This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate De Mayo.

Her ancestors, just how many generations back we can't know,

but historians and researchers and the sorts of people who spend so much of their lives

parsing and cataloging and policing,

this is what they do, the purity of bloodlines.

They know, with remarkable clarity that in the 1850s, her ancestors used to crawl in the cracks and

crevices of coal mines to go eat rats.

That is why Yorkshire terriers are so small.

Scottish coal miners who had come down to Yorkshire in the north of England to find work

wanted that miserable work to at least be vermin free.

And so over time, over generations, they bred terriers, selecting

traits that would make the offspring more ideally suited to the task. And at some point,

some of those traits, the size, certainly, perhaps the hair texture,

that is kind of like the brush of a chimney sweep when you think about it, probably made

particularly easy to shake off the coal dust, and other traits of whatever

evolutionary utility, they became desirable for other purposes, mostly for sitting on

people's labs. These rat killers that they had bred

were adorable and portable.

And then people started to breed for traits

that were useful for a cute little lap dog. It is likely they introduced them all teas into the hereditary

mix at some point in the 1860s. And the Yorkshire Terrier, as we know it today was born.

We don't know precisely when the Yorkie at the center of this story was born either, but it was

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