History
The American Hairless Terrier, the only hairless breed indigenous to the United States, is a naturally occurring offshoot of the Rat Terrier.
Rat Terriers have been around since the early 1800s, when they were developed in England as one of dozens of terrier breeds created to exterminate rats that carried disease and raided food supplies in town and country. Originally called “Feists” as a testament to their feisty temperament, these proto–Rat Terriers were prodigious ratters. They were employed on farms (where one ferocious barnyard Feist was said to have dispatched 2,500 rats on a single day) and in the infamous rat pits, where spectators bet on the number of rats that their favorite terrier could kill.
In the late 1800s, Feists were brought to rural America by British miners who sought a new life. It was here that the Feist was stabilized as a breed with crosses to the Smooth Fox Terrier. It is said that President Theodore Roosevelt, who adored his Feist named Skip, coined the name Rat Terrier.
Fast-forward some 70 years, from Roosevelt’s time to 1972. It was then, in Trout, Louisiana, that a strange thing happened: A hairless was born into a litter of midsize Rat Terriers of normally coated parents. (This is a good place to note that the hairless pups are born with a birth coat that falls out when they are several weeks old.) A couple named Edwin and Willie Scott acquired the hairless and named her Josephine. She was bred and produced Gypsy, a hairless female. Eight years later, after producing several litters of coated pups, Josephine gave birth to a pair of hairless siblings, Jemima and Snoopy. In 1983, Snoopy was bred to his sisters and sired several hairless offspring. A new breed, the American Rat Terrier, was born.
The Scotts continued their breeding program, kept careful records, and founded the first club devoted to their new breed. The breed’s AKC parent club, the American Hairless Terrier Club of America, was established in 2009; the breed gained full AKC recognition in 2016.