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🪵 Handcrafted Miniature Dog Breed Sculptures
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Presidential - Teddy and the bull terrier by @k9krafted

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7 days ago

Rottweiler IGP by @k9krafted

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7 days ago

The Doberman exists because a tax collector wanted to get home alive.

Karl Friedrich Louis Dobermann worked in Apolda in Thuringia in the 1890s and held an unusual stack of jobs. He collected taxes, he worked nights as a watchman, and he was the town dogcatcher who ran the local pound. That last one is the part that matters. A man who wanted a dog to walk dark roads with him also happened to have a yard full of every kind of dog in the district to pick from.

So he built one. Strong enough to matter, quick enough to keep up, sharp enough to notice trouble before he did. Not a show dog. An escort for a man carrying other people’s money through bandit country after dark.

Dobermann died in 1894. A liqueur maker from the same town named Otto Göller picked the work up, founded the first breed club and helped write the first standard, and the thing went from one man’s private problem to an actual breed.

Fifty years later, twenty five war dogs were dead on Guam. The Marines ran Dobermans as scouts through the Pacific, and the first dog killed in that battle was a Doberman named Kurt, who alerted on a Japanese force waiting ahead of a column and is credited with saving 250 Marines. The National War Dog Cemetery on the island is watched over by a bronze Doberman. The memorial is called Always Faithful. by @k9krafted

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18 days ago

In 1819 a divinity student at Oxford stopped a milkman on the road and bought his dog.

Her name was Trump. A small white and tan terrier, bought in his last year at Exeter College by a young man named John Russell, who went on to spend the next fifty years as a Devon parson and got himself known as the Sporting Parson. Every Jack Russell traces back to that one bitch.

He was breeding for a job, not a look. The job was to follow a fox underground after the hounds had run it to earth and then bolt it back out rather than kill it down there. Everything about the dog comes from that. The size, the legs, the nerve, and the white coat that told a huntsman which animal was his when it came out of a dark hole.

Then there is the chest. A working terrier had to be narrow enough through the body to get wherever the fox went, so a huntsman would close both hands around the dog behind the shoulders and see whether his fingers met. They still call it spannable. A dog that failed that could not do the work, however game it was.

The strangest line on the breed’s record came much later. A long haired Jack Russell called Bothie went along on the Transglobe Expedition from 1979 to 1982 with Ranulph and Ginny Fiennes, and remains the only dog to have stood at both the North and the South Pole. He got an entry in the Guinness Book of Pet Records and a bestselling book of his own. by @k9krafted

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19 days ago

The Canary Islands are named after dogs. The bird is named after the islands.

Pliny the Elder wrote it down. A Mauretanian king named Juba II sent an expedition out into the Atlantic, and what came back was a report of an island carrying vast multitudes of dogs of very large size. Insula Canaria. The island of the dogs. Everything else took its name from there, including a small yellow finch that had nothing to do with any of it.

The dog that stayed is the Presa. Presa means catch, and that was the job. Hold cattle on farms where the ground is volcanic rock terraced so steeply that a loose bull becomes everyone’s problem.

Look at the coat of arms of the Canary Islands and you will find the shield of seven islands held up on either side by two of these dogs. Since 1991 the Presa has been the official natural symbol of Gran Canaria, an honour it shares with a cactus.

By the 1960s the breed was close to gone. Farmers and enthusiasts began rebuilding it in the early 1970s and the breed club was formed in 1982.

Six scenes. One block of basswood.

Where else has a dog put its name on the map?

#presacanario #perrodepresacanario #canaryislands #grancanaria #catchdog doghistory woodcarving miniaturediorama handcarved

[SHORT CUT]
The Canary Islands are named after dogs, and the bird is named after the islands. Pliny the Elder recorded the expedition that came back describing an island of vast multitudes of dogs of very large size. Insula Canaria. The island of the dogs.

Two of them still hold up the shield on the coat of arms, and since 1991 the Presa has been the official natural symbol of Gran Canaria. by @k9krafted

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21 days ago

By the 1960s there were two breeders left in all of France.

The Dogue de Bordeaux had been working since the Middle Ages. It hunted big game and guarded estates, and above all it worked for butchers, driving cattle to the slaughterhouse and then lying across the shop doorway while the meat hung behind it. Anyone who has watched one of these dogs decide to lie somewhere understands why nobody argued with it.

Then France spent two centuries being a difficult place to live. The Revolution, then the First World War, then the Second. Each one took a piece out of the breed, and by the 1960s it was very nearly gone.

A schoolteacher is the reason it is still here. One of Raymond Triquet’s grammar school students introduced him to the dog. He decided something that old should not be allowed to disappear, spent the next decade rebuilding it, and wrote the new breed standard in 1970.

Most people meet this breed through a film about a detective and his drooling partner. The dog was already centuries old by the time the cameras showed up. by @k9krafted

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22 days ago

In 1936 a group of owners walked the same dogs into a different registry, and the paperwork handed them a different future.

The dogs were bull and terriers, carried over from Britain and Ireland by immigrant families before the Civil War and then put to work on American farms. They caught hogs, cleared vermin, minded children and guarded the place. By the early 1930s a group of fanciers who had no interest in fighting dogs petitioned the American Kennel Club to take them, and in 1936 the first fifty or so went into the book as Staffordshire Terriers.

Same animals. Same bloodlines. One line went into the AKC as a show and companion breed while the other stayed in the UKC as the American Pit Bull Terrier, and the two names have been drifting apart ever since.

