24/12/2025
Working class people with bully breeds isn’t a problem or a cliche or anymore ‘typical’ than a shepherd with a collie or a man in tweed with a Labrador and ranger rover.
The idea of “status dogs” isn’t new, modern, or confined to one social class, it’s ancient human behaviour dressed up in contemporary panic.
For as long as dogs have existed alongside people, breeds have functioned as cultural signals, hunting dogs marked land ownership and aristocracy, mastiffs and guardian breeds symbolised power and protection, lapdogs telegraphed wealth and leisure, working dogs communicated utility, identity and belonging.
In Victorian Britain breeds became social shorthand as class structures solidified, terriers, bulldogs, sighthounds and toy breeds all carried meaning far beyond function, and that symbolic use of dogs intensified, not reduced, as societies industrialised.
What we are seeing now is not a new phenomenon “he got that dog to try and look aggressive” but a reframing, where modern policy debates collapse complex social signalling into simplified moral narratives, using breed choice as a proxy for virtue, risk, class anxiety and political alignment.
The science is clear that humans use visible markers to communicate identity and affiliation, and dogs, like clothing, accents and hobbies, sit squarely in that space, pretending otherwise makes us historically illiterate. When we talk about “status dogs” as though this is some modern moral failure, we ignore centuries of evidence showing that humans have always used animals to express identity, power, protection and belonging, the panic isn’t about dogs, it’s about discomfort with who we think those dogs represent now - news papers turning “status dogs” into “bad people with bad dogs” is just another way mainstream media beats down lower economical social classes. ###
