A look at the inaccuracy and inconsistencies in breed labels

When we visually idenfity dogs, we’re confusing the public with guesswork and misinformation, plus, we’re potentionally creating negative consequences for dogs and people in society.​

Recently, we’ve noticed a disturbing trend of some people falling back on old habits of randomly labeling dogs. These habits often relate to labeling dogs “pit bull” or “blocky-headed-whatevers.” It’s not new information that these labels are entirely arbitrary and applied inconsistently based on a person’s personal opinion.

In 2019, we spent some time in South Carolina and visited a lot of shelters and met with a lot of great workers and voliunters – but, we saw a lot of inconsistent labeling.

We used some images of the labeled dogs to show how inconsistent and subjective breed guesses are. 

We grouped our findings by label to show how different most of these dogs are from one another. Get ready, because there are a lot of pictures of a lot of dogs – and a lot of labels that are about to make you very confused!