The West Virginia Brown Dog

Rescue dogs in West Virginia come in all shapes, sizes, and breed configurations, but there’s one thing you’ll notice when you survey your choices: most of them are brown. More specifically, their hues trot along the color wheel, from ecru to tan to the color of wet dirt, but basically, what you’ve got is a mess of brown dogs to choose from.

I have one of these brown dogs. She’s dog number three. Does anybody really need three dogs? Probably not. Two is manageable, and we had two. Then, I got that assignment.

Admittedly, it was my idea to write about a local rescue called The Road Home Animal Project for a northern West Virginia publication. I asked the rescue president to bring a foster dog to our interview for a photo. She brought Minnie. Minnie wore a green tartan puffer coat. Her ears stuck out from the sides of her head like Yoda’s, and her deep, dark eyes sat large on her face. She trotted along with us at the park as we talked, sniffing the ground and winding her leash around our legs. She’d been in foster care for several months, and her siblings had been adopted. The rescue couldn’t understand why nobody wanted her.

By the end of our interview, someone did.

Minnie’s arrival unleashed chaos. Within weeks, our house was trashed, our carpets stained. My wooden spoons were splintered, and the remote control looked like it had been gnawed by an angry beaver. Sleeping in on Saturday mornings was out of the question, as was sleeping alone. (I’d assumed Minnie would sleep in her crate, but when I went back and read the “Where Puppy Will Sleep” clause in my puppy contract, it clearly said, “Puppy will sleep on human’s pillow, without exception.”)

What have I done, I asked myself. Life was so simple. Everybody was house-trained and nobody chased the cats and all the kids’ stuffed animals had heads. I yearned for my old, easy life as I shivered in the snow at 2am while she sniffed the ground, too distracted to pee. I mourned as I fired up the carpet steamer—again—and chased her through the supermarket parking lot when she leapt out of the car. I wondered why I thought I needed a puppy. Not that she kept her puppy body long—within months she’d gone from twiggy to barrel-shaped, and her head began to catch up with her ears, growing into a dense cube she used to whack our knees and butt the cats away from their bowls. She was adorable in that funny-looking way, but it was hard to figure out what Minnie was. On the inside.

Technically, Minnie’s a mixed breed, but here in the Mountain State, she’s what’s known as a West Virginia Brown Dog. The West Virginia Brown Dog may not be recognized by the American Kennel Club, but it’s a real thing. So real, in fact, that the Kanawha-Charleston Humane Association declared June 20, 2013 “West Virginia Brown Dog Day,” in honor of our state’s 150th birthday. Shelter visitors could adopt a West Virginia Brown Dog for $20. The ads didn’t include a formal description of the discounted canines, but they didn’t need to. West Virginians know one when we see it.

The West Virginia Brown Dog is smallish but sometimes biggish. It’s sturdy but possibly delicate or, conversely, a brutish lug. It’s not petite—unless it is—and it’s usually somewhere between Labrador- and chihuahua-sized. It probably has hound in its DNA, which you’ll see in the way it follows its nose, and pit bull, which you’ll see in the shape of its skull. The West Virginia Brown Dog is adaptable, loyal, ornery. It’s a well-tempered, squirrel-chasing counter-surfer. It rides in trucks and Subarus and canoes. It hikes, goes to the office, and sleeps on your furniture. You can dress it in a sweater, sports jersey, or puffer jacket; West Virginia Brown Dogs go with everything.

The rescue advertised Minnie as a miniature pinscher mix, and as she grew into weird proportions, we imagined what other breeds might lurk in her DNA. I saw beagle; my husband stuck with min pin. We both saw American pit bull terrier in her stoutness and clownish behavior. But the West Virginia Brown Dog recipe can have many ingredients, and puppies often come from a long line of other West Virginia Brown Dogs, so it can be difficult to identify which pure-bred ancestor claims responsibility for a block head or curly tail. Overcome by curiosity, we ordered a doggy DNA test, swabbed her cheek, and waited.

I think we’re fond of these brown dogs because we see ourselves in them. Not only in their scrappy, adaptable nature, but also because the ancestry of a West Virginia Brown Dog reads a lot like that of a multi-generation West Virginian. Swab our cheeks and you’ll find a heavy dose of Scots-Irish heritage, a good bit of German and English, and a smattering of Welsh, Swiss, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and African American. You’ll also hear a variety of accents. In my hometown of Wheeling, many speak as Pittsburghers do: my grandfather, a Harvard-educated, fourth-generation Wheeling native, worshed his clothes and trimmed the booshes. In the central and southern parts of the state, you’ll hear the speech of Appalachia, traditionally referred to as Appalachian English. Some scholars have claimed it’s an archaic, Elizabethan throwback. In 1978, Dr. Cratis Williams of Appalachian State University wrote, “the dialect of the Appalachian people is the oldest living English dialect, older than the speech of Shakespeare, closer to the speech of Chaucer.” That’s debatable. More likely, the dialect evolved from the speech of those Scots-Irish ancestors, and variations exist within the different regions of Appalachia. North Carolinians sound noticeably different from West Virginians because, like West Virginia Brown Dogs, little about Appalachian English is uniform, not even the way Appalachians pronounce the word “Appalachia.”

