The Norwegian lundehund is one of the most inbred dog breeds in the closed registry system, and I have questioned the wisdom of including this breed into a dog population management culture that celebrates blood purity over health and good science.
Because of its peculiar adaptations for traversing rocky cliffs and squeezing down puffin burrows, there is a tendency in this breed to believe that it is too unique to have new blood added. If you add new blood, the dogs cease being lundehunds– which is actually theological reasoning and is unfortunately all too common in the world of purebred dogs.
All lundehunds alive today derive from six founders, and five of these were all from the same mother.
That is not a very large founding population, and when a breed is placed into the closed registry system and bred to a particular standard, a lot of genetic diversity will be squandered. If you start out with a population that is already quite small, the effects of such breeding practices will be magnified.
This breed has a condition known as “lundehund syndrome,” which is just a shorthand for a variety of gastro-intestinal disorders that affect this breed, which can range from mild issues of malabsorption of nutrients to cancer of the intestines. It is estimated that anywhere from 40 percent to 100 percent of this breed suffer from some variant of the disorder.
There is definitely some sort of genetic basis for the syndrome, but no one has been able to say what might be done to rectify the problem.
Further, the breed is also suffering from a general inbreeding depression, which means the breed is eventually on its way to extinction unless something is done. The breed is rapidly losing its fertility, and without new blood, they may simply become impossible to breed.
And the Norsk Lundehund Klubb (Norwegian Lundehund Club in Norway) has decided to begin an outcross program to save the breed.
The club recently announced that a lundehund had been bred to Norrbottenspets, a small treeing spitz from Norway that is known for its prowess in treeing forest grouse. The club’s announcement reads as follows:
The Norwegian Lundehund Club has initiated a project to increase the genetic diversity of Norwegian Lundehund. This is absolutely adamant now as this very special dog breed is on the verge of extiction (sic). Norwegian Lundehund is one of the most inbred dogbreeds (sic) in the world, and it shows indications of reduced fertility. In the long run, inbreeding depression might be the end of this wonderful dog breed, and we cannot sit still and watch this happen. The first cross has taken place, a Norwegian lundehund male and a female of Norbottenspets. This had to be done by insemination as the male, unfortunately, was too small. The puppies that we hope will be borne in two months time, will be registered at the Norwegian Kennel Club in an x-register, and they will not be sold on the open marked. For all of you that own a lundehund, keep up your breeding programme, as there will be many years until any individual that is a result of crossbreeding will be introduced in the true breed. We hope to save the breed, but we need your help to keep up the numbers of truebred (sic) lundehunds over the years to come. More information will be available on our homepage and fb within a few days.
So when a breed is faced with extinction through poor population management, the only solution is to make radical steps to save it.
Of course, these steps aren’t radical at all. If people were not so accepting of the tenet of faith that blood purity at all costs is a virtue in domestic dog breeds, this breed would be as healthy and viable as any other. New blood would be brought in every couple of generations, and the population would be carefully managed.
But this concept– which is essentially without controversy in the scientific animal husbandry literature as well as the literature on population genetics– is utter heresy in the world of dogs.
To cross breeds is the ultimate sin– something that only done when there is no alternative.
It is really sad that this breed had to come to this point before the Norbottenspets outcross program was accepted.
But the truth is all of these other breeds are in the same boat. They aren’t moving at exactly the same pace as the lundehund, but they are all moving in this direction slowly but surely.
It really is time to drop the blood purity cult.
It’s just not serving the dogs well.
Period.
I have long thought that dogs should be shown like chickens. There is no “registry” for show chickens. If you enter a bird in a breed class, no matter what its actual ancestry is, it is judged on how it looks; on how close it comes to the written standard. A year and a half ago for one of my many cross-breeding programs I made a cross between a Sumatra rooster and a Cubalaya hen. These two breeds are rather similar, but quite different in many ways. Of the five chicks I kept, three grew into beautiful roosters, that, while stunning in their exotic looks, were obviously not “purebred” birds. But the two hens from this cross, one black and one blue, could be entered in any Sumatra show in the country, and not only would the judges not blink an eye, but they might well give the blue ribbon to these birds. If dogs could be bred and shown this way, without any emphasis put on the prestigious pedigree, or the demand that all dogs of any one breed all look exactly alike, then the genetic bottleneck of a closed pedigree system could be eliminated and producing healthy dogs would be much easier. Any dog could be entered into a show as any breed, but of course only the ones that met the standard could hope to win. For people hoping to make money breeding “show dogs”, any puppies that didn’t meet the standard could be sold as “pet quality”.