One of the early ones had a ring around his eye and a job in pictures. Petey of Our Gang was registered as a Staffordshire Terrier, and the dog most people picture was the son of Pal the Wonder Dog, who was poisoned in 1930.

In 1972 the AKC recognised the Staffordshire Bull Terrier from England and put American on the front of the older name to keep the two apart. by @k9krafted

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23 days ago

For something like three thousand years, Turkish shepherds kept only the white ones.

Akbaş means white head. The usual explanation is a practical one. A guardian working a flock at night has to be seen, and a shepherd with a gun in the dark has to know which shape out there is his own dog.

Then the dog came to America.

In 1972 the federal government stopped its poison programs against coyotes on public land. Ranchers kept losing sheep. In 1978 the first Akbash dogs arrived in North America. Around the same time, biologists Raymond and Lorna Coppinger at Hampshire College imported working guardian dogs from Turkey, Italy and Yugoslavia, bred them, and placed several hundred of their offspring on working ranches to find out whether an old idea would hold up in new country.

It held up. By the early 1980s the US Department of Agriculture was buying purebred Akbash for its own livestock guard project. The dogs stood off coyotes, cougars and bears and stayed trustworthy with the animals they were guarding.

Thirteen years after the first ones landed, Akbash in North America were guarding sheep, goats, cattle, horses, llamas and ostriches. by @k9krafted

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a month ago

The only dog ever officially enlisted in the Royal Navy was a Great Dane, and the Navy signed him up to settle an argument with the railway.

His name was Just Nuisance. He lived around the naval base at Simon’s Town in South Africa and rode the local trains with the sailors, never with a ticket, until the railway had had enough of the fare dodging. So on 25 August 1939 the Royal Navy enlisted him as an able seaman, because enlisted sailors rode for free. They entered Nuisance as his surname, and rather than leave the first name blank, they wrote Just. The dockyard made him a collar to carry his rail pass.

That is the modern chapter. The breed itself is centuries older, and it is German.

German princes ran these dogs on boar and bear. The rest of the pack found the boar and wore it down, and the big dog went in last to seize it and hold it for the huntsman’s spear. The best of them were kept as Kammerhunde, chamber dogs, and slept in their lord’s bedchamber in gilded collars lined with velvet, guarding him against assassins through the night.

The English named it after Denmark, and for a time the Germans called it the English dog. In 1878 a committee in Berlin settled it as the Deutsche Dogge, the German mastiff. Bismarck kept them as bodyguards.

Just Nuisance was discharged in January 1944 after an accident left him paralysed. He was buried that April with full military honours. by @k9krafted

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a month ago

In 1949 the Soviet government issued an order for a dog that did not exist yet.

The specification was the hard part. It had to be big, powerful and trainable, and it had to work anywhere in the USSR. That meant arctic cold at one end of the country and desert heat at the other. No breed on earth covered that range. So the job went to the Red Star state kennel outside Moscow, part of the Central School of Military Service Dog Breeding, and they were told to build one.

The raw material came home with the army. Breeding stock was brought in from occupied territory, much of it out of East Germany. By some accounts as many as seventeen breeds went into the work. Giant Schnauzer. Rottweiler. Airedale. Newfoundland. Caucasian Shepherd.

Then one dog changed the plan.

His name was Roy and he was a Giant Schnauzer. They put him to Airedale bitches and the first litter came in 1951, and it did not matter which female he was bred to. The puppies came out stamped with him. Colonel Medvedev watched it happen, stopped trying to average all those breeds into something in the middle, and built the entire program around Roy instead.

For eight years you could not own one. They belonged to the army. Not until 1957, when the type finally bred true, did puppies start going out to civilian breeders.

And that is where it got built a second time.

The state had selected for what the dog could do. Nerve, size, resilience, work in any weather. The civilians who took over selected for what it looked like. Coat, structure, a type that would reproduce itself reliably in a ring. by @k9krafted

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a month ago

The black nose is the original. Everything else is a variation people pay extra for.

In 1835 the British Parliament banned bull baiting. The sport did not stop. It moved underground into pits, and because a pit is a small room, men crossed their heavy bulldogs with terriers to get something faster in that space. Bull and terrier.

Irish and English immigrants brought them to America before the Civil War. In 1898 a man named Chauncey Bennett went to register his and found that no registry would take the breed, so he founded the United Kennel Club himself and handed registration number one to his own dog.

Same dog. Standard nose. Named after a place instead of a job for a hundred and ninety years. by @k9krafted

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a month ago

In 1882 a German dog show had exactly one Rottweiler entered, and the judges called it a poor specimen. That was the breed. That was all of it.

Sixty years earlier they had been everywhere.

The dog is named after Rottweil, a cattle town in southern Germany, and the job it was named for was moving beef. Butchers and drovers used them to push herds down the road to market. The Germans called them Metzgerhund, the butcher’s dog. They drove the cattle in, and then they lay under the cart and guarded the meat while it sold.

Then there is the detail that tells you how far the trust went. When the cattle were sold and the drover had a purse of money to carry home along an empty road, he did not put it in his coat. He tied it around the dog’s neck. Nobody was getting it off him.

Then the railway reached Rottweil in 1868, and none of it was needed any more. Cattle went by rail. The drove roads emptied. The work that created the dog simply stopped existing, and the dog went down with it, all the way to that one animal standing in a show ring in 1882.

It should have ended there. In 1901 a handful of German fanciers went looking for whatever was left and wrote the first standard around it. Within about a decade the same dog was working as one of the first police dogs in Germany.

Same animal. New century. New job. by @k9krafted

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a month ago