james ensor Wed Oct 02, 2013 4:41 am
Recent advances in genetic research including several large-scale checks on dogs in different countries and continents have told us a lot more about the podengo and how it must have travelled around the world. The first dogs of this type were generally called the Pharaoh dog and inhabited Lebanon and Palestine. They were carried on ships by Phoenicians and Romans right through the Mediterranean. Similar dogs can be found today in Sicily, Malta, Ibiza in the Balearics, Andalucia and Portugal. The original dogs were probably descended directly from the pale-footed wolf, a smaller and less aggessive wolf type than either the North American or Siberian wolves.
Other Pharaoh dogs were carried east by ship to India and beyond. The New Guinea singing dog has retreated to the remote mountains above 7,000 feet in Papua and New Guinea, where it still lives wild. There are some examples in San Diego zoo, which look just like modern Podengos, to be seen in Portugal even down to the unusual apron-string stripe just behind the front legs.
Intriguingly DNA from the Australian dingo contradicts the theory that it descended from the south-east asian wolf and somehow made its own way to Australia. The DNA suggests that a new people arrived from India about 4,000 years ago and interbred with Aborigines, already there. The earliest dingo skeletons derive from the same time. It is now believed that they were domesticated dogs in India, brought to Australia by the Indian peoples on their ships. They are a more distant relative of the Podengo, genetically-speaking.
As they are such excellent hunters of small, edible prey like rabbits, the Podengos must have been a valuable crew member to take to the new places being discovered by Spanish and Portuguese ships from 1450 onwards. In the Cape Verde islands, where the first Portuguese settled on uninhabitabed islands just as Columbus was discovering the islands off the North American coast, there is a large population of podengos both medio and pequeno. These surely came by ship, where they would have been useful in keeping down rats. The Dominica dogs, probably the closely related Podenco, from Andalucia, would have been carried in the same way and for the same purpose by Spanish sailors.
It seems that the earliest English settlers did not bring dogs with them to America. But later mill hands who were brought to New England to work the first cotton mills, brought whippets from the Lancashire mill towns. The whippet is every bit as good a rabbit hunter as the Podengo and it is no surprise that people who lived at least partly off catching wild game with their dogs, would have brought them along on their emigrations. That I consider is why this type of dog is so widespread.
It would seem to make little sense to fit breed standards to dogs which for 2,000 years or more bred freely in the open and developed on the basis that only the best hunters were allowed to survive. They still survive in this way in Spain and Portugal, today.
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