Most Appalachians say Appa-latch-uh, and many feel that if you say it with a short a, you’re a true Appalachian; if you say it with a long a—as in, Appa-lay-shuh—you’re an outsider. Sharyn McCrumb, an Appalachian author from North Carolina, went as far as to say, “Appa-lay-shuh is the pronunciation of condescension, the pronunciation of the imperialists, the people who do not want to be associated with the place, and the pronunciation Appa-latch-uh means that you are on the side that we trust.” Not everyone agrees.

Appalachia North author Matthew Ferrence grew up in western Pennsylvania. One might not immediately think of Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, eastern Ohio, and southern New York, as Appalachia, but, per the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), they are. In Ferrence’s memoir, he recalls grad school at West Virginia University, where he learned from other Appalachians that he’d been pronouncing the word incorrectly. The realization reframed what he thought he knew about himself and his fellow Pennsylvanians.

“…I grew up among Appalachians who pronounced ourselves as App-uh-lay-shuns. What does it mean when you grew up as a boy saying the word wrong? What does it mean when you’re from a place where everyone did?” Ferrence considers the notion that he and his fellow northern Appalachians were, therefore, “bad Appalachians, deniers of our heritage, willful self-exiles.” But Appalachian scholars, he writes, agree that there’s no correct pronunciation, despite what the McCrumb crowd crows in loud numbers.

The debate isn’t likely to be resolved, even in West Virginia. Like its signature brown dog, the state may be more easily defined by what it isn’t than what it is. And it’s not just the state’s inhabitants and their linguistics that are a mixed breed—it’s West Virginia itself. Because nobody is quite sure where we fit in this country, geographically speaking. Not even us.

West Virginia is the only state that lies entirely within Appalachia (as defined by the ARC). On an extremely long day trip, you could travel through South Central Appalachia, Central Appalachia, North Central Appalachia, and arrive in my neck of the woods in Northern Appalachia, having never left the state. Four of the five ARC-defined regions cover West Virginia territory, making us an Appalachian Brown Dog, too.

In terms of region, the U.S. Census Bureau lists West Virginia as a Southern Atlantic state. However, the “west” in West Virginia came about because we chose to leave the south. Still, southern West Virginians tend to identify with the south anyway, while northern West Virginians feel like northerners. True northerners would probably disagree; culturally, West Virginia couldn’t be more different from New York or New England. So, when asked, we offer a vague quip about being the northernmost of the southern states and the southernmost of the northern states and leave it at that.

In terms of latitude, we’re too mountainous, our land too crinkled by plate tectonics and erosion, to be considered central, like our immediate neighbors in Ohio. Some—like the Bureau of Labor Statistics—call us a mid-Atlantic state, but the foreboding Allegheny Front shields us from the busyness and density of the other mid-Atlantic states, and we remain a quiet vacation spot for D.C. residents. The Federal Trade Commission labels us “east central,” with Ohio and Michigan. The US Office of Management and Budget lumps eastern West Virginia counties in with cities like Cumberland, Maryland; Alexandria and Arlington, Virginia; and Washington, D.C. itself, for statistical purposes. How could we possibly know where we belong? The only thing we truly know is that none of these out-of-state places feel much like West Virginia.

Something changes when we leave West Virginia. Regional differences within the state cease to divide us. Our home is the common thread in our mixed-breed DNA, the reason why, when ex-pats and college kids return, they inevitably take a photo of the “Wild & Wonderful” sign at the state line and post it with a hashtag like #countryroadstakemehome. Beyond our borders, we’re all just West Virginians, defined by our inability to fit anywhere else.

West Virginia is the mutt. The proud brown dog that declared independence in 1863 and continues to do so. Don’t call us western Virginia. We aren’t Pittsburgh or D.C. We’re West-by-God Virginia, locked in by rivers and mountains, curving and windy and infuriatingly impassible without a map and Dramamine. We like our hot dogs with mustard and slaw and our actual dogs vague and mud colored. Like Minnie.

The results of Minnie’s DNA test surprised us. I was wrong—she isn’t beagle. She is miniature pinscher and pit bull. The other ingredients included Golden retriever, chihuahua, American Eskimo dog, boxer, pug, and something the lab calls a supermutt, which may be American bulldog and/or Cesky terrier. There’s a lot of room for uncertainty, and we never know which breed is causing the behaviors we laugh at. Certainly, Minnie wouldn’t be what she is without those breeds, but even if we could define her, each West Virginia Brown Dog is more than the sum of its twisting chromosomes.

When I started including #WVBrownDog in social media postings, I discovered other West Virginia Brown Dog owners whose loving companions look like mine. They’re out there. And while some states have chosen an official breed, as North Carolina did with the Plott hound, the West Virginia senate adopted a resolution in 2020 to designate an official state canine: the humble shelter dog. They are brown. They are motley—mutts born to mutts born to mutts. The breed standard, if one existed, would list but one essential characteristic: a loyal heart bred in West Virginia.

Laura Jackson Roberts is an environmental writer and humorist. Her work has appeared in places like Brevity, Hippocampus, Still, and Terrain, and she is a regular contributor to Wonderful West Virginia and West Virginia Living magazines. A lifelong West Virginian, she lives in Wheeling with her human and canine family.