The work happened on stationary lace-making frames, the workers spent ten or twelve hours a day at them, and the workshops were often cold.

The workshops were also full of mice and rats. The lace-makers wanted small, brachycephalic (flat-faced) Bulldogs — bred down from the older fighting Bulldogs of England into a smaller, friendlier companion type — to keep the rodents out and to sit on their laps for warmth.

Then the Industrial Revolution killed Nottingham lace. Machine-made lace became cheaper than the bobbin product almost overnight. The skilled lace-makers, suddenly unemployed, did the rational thing: they followed the money to Paris, which still wanted hand-made lace at couture prices.

They brought their toy Bulldogs with them.

Paris loved the small dogs. The Parisian middle class adopted them as fashionable pets. The breed picked up the "Frenchie" nickname in Paris, refined its standard there, and became identified with French café culture. By the time the breed standard was formalized in the late 1800s, everyone called them French Bulldogs.

The English, mortified, tried to call them "Bouledogues Français" to claim them back. They lost. The dog stayed French in name.

German Shepherds: also from there, kind of

German Shepherds are German, but the story has a wrinkle. The breed was formalized in 1899 by Captain Max von Stephanitz, who was deliberately trying to create a national German working dog by standardizing local shepherding dogs from southern Germany. So the name is technically correct.

The wrinkle: during World War I and again in World War II, British and American kennel clubs renamed the breed to disguise the German origin. From 1917 to 1977, the UK Kennel Club called them "Alsatian Wolf Dogs" because nobody wanted to walk a "German" anything down a London street. American clubs called them "Shepherd Dogs" without the country qualifier. The breed only officially became "German Shepherd" everywhere again in 1977.

So the breed name is honest — but it spent 60 years lying for political reasons.

Chihuahuas: probably not from Chihuahua

The state of Chihuahua, Mexico, gave the breed its modern name in the 1850s when American visitors started buying the small dogs from local farmers. But the breed itself almost certainly didn't originate there.

Genetic and archaeological evidence traces Chihuahuas back to the Techichi, a small companion dog kept by the Toltec civilization in central Mexico from roughly 900 AD. The Toltec capital was Tula, in the modern state of Hidalgo — hundreds of miles from Chihuahua. The dogs spread north and were still being kept by farmers in Chihuahua in the 1800s, but they weren't bred there.

There's a competing minority theory that the breed descends partly from Maltese-type dogs brought over by Spanish colonists, but the Toltec origin has the stronger evidence. Either way, the breed's actual ancestral home is several hundred miles south of the place that named it.

Pomeranians: from a region that doesn't really exist anymore

Pomerania was a region on the southern Baltic coast, split today between Germany and Poland. Pomeranians as a breed do come from there — that part of the name is accurate. The wrinkle is that "Pomerania" as a political entity disappeared, was redrawn, and was renamed multiple times during the breed's modern history.

The dogs we now call Pomeranians are also much smaller than the original Pomerania spitz dogs were. The early Pomeranians were 20-30 pound sled-pulling and herding dogs. Queen Victoria, on a trip to Florence in 1888, fell in love with a small variant called Marco — only about 12 pounds — and brought him back to England. Marco's smaller size became fashionable. Within two generations the English breed standard was selecting hard for tiny dogs, and the modern 4-7 pound Pomeranian replaced the older type.

So a modern Pomeranian is descended from Pomeranian sled dogs but is itself a 19th-century English creation, sized down by aristocratic taste.

Dalmatians: probably not from Dalmatia

This one is unsettled. The breed is named for Dalmatia, the coastal region of modern Croatia, and there are 1700s references to spotted dogs working as carriage escorts there. But spotted dogs of the same type also appear in earlier Egyptian, Greek, and English records. The genetic origin of the modern breed is unclear.

The Dalmatia connection comes from one specific use case: the dogs were popular as "carriage dogs" for the nobility of the Republic of Ragusa, an aristocratic state on the Dalmatian coast that traded heavily with England. English visitors saw the dogs, brought them home, and started calling them Dalmatians.

The breed standard was formalized in England, and the spotted carriage-dog look was refined into a fashionable English carriage and firehouse dog. By the time the standard was set, Dalmatia barely had any of the original carriage dogs left.

Why this keeps happening

There's a pattern. A breed gets associated with the fashionable place that adopted it, not the working place that bred it. French Bulldogs became Parisian café dogs, so they're French. Dalmatians became English carriage dogs, so they got named for the aristocratic Dalmatian gentry who first showed them off. Pomeranians became toy dogs in Queen Victoria's England, so the English version became canonical.

This is also why a lot of "Italian" or "French" or "English" breeds are smaller, prettier, and more polished than their working ancestors. Aristocrats and bourgeoisie selected for the lap, not the field.

The original working dog is usually still out there in the region of origin, doing its actual job, looking nothing like the show-ring version. It just doesn't get the breed name.

If you've got a Frenchie at home: she's an immigrant from Nottingham who ended up rich in Paris and famous in the world. The bat ears, the snorty breathing, the scrunched face — all of it was selected by aristocratic taste, not by hunting or work. She is, by design, exactly what someone wanted to put on a lap.

That's also part of why she's one of the most distinctive shapes our AI generates as a custom plush pillow. The selective breeding that made her look so specific also makes her instantly recognizable when rendered.

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