We have found a new Podengo Medio

On Boxing Day ( the English word for the day after Christmas) a very friendly little dog of around 12kg 25lbs arrived near our house in Cape Verde. She looks pure Podengo as the breed has evolved in the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde. She has the pricked up ears, lean narrow frame, white socks, white waistcoat and furly tail of the true Podengo Medio. But we also believe that she may be a sister of Brando who looks like a Labrador puppy but has the spirit and athleticism of a Podengo. If we leave her where she is , she will be poisoned with strychine by the Cape Verdeans who manage the resort. So yesterday she had her first rabies jab, in preparation for a trip to England. We have named her Maria because of the season AT WHICH SHE ARRIVED WITH US.

Maria is already responding to proper food She is running faster and jumps 3 foot;except when flat out she prances like a young lamb. with all feet airborne. She ends any run by jumping two foot into the air. Her desire for and wish to give affection = licking and chewing is unbounded. Of the four dogs that have come up to us in Cape Verde, which we believe are from succesive litters of the same family.she is the purest Podengo. I will try to post a photo when I have UK internet But we are LEARNING MORE ABOUT PODENGOS EVERY DAT  Her outsize ears have just two positions, laid back along her head for running and pricked up for hearing. Her hearing seems to be very acute  certainly better than her possible brother Brando who has inherited floppy Labrador ears.

Her sense of smell is also outstanding. On one beach walk she found a dead baby turtle, a dead mouse and a dead dog, carelssly buried under rocks. She would doubtless have devoured all of them, given the chance.

When she net us she had mites and fleas. But these were poultry fleas, leading us to believe that she was born on a nearby dry farm which has chickens. It seems likely that the farmer feeds a pair, which breed regularly but does not provide food for their offspring once they are weaned. Hence there is a steady stream of puppies that enter our resort, most of which have been poisoned with strychnine, This is the sad reality of life for a tropical dog unless they are lucky enough to meet someone like us.

After a month eating good dry dogfood Maria is transformed. She now jumps up 3 feet and down onto sand 5 feet. I predict that when fully grown she will manage five feet up to a ledge like her sister Jet - see Avatar.

She likes nothing better than to chase Brando, leaping over low-lying scrubby heather-like plants and low rocks. With her narrow body and lighter weight now 13kg(30lbs) to Brando`s 18kg(40lbs) she can outrun him.  She is even more agile and can dodge his lunges when they tussle. It is not hard to imagine her chasing rabbits although so far she has never seen one,as there is nothing larger than a lizard, where she was born. She emits a constant stream of short yelps as she chases. When Brando will not play, she runs at him with a loud yelp.  

She has taken a liking to those of European or American race, especially women, and will run up to them inquisitively.  Sometimes, of course, she is ignored or rebuffed, but she appears to sense who will be nice to her. Once, she jumped up a group of a dozen Lithuanian women, on a tour outing, even chasing after one who walked away. Fortunately they all liked her.

As my Scottish wife`s ancestors were Picts, who sailed by boat from Lithuania and Latvia to the British Isles, more than 2,000 years ago, I suspect that Maria could smell the shared DNA. Of course, as the Picts did not write home, none of the Lithuanians were aware of this link.

After three months of good dog food - Friskies is all that we can buy in the islands - Maria is running very fast. She esily keeps up with a Suzuki 4x4 over rough roads. It is hard to guage her speed accurately but it cannot be far short of the 30mph achieved by the whippet.

Podengo Medio were employed for the same role as the English whippet - chasing rabbits for the pot.  Both dog types were mostly owned by artisans or farm hands uhlike the Labrador which was favoured by the English aristocracy for its ability to retrieve their shot birds from lakes.

Today, Podengo Medios in their native Portugal are mostly owned in singles or pairs by country folk. When they take them to meets with their friends, a large pack can easily bring back 60 rabbits in a day`s hunting. Maria and her brother Brando have to content themselves with field mice and lizards as there are no large mammals in the Cape Verdes. These they catch with consummate ease, even in the house, where they leap over furniture and wine racks to pounce, without upsetting anything.

