Bris is an accomplished dog trainer who spent many years showing them in the American Kennel Club. As a young trainer, he primarily worked with Pit Bulls and Bloodhounds. But his interests always shaded more toward the wilder side of nature.
“I wanted to train a wolf or dingo, but couldn’t get my hands on one,” he says.
As a researcher at the SREL, Bris’ job was to wander into the preserve — a point of pride he held over the site’s nuclear physicists, who were cooped up in their offices — to trap and tag the fur-bearing animals. On these trips, he’d frequently see wild dogs on his trips into the field, but he identified them the same way the locals did: porch dogs, yaller dogs. Until a day in 1976 when his ex-wife brought one of those wild strays home and something clicked in Bris’s mind.
“I had a gee-whiz moment,” Bris said. “I looked down at this dog my wife had brought home from the Savannah River site and said, ‘You look like a dingo.’”
That’s when Bris first thought these wild dogs in the swamp along the Georgia-South Carolina border were more than a bunch of mutts.
The history of dogs is convoluted and filled with unproven theories. Indulge me for a moment while I go through a short, hypothetical history of the dog, according to Bris. The first dogs are thought to have originated from wolves somewhere around the Middle East. These were smaller, more docile wolves. The Arabian wolf, Ethiopian wolf and Iranian wolf are suspected to be possibles origins for the first dogs. From there, dogs split into two lines: those developed in Europe and those developed in Asia. The Asian dogs are more primitive and wolf-like.
The line disseminated through Asia, with the dogs following human camps across the continent. Primitive dogs remained in certain places, eventually developing into entirely separate breeds. This line travels through South Asia, leaving dogs like the dhole to inhabit India. At this point the line splits again. One line goes farther south, through Sumatra, Borneo, and New Guinea, where the singing dog is left. The other line went north through China and Korea.
Which brings us to about 14,000 years ago when Carolina Dog-types followed camps of humans across the Bering land bridge and settled in North America. The American wild dog was largely hybridized out of existence in most places where large human populations existed. But in those pockets of land without large populations, namely the rural South, these wild dogs can still be found unhybridized. Bris summarizes it more simply.
“There still exists, in some possibly isolated pockets, within remote pieces of habitat in the United States, dogs that carry many of the morphological, behavioral and socio-ecological traits of the first dogs that came over the Bering land bridge. Rural areas with large expanses of natural habitat is where this dog survives unhybridized.”
Bris became fascinated with the breed. He finally had the wild dogs he always wanted, and he had living among the whole time. With the help of the United Kennel Club, Bris developed a breed standard and stud book, recognized by the UKC in 1995. Bris said dog show judges love Carolinas.
“The judges look at these dogs and say, ‘God, they’re perfect. Their stifles (knees), their feet. Everything about them is perfect.’ And I say, ‘Yeah. That’s what Darwin did, along with 14,000 years of survival of the fittest.’”
As the overseer of the stud book, Bris is the only person who can say whether or not someone owns a Carolina Dog. While Bris and I sat under the shade of a rundown trailer adjacent to the dog pens, Penny in between us, I asked him the question that had toyed with my mind for more than a year since I first searched for ‘American dingo’: Is Penny a Carolina Dog?
Since no DNA tests exist to prove whether a dog is a Carolina or not, Bris rattles off the three criteria for a Carolina Dog: what they look like, where they come from, what their pups look like.
Penny fits the description physically and comes from around Lavonia, near the Georgia-South Carolina line. So she’s good on both of those accounts. But as a dog from an animal shelter, I was required by law to spay Penny, though at the time I still had no idea how special her breed is. With no puppies, we’ll never know for sure if she’s a Carolina Dog.
But Bris said he’d call her one, and that I should, too.
When he found out she was fixed, he was dismayed in a way that seemed familiar to him. Penny would have made a wonderful addition to the captive gene pool since she was probably born in the wild. However, most people with wild-caught Carolina Dogs get them from shelters and only find out what they have years after the dog has been fixed. Penny is one of hundreds of such that Bris has seen.
“She’s got everything going for her, except ovaries,” Bris said.
But, for Bris, the best part of his wild ride with Carolina Dogs is the surprise and excitement that comes with learning something new about them. And that’s both from finding things out about scientific studies that infer Asian ancestry in the DNA of Carolina Dogs, as well as finding a Carolina Dog like Penny.
“I love the surprise of figuring out new stuff, like the proceedings of the Royal Society,” Bris says. “And then the surprise of Penny, an absolutely beautiful Carolina Dog, who is so laid-back and so unconcerned with anything that she is just perfect. What more could you want?”
