I'm having trouble designing this fictitious dog breed; it's not like a species, in which case I can go haywire and place it in a fitting environment afterwards, or just build it off an existing environment and go haywire from there. Instead, it has to fit human necessity.
It's meant to be an "all-around," hardy, working dog breed. It lives primarily in northern regions and should be able to herd livestock, guard property, track game, and survive on its own, if necessary.
Ultimately, these dogs will become a feral variety in the northern provinces of Raleia that will occasionally interbreed with the local Raleian wolves, producing "wolves" with noticeably dog-like features. A few of my characters are such wolfdogs, so I figured it would be best to design the dog before the characters.
I aimed for a sort of shepherd-spitz-malamute-pitbull-wolf-elkhound... thing... with a dash of the real-life Balto. However, it turns out that AKC standards won't help at all; the best sled dogs are mixed breeds (like Balto! Except his owner wasn't a fan of his body type and castrated him. Oh, well.) and the majority of breed standard-meeting purebreds are near-useless in practice. On top of that, many of the breed histories are partially falsified. Not helpful at all, that.
If you can, in any way, critique or redline my deru, it would be incredibly helpful! :)
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