Canis lupus hominis

Image courtesy of Noel Reck.

A few days ago, this image was posted to my Facebook timeline, and I didn’t really look at it too closely.

This was clearly an image from a nineteenth century German boar hunt, and the dogs used in the hunt were bullenbeissers.

Bullenbeissers were the rough bulldogs of Germany that were used in much the same as their English counterparts were.  (Somewhat heretically, I don’t believe the bullenbeissers are extinct, but I will leave that to another post.)

England had to transform its native bulldogs into “civilized” creatures relatively early on. Bull-baiting and dog fighting were made illegal in the early nineteenth century, and there was no practical purpose for having the rough bulldog type around.

Of course, Germany held onto its big game for far longer than Great Britain did, and in the old days, many German nobles would go on boar hunts like this one. These rough bulldogs had a much longer life as working dogs than their British counterparts.

This particular kind of hunt is called Sauhatz.

I knew that Sau was a cognate that means female pig (sow).

Hatz, however, was a word that had me a bit confused, so I contacted my resident German language expert. She believed the word Hatz was derived from “hetzen,” a word that means to bait, hound, or tear into.

I thought Hatz was more appropriately translated as coursing, and my German language expert found that Hatz does mean coursing.

What we call hog hunting  with catch dogs is called “sow coursing” in German!

So now we know what the caption, but what about the creatures in it.

As I noted earlier, the vast majority of the dogs in the image are bullenbeissers, but there are two dogs that are shaggy.

The exact identity of these dogs is actually even more interesting than bullenbeissers.

These dogs are Saufinders, (“sow searchers”).

They are sort of a rough schnauzer or terrier type dog that may have played some role in the development of the giant schnauzer and the Airedale.

The saufinder was described in Charles Hamilton Smith’s The Natural History of Dogs (1839) as follows:

In Germany, the Saufinder, or Boarsearcher, is a large rough terrier dog, employed to rouse the fiercest beasts of the forest from their lair in the thickest underwood, and they never fail to effect the purpose by their active audacity and noisy clamour. They are usually of a wolfish grey-brown, with more or less white about the neck and breast, and a well fringed tail curled over the back; having in all probability in them a cross of the Pomeranian dog, which may have increased their stature and their caution (pg. 207).

It seems the saufinders would have flushed the boar from the undergrowth, where the bullenbessers would have run it down. Bullenbeissers, like all true bulldogs, were bred for their gameness, and they would have thought of nothing as they charged the boar.

I should also note that the “Pomeranian dog” that Hamilton Smith mention here is actually not the little spitz we call Pomeranians, but the relatively large spitz that is the ancestor of that dog. It used to be common in Baltic region of Germany, where Pomerania is located.

These sorts of hunts speak to a time when Europe was much wilder than it is now. Germany, which always lay between Eastern and Western Europe, is always exposed to wild creatures wandering in from Poland or the Czech Republic.

Great Britain and Ireland could massacre all their wolves, bears, and boar, but Germany is on the same landmass as Russia, one of the wildest places in the world.

So big game hunting remained a past time in Germany many, many years longer than it did in the British Isles.

The British did their big game hunting in the colonies. The Germans did theirs in their forests.

Breeds that became refined and the deformed by the dog fancy in England remained functional across the North Sea.

So while the British were doing bizarre walking races with their bulldogs, the Germans were killing boars with theirs.