The Only Known Pelt of an Extinct Woolly Dog Has Returned Home to British Columbia After 160 Years

This extinct dog was raised for its wool and its only known pelt has finally returned to canada.

For more than a century and a half, Mutton lay far from the place where his life story began.

The small, pale dog died in 1859, and his pelt eventually entered the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it survived while the woolly dogs once raised across the Pacific Northwest disappeared into extinction. Now, the only known pelt of this extinct dog breed has returned to British Columbia, on loan to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia through August 2027.

For Indigenous artists who still practice traditional Salish weaving, Mutton’s return carries particular weight. Woolly dogs were once deliberately bred by Coast Salish communities for their dense fur, which women spun into yarn and wove into prized blankets, robes and clothing. Although the dogs disappeared in the 19th century and the weaving tradition was nearly lost under colonial rule, contemporary weavers such as Atheana Picha and Debra Sparrow have helped revive that knowledge.

“The woolly dogs were a big part of our family life,” Picha, a Tsartlip First Nation artist and weaver, told The Globe and Mail. “Having met this relative now, who left us 200 years ago, is pretty powerful.”

Mutton’s pelt also carries something oral histories alone could not preserve: its DNA. A 2023 study published in Science, built around Mutton’s genome and Indigenous knowledge, showed that woolly dogs represented a carefully maintained lineage stretching back thousands of years. It also challenged the idea that the dogs simply became obsolete when European-made textiles arrived.

A dog bred for wool

Woolly dogs were small, light-colored animals with pointed faces, curled tails and dense, crimped coats. Salish and Makah peoples raised them specifically for their fur, often mixing dog wool with mountain goat hair and plant fibers to make strong, warm yarn. Native Americans never domesticated native wild sheep, unlike peoples in Eurasia who managed livestock herds.

The woolly canines did not simply wander among other village dogs. Oral histories describe women keeping them apart, sometimes on small islands, to prevent crossbreeding. They were combed, shorn and given rich foods such as salmon and elk to maintain their coats.

“There was a very selective breeding process that ensured the quality of the fur,” Jordan Wilson, the museum’s curator of Pacific Northwest and Contemporary Indigenous Art, told the Vancouver Sun.

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The genetics add weight to the folklore. Researchers compared Mutton’s DNA with ancient and modern dogs and found that about 85 percent of his ancestry came from precolonial North American dogs. His genome also showed signs consistent with generations of tightly controlled breeding. Among more than 11,000 genes examined, the team identified 28 associated with hair growth and follicle development, including genes linked to woolly or curly hair. The genetic and archaeological evidence suggests the distinctive lineage had been maintained for as long as roughly 5,000 years.

That is remarkable because Mutton lived decades after European dogs had arrived in the region. Even then, Coast Salish communities had managed to preserve much of a distinctive Indigenous dog lineage.

But how did the dog disappear?

The most convenient explanation is that machine-made blankets simply made woolly dogs unnecessary. But newer research points to a much harsher story.

The 19th century brought epidemics, displacement, the Gold Rush and colonial policies that suppressed Indigenous cultural practices and forced assimilation. Industrial textiles changed weaving economies too, but researchers concluded that they could not explain the disappearance on their own. Indigenous knowledge collected alongside the genetic study instead pointed toward the cumulative destruction of the social systems that had allowed people to maintain the dogs for generations.

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“This dog was bred out of existence in large part because of all the transformations wrought by settler colonialism,” Wilson told Global News.

Mutton himself lived amid that transition. He was the companion of George Gibbs, a naturalist working on the Northwest Boundary Survey, although researchers do not know how Gibbs acquired him. Gibbs recorded that Mutton became ill and died at about 18 months old. The dog had been shorn at least once before his death, and his pelt eventually traveled to the Smithsonian with other specimens.

Today, Salish weaving has undergone a revival, and researchers are examining historic textiles for traces of woolly dog hair. Mutton’s sequenced genome could eventually help identify those fibers more confidently.

For Picha, however, the pelt’s meaning is already visible without sequencing.

“Seeing the fibres on the pelt, they’re already twisting,” she told The Globe and Mail. “They want to be spun. It’s just hungry to be turned into a blanket, turned into warmth.”