Brando despite his castration has become her lover, when she is on heat. He is a polite dog and breaks off his sexual intercourse when I enter the room.  Maria reacts with fury to this interruption, barking at him and waving her bottom in his face.   After intercourse, they seem to get stuck back to back with a male connection holding their bottoms together. Can anyone tell me if this is normal?

The much rarer Podengo Grande does not seem to have reached the Cape Verde islands, where there is nothing suitable for it to hunt. But in Portugal a few are still maintained in kennels to pursue wild boar in packs like the English foxhound. Humans follow the chase on foot rather than on horseback in red jackets, like fox-hunters.

Wild boars have been introduced into the Forest of Dean on the border between England and Wales. Numbers have reached 600 strong and the colony can easily add another 100 to 200 in a year. This soon strains the food resources of nuts from the forest trees. There is talk of shooting many of them. But perhaps they should introduce a pack of Podengo Grandes?

Maria is now in London, England and loving the climate with its fresh grass and diverse smells. She has seen her first urban foxes and grey squirrels - the native red variety is almost extinct except in a few islands - and has shown herself to be a determined huntress. Off the lead her 25mph speed would surely be sufficient to catch a squirrel. But meanwhile she just tries to climb the tree and yelps at them as they scurry off.

She causes a lot of interest here, where dogs with her prominent ears are a rarity. Many recognise a dingo or a pharaoh dog. She particularly favours any other dog that she meets with prominent ears and likes to run in the London parks with whippets, which are some of the few dogs that match her speed.

She expresses what I can best describe as jubilation at living in a house instead of on the beach and whirls around the bedroom like a dervish emitting wild yelps, before plunging off down the stairs to retrieve a toy woolen duck, which Brando himself selected, twice off the lower shelf of a dog super store. We now have a blue and a pink.

Her agilityand speed amaze other dog owners, especially when Brando and Maria chase each other. She will lie in wait crouched down on her haunches and then suddenly spring into action. At other times she will stalk like a tigress using cover. He has a technique of evading her by running up the trunk of a broad tree, whirling round and down again, whilst she misses and has to run around the large trunk. Both have been swimming after small ducklings, but fortunately have not caught any.

While your posts are wonderful and it is clear that you are taking excellent care of Maria - it is also clear from her pictures that she is not a podengo. Primitive dog share many features so likely she is a mix of some of the historic dogs but I see very little Podengo in her.

This photo on the Avatar is of Jet not Maria. Maria is quite evidently a Podengo Medio.  She has now discovered squirrels and will run flat out at them for up to an hour at a time. When they run up a tree she jumps from a flat out run and reaches a height of 7 feet.  Fortunately her aim is careful, so she does not collide with the tree trunk.

Except in the United States and Britain where conditions are different, Podengos mate freely in the open, so that all kinds of foreign dog strains have entered the gene pool.  These dogs, in their native Portugal are prized for their remarkable ability to hear, smell and chase rabbits. Puppies that lack these skills are routinely abandoned or killed.  As a result, the survivors, although showing a wide variety of looks are all outstanding hunters.  Maria is probably the most hunting oriented dog that I have ever met.

Her ancestors were brought from Portugal to the Cape Verdes by ship to keep down the rats - who knows how many decades ago.  But she has not diverged much, if at all, from Podengo Medios still to be seen in Portugal, or for that matter from the Podencos to be found in Spain.

The reason that so many primitive dogs look similar and indeed look like Podengo Medios is that they were carried all around the world by the early Portuguese navigators.  If you look at the New Guinea singing dogs, now captive in San Diego zoo, they look just like Maria, though she tends to emit a high-pitched yelp rather than sing. Genetic evidence suggests that all of these dogs and the Australian dingo are direct descendants of the pale-footed wolf, a much smaller and less ferocious wolf than either the North American or Siberian types, which used to flourish in Palestine.

