Sarcomas are malignant tumors arising from the embryonic mesodermal cell lineage. This group of cancers covers a heterogenous set of solid tumors arising from soft tissues or bone. Many features such as histology, biological behavior and molecular characteristics are shared between sarcomas in humans and dogs, suggesting that human sarcoma research can be informative for canine disease, and that dogs with sarcomas can serve as relevant translational cancer models, to aid in the understanding of human disease and cancer biology. In the present paper, risk factors for the development of sarcoma in dogs are reviewed, with a particular focus on recent advances in clinical genetics, and on the identification of simple and complex genetic risk factors with a comparison with what has been found in human orthologous disease.