In a particularly hilly area of South Wales, somewhere within the half-ruined walls of a Norman castle, you'll find the last remaining member of a long-vanished lineage - a dog named Whisky.
With a sausage-like body and dwarfish little legs, at first glance, it could be an exotic breed of dachshund.
But look closer and you'll start to notice certain oddities.
The small dog's black-red fur is silky, yet shabby, like a Yorkshire terrier.
Meanwhile, the tail is a lively curled tuft, as is the case with Pomeranians.
His head is also different, his face is also different - with an upturned nose and spaniel-like ears, cropped close to his head, reminiscent of the hairstyles of the generations of medieval lords who inhabited the fortress before him.
His tiny beady eyes always have a somewhat glazed expression.
The last feature is not surprising, because Whiskey is, in fact, a taxidermy dog "tumbler" - the last relic of an ancient race that died out in the Victorian era.
- Labradoodle creator says it's his 'lifetime mistake'
- He is an exemplary traveler and has become famous - meet Božija, a dog who loves public transportation
- The friendship of a man and a dog - an eternal movie story
She once worked in the kitchen of a nearby country estate, where she would spend many of her waking hours waddling around in some kind of giant hamster wheel that hung on the wall above the fire.
This was connected to the roasting spit by a system of pulleys, so that as one turned, the other turned.
Tumbling dogs were exactly what we imagine them to be: compact dogs specially bred to run for hours, thus moving the spit.
The back story of the flipper may seem ridiculous by modern standards, but there are probably many more dogs today that could rival his eccentricity.
The World Cynological Organization officially recognizes about 370 different breeds, such as the Chinese crested fashion victim, with a bare, grayish body decorated with tufts of long bluish fur.
Puli - essentially a living rag, with a full coat of long dreadlocks - and the budding lion, the Tibetan Mastiff, known for its massive size and long golden mane.
The thing is, there used to be more of them - many, many more.
For centuries, the world has been home to a kaleidoscopic array of unusual dogs - some of which are so bizarre they sound fictional.
In Hawaii there was a poi, which ate only vegetables and was treated more like a goat than a relative of wolves.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, there was the Woolly Salish, literally a sheepdog bred for its wool, which was made into clothing.
Despite their charisma and popularity in the past, these races are now nothing more than ghosts, faded memories pieced together from stories, written records, and scattered specimens in museums.
Even the talbot, the archetypal medieval dog, is often depicted on coats of arms.
The Chien-Gri, a favorite of the French nobility, was once considered the only dog worthy of inclusion in royal hunting parties.
And the menacing lion moloss, a favorite of the ancient Greeks, simply could not survive the vagaries of capricious human taste.
Where did these eccentric dog breeds come from? Why did we abandon them?
And would some of them still be with us, hiding in plain sight?
Watch the video: Meet Pistachio
Innovation
Today, the concept of a breed is well established, defined as a set of dogs with a certain set of characteristics, which - apart from the occasional deviation - generally breed only with others in their group. But this is a relatively new development.
For millennia, there were no official breeds, studbooks or careful selection programs.
Instead, dogs were often categorized by their function—such as "deer dog" or "lap dog"—as well as by where they originated.
"The word that was used a lot was 'types'," says Michael Warboys, emeritus professor at the Center for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester.
"But people had different names for different kinds of dogs. They talked about varieties, they talked about strains...".
While dogs would normally breed with others within their type, no one followed suit - and consequently, these groups were much looser categories than in the 21st century.
"They were like the colors of the rainbow," Warboys says.
"They kind of flowed into each other. So there were greyhounds, but they kind of merged into foxhounds, which did a different kind of work."
Take Alexander the Great's favorite dog, Peritas, whom he raised from a puppy.
The dog is thought to be a Greek or Macedonian variety, probably a Laconian hound - a massive, athletic dog used mainly for hunting deer and rabbits.
They were known throughout the ancient world and widely depicted in classical sculptures, mosaics, tombstones and drinking glasses.
