St. Bernard History & Bernese, too
Question:
Elaine: The history you mention, was co-authored by Dr. Marc Nussbaumer and Dr. Paul Lennard. Copyright is currently held by the Museum Of Natural History, in Bern, Switzerland. You may view the entire history at the following URL: http://nmbeO.unibe.ch/abtwt/Saint_bernard.html. I am delighted that you enjoyed a section of the ‘history’ and I encourage you to read it in it’s entirety. Unfortunately,it appears that Marcia has little more to do with her time than steal from those who are dedicated to discovering the history of our respective breeds. Might I suggest that you (Marcia) contact me privately for a list of informative books and contacts that will help you, should you decide to write your own history of the Saint Bernard. Susan
Response:
Subj: Re: St Bernard History & Bernese,too As a Bernese Mountain Dog breeder, I find the St. Bernard history articles facinating. We too trace our tri-colored Berners dogs to the red/white plus the black, rust, and white Swiss farm dogs. Every so often a red/white (no black) Bernese pops up in a litter in this country(USA). There was a massive, OFA good, red/white Berner in Wisconsin named Dusty. That breeder did a lot of research and wrote to Swiss Berner Breed Club. The same quote "there is more of that than red dogs" is in the letter written in 1983. In fact from that same letter, the Swiss writer and Berner expert, Frau M. Bartschi, says: "You might wonder where the red gene comes from. It is the old colour of the Bernese farm-dog. In the last century, when nobody cared for colours in the dog, and people did not kow anything about breeding "true", because the main thing was to have a "good dog" on the farm, the red dogs were the majority. . . The three colourd (sic) dogs were more seldom, but never bred apart. All dogs mixed freely. The first breed to be extracted from this "mixture" of farm-dogs was–the St. Bernard! Of course some St. Bernards did come from the St. Bernard Pass and had been bred by the monks as rescue dogs. But even the monks took their basic material from the farmdogs in the neighbourhood. True breeding of St. Bernards started some fifty years earlier. Thousands and thousands of red dogs from the Bernese countryside have been exported at the beginning. But when once the standard of this famous breed was fixed, the breed started slowly to develop into the direction of what is now: A huge dog with a big and heavy head, much different fom what is was in the beginning. If you look a the pictures of St. Bernards at the beginning of the carrier (sic), they look exactly the same as the tricolored, that later were picked out and made into an other breed, the Bernese mountain dog." Very interesting information. Elaine
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