Every dog breed comes from somewhere: a Scottish estate, a Yorkshire mill town, the Paris lace trade, the palaces of China. Most are now loved somewhere else entirely. This is a map of where the world's breeds were born, set against where people register, buy and read about them today.
Ask a kennel club in Paris for the country's favourite breed and the answer is a dog from the Scottish Highlands. Ask in New York and it is a dog from France. Ask in Tokyo and it is the Poodle, which the international breed register files under France, followed by a dog from Mexico. Dog breeds are one of the most travelled things people have made: almost all of the ones we know were fixed in a handful of countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then exported everywhere.
I mapped 573 breeds to the country they come from, using the international breed register kept by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI) where a breed is in it, and Wikidata and Wikipedia where it is not. Then I collected the latest published registration figures from 10 national kennel clubs, and, for countries without open figures, a clearly labelled stand-in: how often people read each breed's Wikipedia article in their own language over the last year.
Countries are shaded by how many breeds come from them. Britain leads with 72, then France (57), United States (51), Spain (39) and Germany (38). Europe as a whole accounts for 69% of the breeds on the map. Click a country to list its breeds. Use UK detail to zoom into Britain, where 20 breeds can be pinned to a county, valley or estate.
Origin: FCI country of origin for FCI-recognised breeds; otherwise Wikidata (country of origin) and then the English Wikipedia infobox. Historical places are mapped to today's country (England, Scotland and Wales to the UK, Tibet to China, the German Empire to Germany). UK points: hand-checked from English Wikipedia, located with OS Open Names or county boundaries. Outlines: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
Now each country is coloured by its most popular breed, and the colour says where that breed comes from. Blue is a British breed, red a French one, gold a German one. Solid colour means a kennel club's own registration figures; striped colour means my Wikipedia stand-in, where no club publishes open figures. Click a country for its top breeds and where each was born.
Kennel clubs (solid): Dogs Australia (ANKC) (Australia, 2025); Canadian Kennel Club (CKC) (Canada, 2025); Suomen Kennelliitto (Finland, 2024); Société Centrale Canine (LOF) (France, 2025); VDH (Germany, 2025); Japan Kennel Club (JKC) (Japan, 2025); Norsk Kennel Klub (NKK) (Norway, 2025); Svenska Kennelklubben (SKK) (Sweden, 2025); Royal Kennel Club (UK, 2025); American Kennel Club (AKC) (United States, 2025). Stand-in (striped): user pageviews of breed articles in each country's main Wikipedia language, 12 months to September 2026; editions shared by several countries (Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, German, French, Chinese, Serbian, English) give the same answer for each of them. Base map tiles © Esri.
Of the 10 kennel clubs, 8 have a number one breed that was born in another country, and 6 of those 8 are British breeds. Only Germany (German Shepherd) and the UK (Labrador Retriever) put a home-grown dog first. Across the top ten breeds of every club, 79% were bred abroad.
Where each kennel club's top ten were born
Each row is a club; each square is one of its ten most registered breeds, in order, coloured by the breed's country of origin. Outlined squares are home-grown.
The French Bulldog is the clearest case. It is a French breed, but it is the American Kennel Club's number one for the fourth year in a row, the Japan Kennel Club's number 7 (9,578 dogs in 2025), and in Britain it briefly overtook the Labrador: 36,785 registrations in 2018 against 36,526 Labradors. It is not in the French top three. In Germany, the VDH's member clubs bred only 43 French Bulldog puppies in 2025, a reminder that club figures count pedigree breeding, not every dog. Britain's boom has also ended: from 54,074 in 2021 to 7,750 in 2025.
The rise and fall of the French Bulldog in Britain
Royal Kennel Club registrations a year, 2016 to 2025, for the breeds that were in the top five in any year (varieties added together).
Where a club publishes counts for every breed, I can add up the share of all registrations that are breeds from that country. Britain is the most self-sufficient: 61% of Royal Kennel Club registrations in 2025 were British breeds. Germany's VDH clubs bred 44% German breeds. In Australia, home-grown breeds were 3%, and in Japan 2%: the Japan Kennel Club's registers are dominated by small European and Mexican dogs.
Registrations by the breed's country of origin
Share of all registrations in 2025 (VDH: puppies bred by member clubs). Clubs that publish counts for every breed.
Most countries do not publish open breed registrations, so for them I used a proxy: the breed whose Wikipedia article was read most in the country's main language over the twelve months to September 2026. This measures curiosity, not ownership. It can be tested where both exist. In 6 countries with both, the stand-in names the club's own number one in 0 and a club top-three breed in 1. Japanese Wikipedia's most read breed is the Shiba Inu, while the club's number one is the Poodle; Swedish Wikipedia's most read breed is the Cane Corso, while the club's number one is the Labrador Retriever; Finnish Wikipedia's most read breed is the Finnish Lapphund, which is in the club's top three (the club's number one is the Labrador Retriever); Norwegian Wikipedia's most read breed is the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, while the club's number one is the Golden Retriever; German Wikipedia's most read breed is the Belgian Malinois, while the club's number one is the German Shepherd; French Wikipedia's most read breed is the Belgian Malinois, while the club's number one is the Golden Retriever. So read the striped countries as a rough guide to which breeds people are curious about, not a census.