With wolfish faces, long snouts and "shining eyes", they resembled modern greyhounds, but sources disagree about their other characteristics.
While some ancient writers described this type as master runners - they were also known as the "swift Laconians" - other sources wrote that they were slow and relied mostly on their sense of smell to catch prey.
Regardless of their skill, Alexander the Great is said to have loved his dog so much, he named an Indian city in honor of Peritas when he died (though it was a habit - he also once named it after his horse, Bucephalus).
But this all changed with the invention of the dog show in the mid-19th century.
As Warboys wrote in the book “The invention of the modern dog", which he compiled with historians Julie-Marie and Neil Pemberton, the Victorians took the rough types that existed at the time and polished them into breeds with clearly defined traits.
"The goal was to get a population that looked uniform," Worboys says.
"It was a bit like creating standardized screws or bolts.
"The dogs kind of reflected what was going on in the industry. They made standards and bred to those standards, so the spaniel would look the same everywhere."
- Found a puppy with a tail on its head
- The dog that flew over the Alps
- How to calculate how old your dog really is
The dog that personifies this trend is the Newfoundland, which originally comes from the eastern Canadian province of the same name - a cold, coastal region where parts have a polar or subantarctic climate.
With a plush bear-like appearance, this type became a popular pet in 18th century Britain, especially among the upper classes.
Lord Byron got him when he was fifteen, and named him Boatswain.
After the death of the animal, the poet buried it in a huge marble tomb, on which he wrote a eulogy, Epitaph to a dog.
"... whose honest heart is still his master's, who works, fights, lives, breathes only for him...".
“They (the early Victorians) loved them because they were thought to be noble, life-saving dogs. What was important about them was character," Worboys says.
At that time, they had a diverse look - in all shades of black and white.
But when the breeds were invented a few decades later, suddenly the Newfoundland aesthetic was in the spotlight.
"The Labrador (once grouped with other Newfoundland dogs) has become standardized," Warboys says.
"The Victorians decided it could be black - all black - with a standard kind of shape or a black and white variety that they gave a different name to."
According to Worboys, this standardization was one of the main reasons for the surprising, hidden event that occurred during the Victorian era.
"What there is general agreement on is what population geneticists call the bottleneck," he says.
After more than thirty thousand years with their human companions and the development of hundreds of different types around the world - for different climates, hobbies, tastes and professions - dogs were suddenly at the mercy of exhibitions and sporting events.
"There are a lot of dogs that the Victorians kind of abandoned," Warboys says.
"If the dogs don't get supporters at the dog show, then they kind of disappear. Nobody grows them, nobody buys them, nobody shows them."
At that time, there was a sort of mass extinction of dogs that had been around for millennia.
Almost all dog breeds that survive today once passed through this bottleneck - and are descended from a small number that fit into the fashion trends and particular tastes of the time.
As a result, much of the genetic diversity once found in dogs has been lost forever.
But shows are only one of the many reasons why so many dogs have disappeared over the past few centuries.
Watch the video: Dog clothes are a new fashion hit
Unlucky friend
During most of the 17th century, in almost every great house in England, hounds could be found stalking the meat fed to knights or other important visitors.
It was a miserable life - the unfortunate pooches were considered rude, vulgar and hideously ugly, and cruelty to them was common.
In a colorful and occasionally mocking book Anecdotes about dogs of 1846 (which, among other things, suggests that "the souls of deceased bailiffs and ordinary policemen are in the bodies of fowler and pointer dogs"), the English writer Edward Jesse wrote that, in his youth, "as they now say, (cooks) were very angry, and if the poor animal, wearied by the larger than usual turning wheel, stopped for a moment, the cook's voice could be heard scolding him in not very gentle terms".
To dispel the sheer horror of the role - which involved torturing in the almost unbearable heat of a fire, in a smoke-choked kitchen, for hours on end - Jesse also relays an anecdote about a group of mutt dogs in the town of Bath who liked to gather in a church during services to relax.
