The American Bulldog Before World War II
To understand how close the American Bulldog came to disappearing, you have to first understand what the breed was before the crisis hit. In the decades before World War II, the American Bulldog was a working farm dog -- primarily in the American South, but present across rural America wherever farmers needed a dog that could do hard physical work.
These dogs caught feral hogs and cattle. They guarded homesteads. They worked alongside farmers and hunters in territory that could be rough, hot, and demanding. They were not show dogs. They were not pets in the modern sense. They were tools -- highly valued tools -- in an agricultural economy that needed exactly what they offered.
The breed was not formally registered. There were no kennel clubs promoting it. There were no organized shows. What there was was a network of farmers, hunters, and working dog people across the South who kept the blood going because the dogs worked, and because working dogs were part of how the land was managed. The American Bulldog survived not through formal preservation effort but through use.
What Changed After World War II
Several forces converged after World War II that devastated the American Bulldog population in a short period of time.
Urbanization
The postwar economic boom accelerated a trend that had been building for decades: Americans moving off farms and into cities. The cities and suburbs that grew explosively in the late 1940s and 1950s had no use for a hundred-pound working farm dog. Families that had kept American Bulldogs on their homesteads for generations moved to places where that dog simply could not go. The demand for working farm dogs collapsed along with the farming economy that had sustained them.
Mechanization of Agriculture
Simultaneously, the work the American Bulldog had been bred to do was being replaced by machinery. Feral hog and cattle operations were being handled differently. Smaller farms were being consolidated into larger, more mechanized operations. The specific working roles that had justified keeping large, high-maintenance dogs were disappearing from the landscape.
The War Itself
World War II directly disrupted the informal breeding communities that had sustained the breed. Men who had kept working bulldogs left for military service. Some did not return. Others returned to different lives in different places. The informal networks of breeders and working dog people were scattered, and with them went the institutional knowledge of bloodlines and breeding practices that had been passed down without formal documentation.
There was no registry to fall back on. There were no studbooks. When the people who knew the dogs were gone, the knowledge of what those dogs represented went with them.
No Formal Breed Community
This was the knife's edge the breed was balanced on. Breeds that were registered with the AKC or other formal bodies had some institutional protection -- their records existed, their standards were written down, there were clubs and breeders with an organized interest in preservation. The American Bulldog had none of that. It existed entirely in the hands of individual working dog people, with no documentation and no formal community to sound an alarm when the population started to decline.
How Close Was Extinction?
By the late 1940s, the American Bulldog had been reduced to a remnant population scattered across the rural South. Dogs that fit the traditional type existed, but they were rare, they were not being actively preserved, and there was no coordinated effort to maintain the population. The remaining animals were in the hands of individual farmers who valued them as working dogs without necessarily thinking of themselves as breed preservationists.
If the postwar urbanization trend had continued for another decade without anyone taking active steps to collect and breed the remaining dogs, the type would almost certainly have been bred out of existence. Mixed with other breeds, replaced by other dogs, simply allowed to die off as their owners aged -- the outcome would have been the same either way. The American Bulldog as a distinct breed would have ended.
The Preservation Effort
What changed the trajectory was the deliberate action of a small number of individuals who recognized what was happening and acted to stop it.
John D. Johnson
John D. Johnson returned from military service to his home in Summerville, Georgia, and found the breed he had grown up with in crisis. He began traveling through the South specifically looking for the remaining working bulldogs -- the dogs that still matched the original type, that could still do the original work. He evaluated dogs on Southern farms, selected the best specimens, and began building a breeding program with deliberate intent.
Johnson's program was the first systematic effort to preserve the American Bulldog as a distinct breed. He kept records. He selected for type, working ability, and soundness. He was not rebuilding the breed from scratch -- he was working with what remained -- but he was bringing intentionality and organization to a process that had previously been entirely informal. Read the full story of Johnson's breeding program →
Alan Scott
Alan Scott, working from Tifton, Georgia, undertook a similar effort with similar foundations. Like Johnson, he was searching for the remaining working bulldogs in the rural South. Like Johnson, he brought systematic selection and breeding intent to what he found. Scott and Johnson collaborated in the early years, sharing dogs and information, working toward a common goal.
Their collaboration -- and their eventual divergence into the Classic/Bully type (Johnson) and the Standard/Performance type (Scott) -- is the origin story of the modern American Bulldog's two-type structure. Read the full story of Alan Scott's contribution →
The Slow Recovery
Breed recovery from a population bottleneck is not fast. The work Johnson, Scott, and the other early breeders did in the late 1940s and 1950s built a foundation -- but the breed population remained small and fragile for years. The work of expanding and strengthening that population continued through the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, as more breeders discovered the breed and joined the effort to grow and document it.
ABRA -- the American Bulldog Registry and Archives -- was established in 1998, co-owned by Lance and Lesli Rose since 2005, as the formal documentation home for the breed. The work of building and maintaining a comprehensive pedigree database is a direct extension of what Johnson and Scott started: the conviction that documented history protects breeds in ways that informal tradition cannot.
Why This History Matters for Preservation Today
The near-extinction of the American Bulldog is not just history. It is a warning about what happens to breeds without active preservation -- and a clear argument for why registration, pedigree documentation, and responsible breeding matter.
The breed exists today because a handful of people refused to let it disappear. The 12,000-plus dogs documented in ABRA's pedigree database are the recorded result of that preservation effort. Every dog added to the archive, every litter registered, every pedigree searched and verified -- these are acts of preservation that build on what Johnson and Scott started.
A breed that came this close to extinction once can face pressure again. The commitment to documentation, to health testing, and to placing dogs with owners who understand and respect the breed is how the community ensures that the story from the 1940s does not repeat itself.