...This one, the 'Mercy Dog'.
Let me get right to the point: this was my dog!!!
In 1998, when I was 10 or 11, I emailed one of my favorite breed creators, who had a Tripod page called "Skyblue Kennelz," asking if she'd make my real dog, Mercy, into a breed. Which she kindly did!
The real Mercy was a "lab/dalmatian cross" as far as my child self knew, but this seems less likely in retrospect. She looked a lot like a labrador, but nothing like a dalmatian (not even the spots, which were more like ticking). She was a Very Good Dog no matter what she actually was, but that's why the Dogz II breed based on her was described as a lab/dalmatian on the original Skyblue Kennelz site.
However, the download itself was called MERCYDOG.EXE (a bit ominous in retrospect!), and for some reason this was the name that stuck as the breed made its way to other sites, eventually including Minibyte's Petz Archive, who not only preserved the breed but ported it forward to Petz 3, 4 and 5. Minibyte was a dedicated archivist, still well-known among Petz-heads despite not being active for over 15 years, who realized that -- even back in the mid-00s -- a lot of the efforts of very creative and talented kids were at risk of becoming lost media.
In Petz 3 onward, you could breed two petz together to create mixed breeds that inherited traits from both parents. Although the Mercy Dog was created to resemble a mixed breed, it originated with Petz II which lacked this feature. Once it was ported to the later games, it was a 'purebred' as far as those games were concerned, and could now be crossed with other breeds to create actual mixes.
From there, it apparently gained a few fans, possibly helped by the intrigue of Minibyte's description.
Like Dali Central, a 'dalmatian rescue' offering adoptable dalmatian mixes. They used the Mercy Dog as a basis for many of these mixes, basically taking this 'mixed breed' that wasn't, and breeding it out to create actual mixes with lots of neat variations! I love the specificity of this project, modeled after breed-specific rescues in real life, which usually have more mixes than purebreds. This site is still up as of writing this! But I'll be making sure it's well-documented on the Wayback Machine too.
The white chest ball with black spots is an identifying feature of the Mercy Dog, visible in many of its descendents pictured above. Breed editing skills, and the tools and tutorials with which to do so, have come a long way since 1998. It was beyond most of our skills to do more than change the color, pattern or size of an entire pre-existing ball on the pre-existing breed you were working from. (I'm not an expert on the history of hex editing, but I'm not sure we even knew what paintballz were pre-millennium, let alone how they worked.) Patches of color that don't wrap around an entire ball, such as the one seen on "Creamsicle" in the image above, were inherited from one of the official breeds.
So, rather than having a spotted white splash on the front of the chest like the real Mercy, the Mercy Dog wears a 'vest' of dalmatian patterning around the whole chest and back. Very striking and not a flaw in my opinion! "Mercy Dogs" resemble a real dog who existed, and they exist in turn because of an 11-year-old who loved her (and a kind creator who responded to that kid's request!), but they're their own thing, too. That's perfectly fitting, since this breed was out there being loved by others who knew nothing about all of this context.
Here's one detail that gets me: Mercy Dogs were originally an edit of the official dalmatian breed introduced in Petz II, and it seems like the proprietor of Dali Central mixed them with, among other things, the official labrador breed. So if the real Mercy was never actually a lab/dalmatian cross, and neither was the Mercy Dog (being basically a dalmatian with aesthetic tweaks), then apparently she has some digital descendents who actually are! And I think that's just so cool?? This was just happening out there somewhere, and I never knew.
There's also this person who posted to a forum almost seven years ago asking about the breed. Long enough ago that I wonder if they'll ever see the email I'm about to send them, but still much more recent than most of this. It really gives a peculiar feeling to know that someone was still thinking about this breed almost 20 years after it was created. (Hi if you're reading this! I hope this isn't too weird! I've redacted your email in the screenshot above just so your contact info isn't out there on some random person's website.)
Maybe it had a certain mystique for some people, not knowing why the heck this thing was called 'Mercy Dog' when most fan-created breeds were either real life breeds with normal names, or at least intentionally weird. This was just a labrador with a white chest and feet -- why was it called Mercy Dog? Well, now you know! I hope it doesn't spoil the magic too much ^^
In the end it was my partner who found the breed for me by asking the Petzcord community for help, which they offered immediately! I'm very grateful to them for making sure this breed still exists after 25(!) years. It was Minibyte who originally saved this and many, many other breeds from becoming lost media -- the downloads on the original Skyblue Kennelz weren't archived on the Wayback Machine, so they might have been truly lost if not for her efforts. Then, as even more time passed and her archival project became itself in need of archival, more folks picked up the torch. I can't tell you how special it is to have this little piece of my childhood back after all this time. Mercy's been all over the internet making new friends and I never even knew!
And finally, here they are: the Mercy Dog breed files, as zipped by Minibyte circa 2006, for Petz II, 3, 4, and 5.
~Sig 6.7.2025
P.S. If you're interested in Petz stuff generally, watch this space! I've just started playing again recently for the first time in over 20 years, and I think I might have some worthwhile stuff to contribute to the community, like breedz and tutorials -- such as how I managed to get the game running on Linux Mint as someone who, uh... well, someone who made THIS webpage. So I might go ahead and spin up a whole Petz website and link back to it from here.