As a dog owner I agree, but as a dog enthusiast/wannabe scholar I'm troubled by how misunderstood and poorly studied dogs are as an animal. The breed encyclopedia/kennel club stories are extremely unscientific and inaccurate to the point of being farcical, there should be some effort by someone to accurately classify and catalogue dog lineages and dog types and understand them. It's very odd that it isn't already thoroughly understood and easily searchable clear information. For any other species it would be, but dog info is monopolized by stuffy kennel clubs which are stuck in a cartoonishly ignorant 1800s state of mind. 

If their official story is mastiffs are a family of large heavy dogs which were used to fight lions and soldiers in war, and it's total BS, I want to know and figure out what the real story is. I want to understand what the evolved dog lineages really are and why they are, what they actually arose to do before any BS tales were dreamed up by dog show people.

Real dogs are real natural animals that fill a niche as role players in the social units of hominids, so that's the angle I like to approach their study. More recently people have taken some and made them into silly beauty pageant contestants for dog shows and given them breed names and wrote little fairy tales for them. I try my hardest to ignore all that or at least cut through it.