The problem with European breeds is most of their breeds are preserved for cultural reasons; not for shows.
I agree absolutely with both sets of comments above. Incidentally, I seem to recall that the lundehund has an extra toe on each foot, so one can imagine its breed aficianados wanting to eliminate every pup from any outcrossing experiments which is minus that surplus digit – as an absolute prerequisite ahead of health considerations. Sorry if I’m being cynical.
Hear hear! This is a great example of what can eventually happen to any breed. Unfortunately, I fear you are correct that no one does anything until their breed is clearly on the brink, and choosing a breed that is there now, as an example, will likely cite responses of “Oh, but that’s the Lundehund! MY breed isn’t anywhere nearly as bad and won’t be for a long time.”
But no one really wants to think about that day that will come after the “long time” has passed, do they?
A problem with the suggesting of an outcrossing, is that people don’t understand how it should be done. They fear that “cross-breeding” will result in losing the qualities they value; they equate it with the production of “designer dogs” for novelty (and money). The majority of breeders don’t have much more than a rudimentary understanding of canine genetics, and the thought of deliberately introducing “foreign blood” simply frightens them.
Some arrangement like an appendix registry could be useful: register and identify the out-crossed dogs, people could choose to use them or not. AKC has done something like this in some cases, such as Dobermans descended from the albinoid (white) individuals, which are given a coded registration number.
To put this in perspective, it would be interesting to know about the geography of land races in Norway. The traditional, fjord-centered settlement patterns in Norway inherently produce cultural fragmentation. I know this is true linguistically, and I’ll bet it’s true with dog breeding as well . . . ie, many small relatively inbred landraces centered on a few fjords.
Where, in Norway, is the Lundehund from? Are there other, similar landraces that never got brought into the pedigree system? Might there be country dogs out there from a couple fjords over that could be used without damaging the nationalist pride?
I’m speculating based on having once worked in a group that contained both an Oslo native and a Bergen native. They communicated in English because they were bad at, and disliked, one another’s dialects.
Hi Jen,
I was surprised to find this sort of fragmentation in the USA. We have it too.
While our public schools taught “America is a melting pot.” where people let go of their former idenities as citizens of the counties they left, private (mostly religious) schools have taught “America is like a stew, a bit of Irish potato, a slice of Italian tomato, a chunk of English mutton, a handful of Native American corn….”.
So while most Americans have been raised to believe “We are all Americans”, many other Americans are raised to identify themselves as members of a smaller subset of the country, with other types either tolerated as “other parts of the stew”, or as some sort of cultural or moral degenerates who infest ‘their’ country.
People who live in cities and democrats seem more likely to be melting pot types, while most of the “stew” types I have talked to tend to be republicans who live in small towns. I’m NOT saying either type is better than the other, just that they view themselves as part of different sized groups.
I have been to small towns where the older people still spoke French, and sometimes ONLY spoke French. Why? Because a couple hundred years ago or so, their ancestors arrived in New Orleans from France, and even when the families moved to settle small towns, they continued to speak French.
Of course, nobody from France can understand them and they can’t go to France and understand anyone because the dialects have grown apart. We also have Italian Americans who speak forms of Italian which are not now used or understood in Italy. There are many small town which are pockets of Dutch, Swedish, German, or any one of many other places. People in these small towns are proud of their heritage.
But often, they preserve the way their Grandfather’s grandfathers WERE, while the European cultures they came from have changed.
I can believe that people from small towns who are all interrelated, would stay with “their” dog breed even if it was sickly.
Well, I hope they go a lot further still with this programm. Problem is, one outcross is a drop of water on a hot stone in the long run. It needs several outcrosses and then an conscious effort to keep the descendants of those in the breed.
When you only want to introduce and keep one gene, one outcross might be enough (like with the LUA Dalmations), although a few more would be better, because with only one, every dog with the healthy gene variant will inevitably go back to the two dogs used in the outcross, which is similar to popular sire syndrome in a way…
But when you want to increase general fitness, fertiliy and so on, just doing one or two outcrosses and then “breeding back to type” as fast as possible will not do the job, as they don`t have enough of an influence on the genepool as a whole.
And here, too, you wouldn`t want to be forced to inbreed on the dogs used for the outcross later, otherwise the same disaster as before is pre-programmed. So in order for the breed as a whole to profiteer from outcrossing without starting a new inbreeding chain, a few more crosses would be a good idea.