Maria visits her sisters in Nuremberg, Germany

Many years ago we took Jet, in the avatar, and Niki who looks like a very small Labrador to live with Julia in Germany. Julia also has a Parson Jack Russell and an Australian sheep dog. We also took Brando, brother to the three females that we had rescued from the Cape Verdes. So it  was a noisy household. The Australian sheep dog is a cross between an border collie and an Australian dingo. The dingo is evidently a relative of the podengo medio and the Jack Russell was bred for the same role as the podengo pequeno. So we had a pack of hunters.

The four related dogs clearly recognised one another as relatives, although Maria, who is the youngest,  had not met her two sisters before. She allowed Niki to sniff her bottom, a privilege rarely tolerated with strangers.  Later she kissed Niki.

Three of the four dogs are relentless diggers.   All will chase after small prey such as squirrel. In Germany they have the small, pretty red squirrel, which has been driven out of much of England by the imported North American grey.  But both run up trees rapidly when a podengo gives chase.

Maria spotted some small deer and chased them for (at a guess) 10km/6 miles through thick, dark conifer forest, just as dusk was falling. Several Germans reported sighting her, and claimed that she was injured and limping.  

After well over an hour of searching in the wrong direction, we found her unharmed, back where she had started, a little subdued but happy.  As Germans are allowed to shoot dogs that chase deer, our relief was enormous.

At my reckoning, we had one more or less pure Podengo Medio, Maria and four other dogs with at least some podengo genes.  Jet in the Avatar, is black, and her ears do not always stick up like Maria`s.  Brando and Niki are obviously brother and sister.  Both look like small Labradors but they can run nearly as fast as Maria (25mph/40km/h) over rough ground.  I had not met an Australian sheepdog, before, but I know that she is a cross between an English border collie and an Australian dingo.   This makes for a rather dominating dog, that is nevertheless intelligent and fast.  The sixth dog in the pack, a Parson Jack Russell, was bred in Cornwall, initially to dig out badgers.

All six dogs in the pack had an interest in either digging out underground mammals or in chasing furry four legged mammals. Some wanted to do both.   But only Maria ran off at top speed through the forest after the two small deer that she spotted. Maybe this tells us something about the history of podengos. For I suspect, that over the centuries, many podengos and part-podengos were bred in the casual way, in which five of these dogs were born.  The exception, of course, was the Parson Jack Russell, which was carefully bred by the Cornish pastor from a fox terrier called Trump.

I also suspect, that in earlier times, in Portugal, of this sextet, only Maria would have been fed, since she would have excelled at bringing back rabbits.  Only she would have survived to breed.  Again, only the most succesful of her offspring would be fed and live to breed.  Thus did the podengo become bred as a formidable hunter.