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Breed library

Breeds, grounded in the canine knowledge graph.

Every card below pulls from the same data that drives the 3D atlas of 18,477 dogs. The card shows you the breed's AKC group, size, how many dogs we have in the atlas, and the breed it sits closest to genetically. Open a breed for the full picture: how genetically diverse the breed is, which morphology genes are locked in across it, which Mendelian variants run at observable frequency, and where the breed sits in the wider population.

Where a breed has nutrition coverage, a small badge points to the food guide. The genetics leads. Nutrition follows as a downstream feature, not the headline.

The atlas, by breed

What the research is built on

The atlas is not an even sample of dogdom. A few breeds, led by the GRLS Golden Retriever cohort, carry most of the genomes; the rest form a long tail. That skew is worth seeing, because it is the reason the relatedness and ancestry numbers across the site are corrected for sample size.

Golden Retriever3,52319%
Labrador Retriever1,6109%
Bernese Mountain Dog5323%
German Shepherd3812%
Dalmatian3352%
Irish Wolfhound2862%
Yorkshire Terrier2281%
English Setter1921%
Boxer1921%
Rottweiler183<1%
Newfoundland182<1%
Border Collie157<1%
Australian Cattle Dog141<1%
Belgian Shepherd136<1%
Giant Schnauzer126<1%
Cairn Terrier120<1%
English Springer Spaniel118<1%
Doberman Pinscher117<1%
Cavalier King Charles Spaniel102<1%
Vizsla100<1%

Share of the 18,477-dog atlas. The bars show consumer breeds; the atlas also holds 3,277 Darwin's Ark community-genotyped dogs, 722 NHGRI reference dogs, and 113 research cohorts (2,019 dogs: feral, village, dingo) shown on their own pages, so the breeds here do not sum to 100 percent.

n = 18,477 dogs · Sniff Atlas v1.0.1 (CanVAS / Donner 2023 + GRLS)
Atlas population per breed (research dogs genotyped, not a census of the breed). Share is of the 18,477-dog atlas.

Sporting

8

Bred for the field. Retrievers, setters, spaniels, pointers.

Hound

3

Tracked by scent or sight. Independent worker.

Working

12

Guard, draft, rescue. Built for jobs that matter.

Herding

6

Stockwork lineage. Move animals, read intent, decide quickly.

Terrier

2

Vermin specialists. Compact, brave, willful.

Toy

8

Companion-purpose dogs. Often older and quieter than their image.

Non-Sporting

5

The catch-all group. Distinct lineages that do not fit elsewhere.

Mixed

8

Lineages the AKC does not formally recognize.

How the library works

Genetics first. Nutrition is one feature.

Each breed page leads with the population genetics computed from the atlas: how many dogs we have in the breed, how genetically diverse it is, which morphology genes are locked in across the breed and which still vary from dog to dog, the breed's closest genetic relatives, the Mendelian variants that run at observable frequency. Where we have editorial nutrition coverage, it follows after the genetics, contextualized by what's above. Every number on the page has a source.

For programmatic access: /api/v1/breeds.json is the current catalog (nutrition substrate). The per-breed genetic-neighbor data is at /api/breed/<slug>/neighbors.json. Both endpoints emit JSON under CC-BY 4.0 with permissive CORS; the LLM-discovery file at /llms.txt is the canonical entry point for AI agents grounding on Sniff content.

Read the full technical methodology for how every dimension is computed.