1164

THE TRANSHUMANCE DOGS – THE FLOCK GUARDIANS
By David Hancock

Historians around the world have been very neglectful of man’s benefit from the immense contribution of pastoral dogs, especially those used in transhumance – the movement of stock over vast distances, often mountainous terrain. Admittedly there are few artefacts, whether written or material, accounting for their role and impact. But from Portugal in the west, right across to the Lebanon and then on to the Caucasus mountains in the east, from southern Greece, north through Hungary (Kuvasz and Komondor) to most parts of Russia (their Owtcharkas) there are powerful pastoral dogs to be found, developed over thousands of years to protect man's domesticated animals from the attacks of wild animals. Some are called shepherd dogs, others mountain dogs and a few dubbed 'mastiffs', despite the conformation of their skulls. Their coat colours vary from pure white to wolf-grey and from a rich red to black and tan. Some are no longer used as herd-protectors and their numbers in north-west Europe dramatically decreased when the use of draught dogs lapsed. Not surprisingly, some common characteristics link these widely-separated breeds: a thick weatherproof coat, a powerful build, an independence of mind, a certain majesty and a strong instinct to protect. As a group, they would be most accurately described as the flock guardians. In North America they are usually referred to as Livestock Protection Dogs or LPDs.

 In south-west Europe these dogs became known in time as breeds such as the Estrela Mountain Dog, the Cao de Castro Laboreiro and the Rafeiro do Alentejo of Portugal and the Spanish or Extremadura 'Mastiff'. To the north-east of the Iberian peninsula, such dogs became known as the Pyrenean Mountain Dog or Patou, on the French side, and, separately, on the Spanish side, as the Pyrenean 'Mastiff'. In the Swiss Alps they divided, as different regions favoured different coat colours and textures into the 'sennenhund' or mountain pasture breeds we know today as the Bernese, Appenzell, Entlebuch and Greater Swiss Mountain Dogs and the Alpine Mastiff, which is behind the St Bernard, a breed once much more like the flock-guardian phenotype. In Italy, local shepherds favoured the pale colours now found in the Maremma Sheepdog and the very heavy coat of the Bergamasco. In the north-west of Italy, the Patua or Cane Garouf, the Italian Alpine Mastiff may soon be lost to us. In Corsica, their flock protector, the Cursinu, is also under threat as numbers fall. In the Balkans, similarly differing preferences led to the emergence of the all-white Greek sheepdog and the wolf-grey flock guardians of the former Yugoslavia, the Karst of Slovenia, the Tornjak or Croatian Guard Dog and the Sar Planinac of Macedonia.

 Further east, other breed-types were stabilised into the Barachesto and the Karakatchan of Bulgaria, the Kuvasz and Komondor of Hungary, the Romanian Bucovina, Carpathian Shepherd and Mioritic Shepherd Dogs, the Tatra Mountain Dog or Goral of Poland, the Slovakian Kuvasz or Liptok, the Mendelan (widely used in bear-hunting) of north Russia and the Owtcharkas of south Russia and in the Caucasus – with varieties in Dagestan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. In Kyrgystan there was the Kyrgysian Shepherd Dog; in Tajikistan the Dahmarda or Tajikistan Mastiff; in Mongolia the Mongolian Livestock Guarding Dog; in Turkmenistan the Turkmenian Shepherd and in Uzbekistan the Torkuz and the Sarkangik. In the Himalayan regions appeared the so-called Tibetan 'Mastiff' or Do-Khy, the Bhotia or Himalayan Mastiff, the Bisben, the Bangara 'Mastiff', the Sage Koochi or Powinder dog of Afghanistan and the closely-related Powendah dog of north-west Pakistan. In Iran there is the Sage Mazandarani.

