I KNEW I COULD COUNT ON YOU TO ENABLE ME.
So, Dalmatians are at their core a stagecoach guardian. That’s what they were initially developed as.
(This can take people by surprise when they get a Dalmatian as a pet, sometimes. Mind you, some show-line Dalmatians are bound to perfectly nice pet-quality dogs who don’t have much of the actual breed instinct left; but these are not meant to be low-energy dogs, and they’re not at all programmed to be super friendly toward strangers by default.)
So, they’re stagecoach guardians; a well-bred, breed-typical Dalmatian was meant to run alongside a stagecoach for…basically ever, and to snap at anyone who got close enough to threaten the coach or risk getting in the horses’ way.
A brief digression away from dogs for a second, to talk about pre-automobile fire departments.
The essential detail here is that we’ve had fire departments since basically ever (and they were….not infrequently straight-up protection rackets of the “nice place you got here. shame if it caught fire and nobody was willing to come put it out for you” variety, but that’s another story). And we’ve had fire engines for much longer than we’ve had automobiles.
These fire engines (here’s one example) would be drawn by a team of horses, as fast as they could manage in the streets, to the scene of a fire once the alarm was raised, same as today. They’d have bells clanging and alarms going off, same as today. And, same as today, once they got to the fire, all the firemen on board would pour off, throw on the brakes so the engine didn’t roll away, and, you know, focus on fighting the fire.
At which point, because people have always been people
There was a very real problem in which bystanders would steal the fucking horses.
Like…these were powerful, fast-but-strong, extremely well-trained coach horses! They were valuable as hell! And it’s not like you’re stealing the fire engine, after all, right? It’s parked, taking the horses doesn’t mean the building burns down or whatever, you’re just….gonna walk off with them all casual-like.
So obviously, fire departments would prefer to not have to constantly purchase expensive horses and train them to be safe around fire all the time. So they needed guard dogs to watch the horses while they were distracted by the burning building. And the dogs needed to be nimble–no big slow heavy mastiffs–and able to keep up, and have an intrinsic instinct to guard horses. And if they were easy to (haha) spot coming, even better.
Dalmatians are firehouse dogs because opportunistic thieves were doing the 1800s equivalent of stealing fire engine hubcaps and putting the pump up on cinderblocks while everyone was looking the other way.
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