Which dog breed was bred to run beside carriages?

The Dalmatian, which has unusual stamina for its size and was bred to trot for hours alongside horses - guarding the carriage, clearing the road ahead, and calming the horses, with which it gets on unusually well. It moved to fire stations for exactly the same reason, running with the horse-drawn engines, and stayed on as a mascot after the horses went.

The spots are not there at birth. Puppies are born pure white and the pattern develops over the first weeks, which is unusual, and it is linked to the same genetics that gives the breed a high rate of congenital deafness - somewhere around 15 to 30 per cent of Dalmatians are deaf in one or both ears. The pigment cells that colour the coat are also required in the inner ear, and a dog bred for large white areas is a dog short of them.

They also have a metabolic quirk shared with no other dog and, of all things, with humans: a defect in how they process purines, so they excrete uric acid rather than converting it further. That makes them prone to urinary stones, and it means the breed is used as a model for studying gout.