 In central Europe, protective breeds like the Beauceron, the Briard, the Bouvier (meaning drovers' dog) des Flandres, Bouvier des Ardennes, Bouvier de Roulers, Bouvier de Paret, Bouvier de Moerman, (with only the Flanders and Ardennes dogs surviving), the Giant Schnauzer and the Hovawart emerged. Kennel club breed names have blurred the herding dogs and the flock guardians; the latter treat their livestock as siblings, the former regard them as prey, with the prey-pursuit instinct subdued then modified into protection. In Scandinavia the long-extinct Dahlbo-hound, the size of an English Mastiff, was used to guard the cattle of the Dahlbo people in forest pastures. Whilst where Europe and Asia meet, types now referred to, perhaps mistakenly, as breeds: the Anatolian Shepherd Dog (a western title), the Kangal Dog, Karabash (black-headed), Akbash (white-headed), Kars Dog, near the border with Georgia, and the Kurd Steppe Dog developed in separate areas, with a very attractive shepherd dog coming from the Kastamonou area, near the Black Sea. The Slavic dogs are named ‘owcharkas’ (or sheepdog, coming from their word ‘ovtsa’) but often written as ‘ovcarka’ too. In their Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution (Scribner, 2001), a ‘must-read’ for researchers of these dogs, the Coppingers mention a recent study by KORA, a Swiss conservation programme, that identified 26 countries from western Europe across to Tibet, with around 50 versions of flock guardian dogs; these cannot truly be called breeds because they moved from country to country, were interbred and could only be differentiated by location not type.

  I believe that these pastoral dogs originated with the dogs of the Indo-European peoples (hunters then nomadic shepherds) who migrated south 3,000 years before Christ. The East Indo-Europeans moved from just north of the Caucasus Mountains around the northern shores of the Black Sea to settle in Greece and Anatolia and south-west of the Black Sea into Turkey. Over the next two thousand years, this migration continued, to produce the settlements of the Slavs, Illyrians and Thracians in the west and similar civilizations east of the Caspian Sea, south-east to the Tibetan plateau and south to the Indus valley. Just look at the resultant distribution of such big herd-protectors: the Maremma of Italy, the Estrela Mountain Dog, the Transmontano Mastiff or Cao de Gado Transmontano and Cao Rafeiro do Alentjo of Portugal, the Kuvasz of Hungary, the Anatolian Shepherd Dog, the Pyrenean Mountain Dog, the Bulgarian Sheepdogs, the Tatra Mountain Dog of Poland, the Romanian Shepherd Dog, the Sar Planinac of Yugoslavia, the Transcaucasian Owtcharka and the Himalayan dogs. Some of these modern types may have developed separately as breeds over the last thousand years but the similarities are all too obvious. Local preferences have manifested themselves, with black and tan dogs being favoured in northern Switzerland (rather as with the Beauceron in nearby France and the Rottweiler in neighbouring southern Germany) and the red and white of the St Bernard in the south, more like the big dogs of the Pyrenees, the Abruzzi and the Greek and Yugoslavian mountain areas.

   Where did these flock guardian breeds originate? The history of dog is the history of man; when tribes migrated their valuable flock-guarding dogs went with them. The flock-guarding breeds have three principal elements in common: their general appearance, their protective instincts and the fact that they are found wherever the Indo-Europeans settled. This latter area stretches from northern India through Iran into NW Asia, E Europe, the northern Mediterranean countries, N and W Europe to the British Isles as well as the southern hemisphere. As a type they are the most widely spread of all canine varieties. Three thousand or so years ago, the people from the area north of and between the Black and Caspian seas, using their mastery of the horse and their invention of the wheeled chariot migrated to the west, south-west, south-east and due south. These mobile pastoralists, over the next thousand years or so, were to reach the Tibetan plateau and the river Indus in the east, the Taurus mountains in Anatolia and the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in the south and then beyond the rivers Rhine, Danube and Po in the west and south-west to form what eventually became the Celtic, Italic, German, Baltic, Illyrian, Thracian, Slav and Greek settlements.

