Category:Dogs

The biting dog hides its fangs.

- traditional Blessed Isle proverb.

Description

Dogs are a type of animal common across Creation, generally furred, quadrupedal, and carnivorous. They have long been domesticated by humanity, for a wide variety of uses: hunters, guardians, pets & companions, pack & cart animals, mounts, livestock (for their meat), and more. The breeding of dogs for traits fit for each of these roles has resulted in a vast array of different breeds, each very distinct and highly specialized.

Friends-of-Humanity Conclave

There is great dispute over the place of dogs in the Celestial Bureaucracy and the Bureau of Nature’s Hierarchy of Type. When they were first domesticated, the divinities of the original dogs were members of the Friends-of-Humanity Subcommittee of the Canine Conclave, which also contained creatures such as Wolves, Foxes, and Jackals. The subcommittee was originally formed to organize replacement of the gods for domesticated canines, who had perished near the outset of the Primordial War, and in whose absence mutation and chaos had proliferated amongst dogs due to rampant human interference and lack of paperwork. The subcommittee's spirits, unlike their Canine Conclave colleagues, cultivated close links with the gods of the Bureau of Humanity. These connections at first granted them bureaucratic cover from their own superiors, but as dogs became important for tribes and cities across Creation, it allowed them to exert sufficient pressure to dominate the Conclave… the subcommittee came to set the agenda and control the Canine office, the original Conclave absorbed by its own subcommittee. With this coup, ‘canine’ and ‘dog’ became synonymous.

The Friends-of-Humanity Conclave today is somewhat of a misnomer, for it consists of domesticated dogs (the dominant faction by far), as well as those who have gone feral, and wild canines who have no inherent friendship towards humans. In Yu-shan, it has a reputation even amongst today’s corrupt divinities for being lax with its paperwork… an absence of oversight exploited, often unknowingly, by mortal dog breeders practicing their craft. The gods of wild canines have little ability to force change within the Conclave, and spend much time grumbling about better years now past.

The current Alpha of Dogs (head of the Friends-of-Humanity Conclave) in the Bureau of Nature is Arshyan the Stalwart.