group of closely related and visibly similar domestic dogs
Montage showing the morphological variation of the dog.
A dog breed is a particular type of dog that was purposefully bred by humans to perform specific tasks, such as herding, hunting, and guarding. Dogs are the most variable mammal on Earth, with artificial selection producing upward of 360 globally recognized breeds. These breeds possess distinct traits related to morphology, which include body size and shape, tail phenotype, fur type, etc., but are only one species of dog. Their behavioral traits include guarding, herding, and hunting, and personality traits such as hypersocial behavior, boldness, and aggression. Most breeds were derived from small numbers of founders within the last 200 years. Because of their adaptability and usefulness to humans, dogs are now the most abundant carnivore species worldwide.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).