 Extensive trade was conducted between western Anatolia and the Mediterranean littoral, from southern Portugal and Spain to southern Italy and Greece. Valuable hunting and flock-guarding dogs would have been coveted and then traded. Agricultural and social change both affected the way the flock-guarding dogs developed and so too have climate and terrain. In Poland for example the Tatra Mountain Dog is a large thick-coated breed whereas the Portuguese breed of Rafeiro do Alentejo is lighter-coated but still sizeable. Man's dependence on huge dogs to guard his livestock is not however as dramatic as war and hunting and because shepherds were not usually literate, it rarely features in art or literature. Yet sheep migration alone has historic significance, both over the movement of people and their culture. The Foundation for Transhumance and Nature in Switzerland has estimated that there are 77,000 miles of sheep trails in the world, with each migration averaging from 370 to 620 miles. International boundaries had no importance

 It is forgiveable to believe that such breeds are sizeable because they need to be able to see off wild animals that prey on sheep. But much more important are the bigger stride afforded by size, the ability to carry more fat reserves and store more heat than a small dog and to survive disease, severe weather and the odd accident - big bones break less easily than tiny ones. This is why such breeds possess a similar phenotype; the Estrela Mountain Dog is easily confused with a Slovenian Karst or Caucasian Owtcharka, or a Maremma with a Tatra Mountain Dog. The Caucasian Owtcharka can resemble the early St Bernards, the Alpine flock guardian, too. The shepherds, drovers, stockmen and traders in such dogs knew what made a dog effective and therefore more valuable. It is wrong however to breed for great size alone in such breeds, dogs on long migrations were 60lbs weight not the 100lbs+ often desired in breeds like the St Bernard and the Newfoundland, that suffer badly in extreme heat. The warmer the migration route the lighter the dogs had to be to cope with the temperature. The more substantial dogs – with heftier frames, able to conserve heat – featured further north or purely in mountainous regions.

   In a country with sixty per cent of its land surface made up of mountains, it is not surprising to find that Switzerland has more breeds of mountain dog than any other nation. We have known of the Mount St Bernard dog for many centuries and the Bernese Mountain Dog increasingly over the last decade. But the other three 'sennenhund' breeds: the Appenzeller, the Entlebucher and the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog are not yet established in the United Kingdom, although the Entlebucher is making ground here and has an interim breed standard authorized by the KC. The Greater Swiss, however, is making headway in the United States, where it was introduced in 1968. Now there are around 200 of them there, a slow but sensibly-paced increase based on a careful selection of imports and well-planned breeding to maintain the breed's sustained high level of physical soundness and excellent temperament.

 The four Swiss breeds of Sennenhund (strictly speaking, 'a dog of the Alpine dairy pasture' rather than 'Gebirgshund' or mountain dog) have been utilised in any variety of ways: herd-protector, drover's dog, butcher's dog and draught dog, and their physical strength, willingness to work and equable temperament reflect man's requirements of them. Professor Heim first proposed the generic name, sennenhund, for the four tricolour Swiss breeds but it was opposed by the early breed-devotees of the Bernese dog. The name is of course misleading for the Senn, the cattle herdsmen of the Alps, kept either small, fast, nimble dogs or none at all. The big dogs were employed in the valleys where the farmers wanted dogs that would not hunt or wander but instinctively guard the homestead. They wanted dogs impressive enough to deter ill-intentioned strangers yet be well-disposed towards the family.

   It is simply absurd to claim that these breeds were known as such by the Romans or descended from Molossian dogs. The Roman armies would have found (rather than introduced) big guard dogs, and very ferocious ones too, in all the mountain areas they invaded. Such big dogs were found all over the mountainous areas of Europe at the time the Molossian dogs were being extolled by Greek and Roman intellectuals. Why pick out the big dogs found in Epirus so specifically? It is also incorrect to claim centuries of pure-breeding behind each of these big Swiss breeds of dog. Researchers quoting from the German author Strebel (Die Deutschen Hunde,1904) and Professor Heim, a geologist not a historian, need to exercise great care. Newfoundland fanciers are aware of some of Professor Heim's rather unusual theories on their breed.

   The other Swiss breeds show no signs of exaggeration. The Entlebucher, 16-19", tricolour and short-tailed, has survived bad times through the dedicated interest of people like Franz Schertenleib and the veterinary surgeon Dr. Kobler. Coming from the Entlebuch region in the Lucerne canton, mainly between the valleys of the Little Emme and the Enteln, they are alert, agile, sure-footed dogs, eager to work and make themselves useful, sharper and nimbler than their sister breeds. The Appenzeller, resembling the Rottweiler from further north, is a bigger, 19-23" and 48-55lb dog, also tricolour, with a short, thick, glossy coat and a full tail, curling over the back. Coming from the Toggenburg valley around St Gall, it was once known as the Toggenburger or Toggenburg Triebhund (drover). Watchful, vigilant, full of vitality and more boisterous than the look-alike Entlebucher, it was used with sheep and cattle and as a draught dog.