Jet, the dog in the Avatar. is capable of jumping up 5ft and balancing on a window sill. She now lives in Nuremberg, where she first encountered snow. She is so agile that she watched the flakes in a light fall and dodged them. In many ways she is more cat-like than dog-like, with an astonishing turn of speed and amazing agility.

I have met many Podengo Medios in their original home of Portugal and their next most common home of the Cape Verde islands, a former Portuguese colony. The dogs vary greatly in colour and in appearance. Most weigh between 18-20kg (40-45 lbs) and have narrow bodies and long snouts on narrow heads, with pointed ears. Most of the Medios that I have seen are short-haired, indicating an origin in the northern Portugues mountains. Podengo Medios from the Algarve and Alentejo, where the brushwood is much more spiky tend to have long wiry coats.

In Portugal for centuries these dogs bred in the open, often with whatever male hapenned to come along. Those puppies that turned out to look a bit different were adopted and fed only if they excelled in their prime role, catching rabbits. The true measure of a Podengo Medio is speed, agility and outstanding hearing and sniffing ability. These were the keys to survival. That is how we should judge, whether or not a dog is a Podengo. Like the Lurcher, these dogs come from a broad church.

Jet, who is the black dog in the Avatar, approached me from behind when I was sitting in a bar in Cape Verde islands. She chewed my hand, which was hanging loosely beside my chair. After that she never left us, until we rehomed her in Nuremberg, Germany.  The day that she made contact in this unusual way, we also met Niki, a yellow dog of the same size but with features of a Labrador, who we assume is her sister.  Both dogs had collars and Niki had a bronze star around her neck, engraved with the name Niki (in the Greek spelling).  We think that Jet may have been called Nigra - Portuguese for black - and lacking the connotations of the similar English word. However we felt it prudent to give her a new name. We were not able to discover their owner. And the savages who run the holiday complex in Cape Verde put a "fatwa" on them both  by name involving death by strycchnine posoning. Two attempted poisonings were made by an Italian resident who is also a dog owner. So we had to campaign amongst all our Italian friends to protect them, while they awaited rabies clearance for Europe.

Jet is quite the most agile and athletic dog that I have ever met. Weighing 13kg (30lbs) and barely 60cms high ( two feet) she is capable of jumping from a standing start onto a narrow window ledge at a height of 5 ft (155cms).  This performance is more like a cat`s than a dog`s. She also runs very fast and chases any small mammal that moves, up to the size of a cat.

Maria, a fawn dog, but of similar size shape and appearance to Jet apart from the color, we think could be a sister from the same parents but of a later litter.  She has just been in Portugal where she met other Podengo Medios, which recognized her as of the same breed, as did their owners. Maria has jumped 7ft (2m) at full gallop at a tree, pursuing a fleeing squirrel.

Perhaps the confusion as to what a Podengo Medio should look like arises from the fact that the Podengo Pequeno and the Podengo Medio are not particularly closely related genetically. In Portugal they do not inter-breed, inhibited by a substantial size difference. The reason that they carry the same name (best translated as hound) is that both were used to hunt rabbits and still are - the Pequenos flushing prey out of their burrows and the fleeter Medios chasing them on the ground, once they emerged into the open.

Having now met several Podengo Medios in Portgual, their native home, I am confident that Maria would be recognized as a Podengo Medio in Portugal. Jet would just be seen as a Podengo-type mutt, of unusual coloring. Dogs there are not rated or classified by appearance so much as by their ability to hunt with exceptionally high speed and agility.  Jet has this in spades. We deduce that her ancestors were brought to the islands in colonial times by Portuguese caravels because of their abilities as rat-catchers on the ships. Her father and probably Maria`s was largely black and tan, with Labrador features.  Another probable brother, whom we call Sooty, is also black but now has only three legs after a tourist-carrying excursion Land Rover drover over his front leg whilst he was lying, asleep beside a track. It has not been possible to re-home Sooty. There are far too many three-legged dogs in these islands.