One day, when the word "turner" came up in the sermon, they all stormed out of the room, thinking they were going to be asked to go to work.
But at the beginning of the 19th century, the invention of mechanical tumblers changed everything.
Discarded as pets and no longer useful as kitchen staff, the dogs quickly disappeared - almost completely extinct as early as 1807, with their final demise a few decades later. After a lifetime of service, the Whiskey ended up as a stuffed specimen on display in the shop.
It was gifted to Abergavenny Castle in 1959, where it currently resides in an 18th-century hunting lodge.
When a certain type of dog was no longer needed, the final reckoning could be swift.
This is exactly the fate that may have befallen the Hawaiian poi - a small jack-of-all-trades dog originally from the South Pacific.
Coincidentally, they are thought to have resembled tumblers, and like these distant cousins, some sources considered them ugly.
Polynesians formed strong bonds with their poi dogs - fiercely defending them from harm and burying humans and dogs together.
However, "the descriptions of European visitors were not particularly kind," says Carys Williams, a researcher at the Dogs Trust in Great Britain, who studied poi dogs.
"They were used to bringing collies and very useful dogs with them on their travels, and then they went to these islands and found these little skinny dogs with pointy legs ... and they just weren't much of a sight to behold."
The fact that poi couldn't bark probably didn't help their image. "...these animals can only squeal and howl, and they do so in the most pitiful tones imaginable," one researcher wrote in 1880, according to Williams' research.
Genetic evidence suggests that the poi were close relatives of the dingo and descended from dogs brought to the island tens of thousands of years ago.
- How Stray Lucy Changed My Life
- Meet the secret agent who hunted down the leader of the Islamic State
- Keepers of abandoned dogs of Chernobyl
The islanders have kept dogs as pets for centuries, despite, as Williams explains, the almost complete absence of a functional role for them, either in hunting, guarding (there are no large predators on the islands to defend against), transportation (the islands are too small to be necessary), or animal husbandry (locals mainly keep pigs).
They had only one function - as food.
Poi was raised as a companion, comma and was also eaten, though usually only as part of a ceremonial feast.
When a dog was killed, its fur could be incorporated into clothing and its teeth turned into jewelry (one museum in Honolulu has 13 ankle rattles in its collection, which would require 11.218 teeth from 2.805 dogs).
But perhaps the strangest thing about these dogs is that they were mostly vegetarians.
Indeed, the word poi derives from the Hawaiian dish of the same name, a staple traditionally made by mashing cooked taro root on a wooden grinding board until it reaches a paste-like consistency.
Along with occasional scraps, this formed the basis of the hound's diet.
"A vegetarian diet was much more of a choice for humans than it was for dogs," says Williams, who explains that there are hints that the dogs were nutritionally deficient.
Analysis of skeletons found at archaeological sites revealed dental cavities and signs of jaw atrophy, possibly due to the starchy taro and the absence of the need to chew food.
However, after millennia at the heart of Polynesian culture, poi eventually fell out of favor.
Western colonists brought their dogs to places like Hawaii—and as they interbred, the natives began to disappear.
At the same time, these new settlers brought about a change in attitudes, until it was no longer considered acceptable to eat one's pet.
The last poi lived in the mid-late 19th century - and there are no surviving paintings, photographs or other works of art that can be definitively linked to him.
"That (poi) would probably be very suitable for modern life, to be perfectly honest, a very pleasant dog with a very low level of aggression," says Williams.
This would not be the first time that colonialism and loss of functionality conspired to wipe out an ancient type.
- Why our pets have some disgusting habits
- Should dogs eat raw meat?
- Abandoned dog sold at auction for almost 22 thousand euros
Another classic example is the Salish woolly dog, which historically played an important role in the culture of the Coast Salish people of Canada's Pacific Northwest.
These soft, flat-eared dogs were always white, and their soft wool was combed regularly so that whatever came off could be woven into the blankets.