    The bigger (25-28") Grosser Schweizer Sennenhund (or Greater Swiss Dog of the Alpine high pastures, once called the Bouvier Suisse) is more like a shorter-coated Bernese Mountain Dog and it surprises me that this breed has only recently been favoured in England. In America it is an outstanding obedience trialer and is considered an ideal family dog, sturdy, robust, friendly by nature but instinctively protective, gentle with children and easily managed. The big Bernese farm dogs came in different colours, tricolour, red, yellow and red with white. The old records show all these colours and they were not bred separately. From the middle of the last century, the cheeseries were built in the valleys and on the lower slopes and farmers began to use big draught  dogs to bring milk there by dog-cart. When the St Bernards became fashionable after 1850, some of the bigger red and yellow dogs were actually sold as St Bernards. The tricolour dogs fell out of favour except in a few isolated places like Schwarzenburg in the south of Berne. Here the people were less well off and had poor roads. They found big draught-dogs extremely useful to dairymen, butchers, basket-weavers, tool-makers and traders in garden produce. These dogs were bought and sold at an inn called Durrbach-Gasthaus and became known as Durrbach-dogs.

    The breed histories of the Swiss tricolour breeds compare most favourably with the sheer nonsense written about the St Bernard down the years. And what a pity that is, for the St Bernard is a truly magnificent breed, full of virtue and worthy of our admiration. The St Bernard really doesn't need wildly-exaggerated stories about its prowess in the snow-rescue field. The facts indicate that the role of the hospice-dog was to prevent travellers getting lost in deep snow, rather than rescue them with brandy and blankets. The monks had no fixed ideas on breeding, resorting to outside blood of other breeds and never having success in rearing puppies at the hospice, needing to send whelping bitches down to the valley.  The monks sold or gave away the very large pups and those with long coats. Yet the short-coated variety has never had the acclaim of the longer-coated version. Wynn, in his History of the Mastiff, states that at one stage the monks obtained dogs that were probably identical with those which defended flocks in the Abruzzi mountains. The legendary Barry was a medium-sized short-coated dog. Herr Schumacher has written that around 1830 the monks had to resort to Newfoundland and Great Dane bitches to produce more robust offspring. From 1835 to 1845, huge "Alpine mastiffs" were often recorded and even drawn by Landseer. A dog called L'Ami was exhibited in 1829 as the largest dog in England and as an Alpine mastiff but was probably a cropped-eared Great Dane. Many of the St Bernards imported into Britain from 1860 were described as "coming from the Monastery of St Bernard" but most of them were merely descendants of dogs which had been bred there years before. "Idstone" refers to an outcross to a Pyrenean 'wolfhound' when the hospice kennels were stricken with distemper.

   Looking at contemporary St Bernards I suspect that the master-breeders who developed the breed in Britain towards the end of the last century resorted to mastiff blood to produce the desired massiveness and powerful head and obtain extra stature in the breed. This is perhaps now coming through in excess and the St. Bernard has become very different from every other breed of dog from the mountainous areas of the Western world. But whether true to their ancestor-breeds or not, the big dogs from Switzerland have captured our hearts with their massive grandeur, considerable handsomeness and long-acknowledged qualities as companion-dogs. We are indebted to the Swiss for giving us such widely-admired breeds. The quite remarkable feature of these big dogs is their tolerance, urbanity, restraint and self-discipline - an ideal model for any hefty young human.

