This Italian greyhound comes from W.E. Mason’s Dogs of All Nations.
The head reminds me less of a modern Italian greyhound and more of a deer-headed chihuahua.
The dog has almost the “candle-flame” ears we see in toy Manchester terriers.
The Manchester (“black and tan”) and English white terriers were crosses between some sort of terrier and either a whippet or Italian greyhound. They were celebrated in the ratting pits, and they were popular pets for a time.
The English white terrier went extinct.
The Manchester breeds are still around.
I wonder if any of these dogs were crossed back into Italian greyhounds.
The ears on this dog seem to indicate a possible toy Manchester or toy white terrier ancestry.
The weird thing about that photo, is that most older pictures I’ve seen of IGs have the ‘correct’ folded ear. So I don’t know if that dog was an anomaly or what.
If the cartilage in the ears is too thick, you will get ears like that. One of mine was like that; as a young dog if he was very interested in something, the ears would go up, but as he got older, they stood up almost all the time. For correct rose ears you need very thin cartilage, it must be bred for. You see the same in Whippets and regular sized Greyhounds, especially ex-racers, which are not bred for cosmetics.
Brindle and black and tan markings are explicitly DQed in the IG standard, so I’d say there was some mixing of Manchesters and possibly Whippets at some point. For some reason where there’s been mixing in the past or during breed development, they want to remove all associations.
It makes sense that when the Italian nobles wanted smaller dogs to live with them in the house, they crossed the ancient mediterrean sight hounds with some smaller breeds they could find.
A modern erect-eared italian http://fineartamerica.com/featured/italian-grey-hound-on-beach-cica-oyama.html
Think cirneco dell’etna (or rather its ancestor) is the contributer for the modern Italian greyhound.
Hm, that makes a lot of sense, actually. I hadn’t thought to make that connection before.
I hadn’t thought about that breed either.
This isn’t on the IG topic, but the English White Terrier played a role in creating the Bull Terrier.
What’s interesting is there were toy English white terriers that looked like white toy Manchesters and toy bull terriers (not like modern miniature bull terriers).
I have seen paintings and photos of both, and I have a hard time telling them apart.
Often they had apple heads and looked like white Chihuahuas with cropped ears.
Toy bull terrier 1915:
http://chestofbooks.com/animals/dogs/Dogs-All-Nations/Toy-Bull-Terrier.html
Found another example (again, oddly used to represent the breed in an ‘All-Breed’ book):