Our Story:
Our tale begins in 1977, when Gabriel Bonnet founded the American Registered Mutt Association (ARMA) as a social registry for Mutts, formed out of a love and respect for canines of questionable heritage.
Inspired by our family puppy Pippin, Gabe wanted to showcase the superiority of the mixed breeds, and create a community for our scrappiest best friends (and maybe send a not-so-subtle dig to certain purebred clubs to fight back against the discriminatory practices of their snobbish ilk).
Advertising only in airline inflight magazines, Gabe sold $3 memberships, dog tags ($5) and t-shirts ($6) and built a hand-written registry of nearly 1,500 registered Mutts. The highlight of the enterprise was a feature story (with photo!) in Parade Magazine.
Alas, Gabe was ahead of his time and so, despite the undeniable genius of his idea, conducting a side business from rural Colorado via snail mail and typewriter proved challenging to sustain — especially for someone with a full-time pediatrics practice, an alfalfa farm, and three kids under 12 who (strangely and annoyingly) were not that interested in taking over the family business at the time.
Gabe shelved ARMA and we all got on with our lives.
Cut to today -- America has had its first rescue dogs in the White House with, ahem, a few behavioral issues (some of us can relate, amIright?) and pretty much every household adopted a shelter dog to get us through that lonely Covid quarantine.
And now we have the internet, an ungodly number of ways to connect socially, and an embrace of rescue dogs who have been elevated to a ridiculous position of adoration in our families, so it seemed like the time was right to relaunch ARMA.
So here we are and we’ve gone global —ARMA Mutt Club 2.0 is now the World Mutt Society.