   I have been impressed by the Portuguese and Spanish livestock protection breeds and seen some of them at work. I was surprised to learn of a Portuguese judge, when judging his Estrela Mountain Dog entry at Bath Dog Show in 1978, refusing to judge a short-haired exhibit in the same class as the long-haired variety. Shortly after this incident, I was in Lisbon and called on the Clube Portugues de Canicultura, based there, for clarification. I was briefed that both the long and short-haired varieties are within their breed standard, but not interbred. This is to me a needless lessening of the gene pool and can only be yet another manifestation of the dreaded ‘pure-breeding’ mantra. The shepherds I talked to about this matter, just shrugged dismissively and expressed scorn at such a foolish distinction, never respected by them. Their dogs were smaller than the show entry here and those paraded at the World Dog Show held in Oporto and Lisbon in 2001. I asked the shepherds about the other Portuguese breed of this type, the Rafeiro do Alentejo; they pointed to a tawny-yellow solid-coloured dog lying nearby, saying that it was one and their favoured sire! (The others I saw elsewhere of this breed were bi-coloured, several were dappled.) They mentioned, with admiration a breed further north, the Cao de Gado Transmontana, often 30inches at the shoulder and used to get the cattle between summer and winter pastures. The Portuguese shepherds, like all shepherds before them, bred good dog to good dog; breed identity didn’t matter for them.

  In Spain, their Spanish Mastiff is for me, unwisely named. In time, the exaggerators will doubtless aim to make them increasingly mastiff-like, using our Mastiff as a mistaken model. The Spanish Mastiff should be modelled on a companion breed like the Portuguese and Pyrenean livestock protection dogs. Again, the specimens in the field were appreciably smaller, (and noticeably fiercer!) than the exhibits at World Dog Shows, and there were plenty at both the Oporto and Lisbon shows. The working dogs in the high pastures of upland Spain were not all happy to catch the scent of my own dog, secured in my car. They were wolf-grey, around 28 inches at the shoulder and completely at ease with the shepherds’ young children. They were highly suspicious of a stranger like me. They had a much more powerful gait than the show dogs but were lighter in bone and substance. The show exhibits I have seen at several world shows were dangerously over-boned and quite clumsy-looking; this is not a good sign for their long-term future. In Uruguay, developed initially as a Spanish colony and whose main income comes from agriculture, there is a large flock guardian breed, quite similar to the working type of Spanish Mastiff; perhaps a useful source for an outcross should Spanish lines become too close. Here, again, the classic flock guardian physique is seen as function decided form. 

  The countries of the former Yugoslavia are only now revealing the range of breeds, especially in the pastures, developed and valued there. Slovenia has long been proud of its Karst Shepherd or Krasevec, once known abroad as the Istrian Shepherd and worked in the Slovene Karst area around Pivka. Two feet at the shoulder and around 40kgs, silver-grey or dark grey, there are well over a thousand of them, mainly around Ljubljana, where it is widely used as a service dog and guard-dog. From the mountain of that name, in Macedonia, comes the Sarplaninac, a very similar breed to the Karst, in size and coat, with a bigger variety called the Sar Tip. The Tornjak of Bosnia/Croatia is of similar size, but carries its tail high and comes in piebald or white with black patches; in 1997 there were only 200 registered dogs but in the last decade national pride has ensured their survival. The Greek Sheepdog is in the mould of the Maremma, the Kuvasz types and the Tatra dog of Poland, a strapping white thick-coated dog, purely a working dog.

 In Roumania, their old Roumanian Shepherd Dog is now known as the Carpathian Shepherd Dog, in a wide range of coat colours, with the mainly white or piebald Mioritic Shepherd becoming the better-regarded breed by the urban community seeking larger more handsome guard-dogs. Less favoured but equally distinctive, is the Karakachan Dog of Bulgaria, now being specially bred by a conservation organization called Semperviva to deter wolves from pastures rather than face a more drastic culling by organized shoots. Similar breeds in nearby countries such as the Kuvasz and Komondor of Hungary, the Tatra Mountain Dog of Poland and the Slovakian Shepherd or Cuvac show how the white coat in flock guarding dogs has been preferred. This is covered later in the book.