Two patterns stand out. The Cane Corso, an Italian mastiff breed, is the most read breed in 12 of the 42 editions, English included (1,248,433 views in twelve months), far ahead of its place in any registration table. And several editions read most about their own national breed: Finnish Lapphund (Finnish), Canaan Dog (Hebrew), Icelandic Sheepdog (Icelandic), Shiba Inu (Japanese), Kangal Shepherd Dog (Turkish).
Pageviews: daily user views over the 60 days to 28 October 2026 (MediaWiki PageViewInfo) to pick each edition's four most read breed articles, then monthly user views October 2025 to September 2026 for those four (Wikimedia REST API). Candidates: the 200 breeds with the most Wikipedia language editions, plus the Pomeranian.
A breed's country of origin is not always settled. The FCI assigns each breed one country (sometimes with a "country of patronage" that looks after its standard), and Wikidata often lists several. For 319 breeds that have both, they share no country at all for 8, and Wikidata lists extra countries for 5 more. The Jack Russell Terrier is British by origin but the FCI records Australia as the country where it was developed; the Shih Tzu and Lhasa Apso are filed under Tibet (China) with Britain as patron.
Breeds. Wikidata items that are instances of dog breed (Q39367 or a subclass), 1,148 items retrieved on 28 October 2026, joined to the FCI nomenclature (364 breeds, definitive and provisional) by FCI number or name. I kept breeds that the FCI recognises or that have an English Wikipedia article, and dropped crossbreeds, lists, duplicates and extinct breeds, leaving 573. Wikidata coverage is uneven: national and regional breeds from countries with active editors (Spain, Russia, the United States) are better covered than breeds from Africa or South Asia, so counts by country partly reflect who documents breeds.
Origin. For FCI breeds I used the FCI's country of origin (363 breeds), otherwise Wikidata's country of origin (168) or the English Wikipedia infobox (42). Where a breed has two origin countries I map the first listed. "Origin" means where the modern breed was fixed, which is often not where its ancestors came from: the Labrador was developed in Britain from dogs of Newfoundland.
Registrations. Each club counts something slightly different: the Royal Kennel Club, the Japan Kennel Club, Dogs Australia and the Swedish club count registrations; the VDH counts puppies bred by its member clubs; the French figures are births entered in the LOF. Clubs that list varieties separately (the six Dachshunds and three Poodles of the Royal Kennel Club, for example) are added together here, which is why the Dachshund is third in Britain. The AKC and Canadian club publish ranks, not counts. France, Canada, Norway and Finland come from press releases or press reports of club figures and cover only the top few breeds; Finland's are for 2024. Registered pedigree dogs are a minority of all dogs, and the gap varies by breed and country.
Stand-in. Wikipedia pageviews by language are mapped to countries where that language is the main one. Shared editions give one answer for many countries and are striped more lightly on request. Pageviews follow news and novelty, and readers of a language are not all in one place.
Not covered. Mixed-breed and non-pedigree dogs, which are most dogs in most countries; dogs registered with other bodies (for example the United Kennel Club); and the many countries with neither open club figures nor a single main Wikipedia language.
Breeds: Wikidata (CC0), queried through QLever (University of Freiburg) and the Wikidata API, 28 October 2026. FCI breeds nomenclature, Fédération Cynologique Internationale, https://www.fci.be/en/nomenclature/ (factual fields: group, country of origin, patronage). English Wikipedia breed articles (CC BY-SA 4.0) for infobox origins and the UK birthplace sentences. Registrations: Royal Kennel Club breed registration statistics 2016 to 2025; American Kennel Club, Most popular dog breeds of 2025; VDH Welpenstatistik 2011 to 2025; Japan Kennel Club 犬種別犬籍登録頭数 2025; Dogs Australia national registration analysis 2018 to 2025; Svenska Kennelklubben press release of 13 January 2026; Norsk Kennel Klub press release of 15 January 2026; Canadian Kennel Club top ten for 2025 as reported by The Canadian Press; Société Centrale Canine 2025 figures as reported by Breizh-Info; Suomen Kennelliitto 2024 figures as reported by Verkkouutiset. Registration numbers are used as facts with credit; no text is reproduced. Pageviews: Wikimedia Foundation pageviews (CC0). Outlines: Natural Earth (public domain). UK places: OS Open Names (Open Government Licence v3.0, contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026); county boundaries from ONS (OGL v3.0). City labels: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Base map tiles © Esri.