However, it wasn't just dog sheep.
Woolly dogs were treated with respect and ruled the houses of people where they were petted and adored.
Like other dogs, such as those used for hunting, they were considered to be somewhere between animals and humans - and were often named and buried as a result.
As with the poi, the disappearance of the woolly dog followed a major change in lifestyle brought about by the arrival of western settlers.
"That's partly because other types of material were available," says Dana Lepofsky, a professor of archeology at Simon Fraser University who has studied dogs.
"But also because of the whole weaving culture, the social context changed with colonization."
A possible revival
But the mixing of modern "breeds" and ancient "types" opens up a fascinating possibility - is there a poi today, disguised as a regular dog?
This idea led animal keeper Jack Tropp to try to stop the extinction at the Honolulu Zoo in the 1960s.
By breeding dogs with poi-like characteristics and then doing the same with several generations of their offspring, he hoped to concentrate the genes of the type until they emerged from the ether of hybridization.
"There's a wonderful picture in the Honolulu Star where he sketched what he thought a poi poi should look like," Williams says.
Unfortunately, the results of the project were not well documented, and not long after, the project seems to have died.
"Then again, the poi never became a popular breed even though people wanted to preserve it," adds Williams.
However, there may be something more like an afterlife for salish dogs, which ethnographic studies suggest are sometimes deliberately crossbred with wolves and coyotes to make them better hunters.
Cassia Anza-Burgess, a former archaeologist who studied the Salish people and their relationship with dogs, is optimistic that the lineage may be living somewhere in the wild.
"We found no genetic evidence (of hybridization) in our sample (Salish dog bones from archaeological sites)," says Anza-Burges.
But she points out that she only looked at mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mothers to offspring.
This is significant, because - naturally - it was the females that the Salish people would let mate with wolves or coyotes, so the injections of wild genes would always come from the males.
"But I think it would be fascinating for future research to look at whole genomes, not just the maternal line, and see what kind of backcrossing you can find there because the evidence seems pretty strong that it should be there—we just haven't picked it up," says Anza- Burgess.
Watch the video about the love of a dog and a St. Bernard
Difficult decision
If we fast-forward to today - endangered dogs face a new obstacle on the way to survival: the conflict between genetics and ethics.
In the last decade, growing awareness of the low genetic diversity in many dog breeds - especially pedigree breeds - has led dog organizations to take crossbreeding more seriously.
Today, some breeds have such small populations that the ethics of maintaining them becomes tricky - with such low genetic diversity, they can become more susceptible to deformities or disease.
Eventually, "inbreeding depression"—where the fertility of a population is affected by the accumulation of unhealthy genetic variants—can wipe them out entirely.
One risky breed is the Silyheim terrier, which became fashionable among celebrities in the 1930s and 1940s - Cary Grant, Princess Margaret, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis and even Agatha Christie all had one at one point. one of these cuddly white dogs.
With curly white fur and light beards, the dogs look part lamb and part old man.
But after decades of popularity, they fell into obscurity with the emergence of designer breeds like cockapoos - descendants of the poodle and cocker spaniel - which have similar cuddly characteristics.
After reaching the bottom in 2008, today their population is constantly increasing.
However, the entire breeding population numbers only slightly more than a hundred individuals - which is often considered the lower limit for the survival of endangered species.
Given the new attention being paid to the genetic health of dogs, Warboys doesn't think there's much hope for endangered breeds like the Silyheim terrier today.
He recalls a conversation with a vet at a kennel club a few years ago, "and he said, off the record, that there are about six or seven breeds that he would like to see disappear because they are more trouble than they are worth."
Who knows, perhaps such wonderful dogs as the Old English Sheepdog, the Silyheim Terrier, and the Irish Wolfhound may soon join the list of extinct historical curiosities, along with all the others.
You may also be interested in this video: Astor - guide dog in Serbia
Follow us on Facebook,Twitter i Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