  In their book, referred to earlier, the Coppingers recorded how they sat by the roadside in Macedonia near the Albanian border for over a fortnight studying the thousands and thousands of sheep, with shepherds and dogs, moving from the lowland winter pastures of Greece over to the summer pastures along the border, the annual spring migration to the Sarplanina Mountains. They point out that claims of a separate identity for the Italian flock guarding breed, the Maremmano-Abruzzese, rested on the fact that the two were the same breed, with one much more visible, in Mare-mma, the pasture by the sea, the other, the Abruzzese, less so in the more remote mountain pastures of the Abruzzi Mountains along the central Apennines – but seen in different coats at different times of the year. They found all over southern Europe and the Balkans that the dogs were named after the locality they worked in, not developed as distinct breeds, with separate breed ‘points’. They hazarded a guess that well over a million adult sheepdogs are moving back and forth over three continents in a thousand-mile wide band from the western Mediterranean to somewhere east of the Himalayas, pointing out that each year there is a mixing and remixing of endless populations of dogs. How could ‘breed-sanctity’ be maintained in such circumstances?

   The Coppingers, both biologists, have set up the Livestock Guarding Dog Project at Hampshire College in the USA, based on the Anatolian Shepherd Dogs imported there. The reintroduction of wolves in parts of America, backed by a change of public attitude towards them, led to sheep being lost to them at an unacceptable rate; in 1990 for example, one million sheep a year were lost to wolves at a cost of 22 million dollars. Research into the Coppingers’ project showed that 76 producers who had suffered between 1 and 202 attacks in just one year, found that within a year, after the introduction of dogs, no further losses were experienced, and, no predators had been killed because the dogs had so effectively deterred them. Here, the National Farmers Union has estimated that in 2012, dog attacks on livestock cost farmers in England and Wales an estimated £1 million; there could be a role for flock guardians here although their role and type would need as much careful consideration as their training and location.         

  We have sadly but perhaps inevitably lost most of the flock guarding dogs, including some distinct breed-types, through economic change and the extinction of many wild predators. Working dogs that wore spiked collars, had their ears cropped, fought wolves, gave birth to their pups in a hole in the ground and slept out of doors in the snow and chill wind deserve a better fate than becoming victim to misguided modern breed enthusiasts and their fads. In preserving those breeds which have survived we must remember the essential criteria which led to these flock guarding dogs developing as such magnificent examples of the canine race, such as robustness, a functional physique and size commensurate with soundness. Big flock-guarding dogs have been vital for centuries in countries where sheep are pastured in remote mountain areas.

 Charles Darwin, on a South American tour, noted how such dogs were trained from puppy-hood for their future role. His surprise at finding such dogs is in itself surprising; the mountain pastures of Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Balkans, much nearer home, had featured such dogs for centuries. The flock-master taught the pups how to be suckled by ewes, sleep in a nest of wool and then progress to expect meat at the end of the day at a set location, where the sheep would accompany it. Puppies of the sheep guarding breeds slept with the lambs and sometimes adult bitches allowed lambs to suckle from them. Dog and sheep bonded from such activities, but it was absolutely vital that the whelps lived with the sheep from even before their eyes opened. When flocks of sheep were sold it was common practice to sell the dogs that managed them as well. In this way many sheepdogs went from countries like Britain and Spain to their colonies. This has led to British herding dogs, in particular, becoming not only the most valued in the world but adapted and developed into native breeds in their new countries, as the Australian pastoral breeds aptly demonstrate. The transhumance dogs however still impress us with their grandeur, magnanimity and imposing presence. May they survive the pressures of contemporary life. 

  “I was impressed by some of the Leonbergers and most of the Great Swiss Mountain Dogs, a strapping handsome breed with no exaggerations and a manageable coat. I was less impressed by the Spanish Mastiffs, a flock guarding breed rather than a classic mastiff breed. Their mobility was severely hampered by excessive bone; they were quite unlike the huge but more active spike-collared flock guardians I once saw in northern Spain, actually working for their keep. The Sarplaninac, the big Yugoslavian herder, looked a fine breed, but I find it very difficult to distinguish this breed from the Kraski Ovcar or Karst Shepherd Dog from Slovenia. Both were entered and I really needed an expert on each breed to enlighten me on their differences. Both resembled a wolf-grey Estrela Mountain Dog. The Tibetan Mastiff entry was impressive, with many looking far bigger than the ones I see here, and with a wider range of coat colours. The Russian Owtcharkas were imposing dogs and not to be trifled with.”

       From my own article in Dogs Monthly on the Dortmund World Dog Show, 2003.