The Norwegian Puffin Dog

Posted by Cynthia Wood on December 7th, 2006 at 4:02 pm

The LundehundIn order to run down and kill wolves, the people of Ireland bred the powerful and long-legged Irish Wolfhound. When they needed something to chase ill-tempered badgers into their holes to exterminate them, Europeans bred the feisty, short-legged dachshund. But five hundred or more years ago, the people on the northern coast of Norway had a different kind of prey to contend with: humble puffins.

Puffins are small sea-birds. They look rather like small, flying penguins with big colorful beaks, and they like to nest in the narrow, twisting caves which honeycomb the local rocky sea-cliffs. The sheer inaccessibility of those cliffs helps to keep the predators away, while the caves add yet another layer of difficulty to anything trying to get at the puffins. Yet in northern Norway, puffins used to be a major source of winter food, and catching them in enough quantity to make it through the long winters was absolutely necessary.

In order to fill this unique niche, the Norwegians bred a unique dog. The resulting Lundehund was an extraordinary animal with some unparalleled gifts. For all its uniqueness, the Lundehund is vanishingly rare. It has been so close to extinction that at one point there were only five of them in existence.

Mere