66/ 100 Pilgrim Dogs

Each of the feral dogs in India, happily spending a great deal of their time dozing in the sunshine in between eating and waiting for a fight to go and watch, are completely unique but surprisingly similar too. Nobody controls their breeding, and even if there was someone who was keen to mate one particular dog with another, I am sure that they are all from such a mixed and diverse gene pool that the outcome would still be as much of a surprise as it would be if you just let the dogs choose their own mates.

There is no official breed name for these wonderful mongrels but the Indian people do have a couple of names for them. The Indian Pariah Dog is a great one, although I only heard people refer to them as that a few times. The most common name was the Desi Dog – with Desi being the informal Hindi word for something from India.

After countless years of interbreeding the dogs are remarkably alike. They almost all have short hair, large ears, either a tan or tan and white coat and are medium sized. The little gang in the photograph today is actually one of the more unusual ones in that there is a black and white dog, and also a flecked coated one too.

Rarely you can spot an exception. Possibly one of the pets escaped and added some Shih Tzu, Alsatian or Pug into the local mix and you’ll find a dog like the one in my last post that is black and white with an unusually fuzzy coat.

On our first trip to India we hired a driver and visited the southern coastal town of Pondicherry (or Puducherry). Once a French colony this interesting town was popular with India tourists and lovers of Ganesh, the Hindu Elephant God, who flock to the 500 year old Manakula Vinayagar Temple. We went to have a look at the temple and hoped to see their resident elephant, Lakshmi, but sadly she wasn’t there the day we went (she died in 2020, a year after our visit, so perhaps she had retired).

Apart from the excessive amounts elephant paraphernalia one thing that I noticed there was the prevalence of completely black dogs. As well as being black they were also larger than the Desi dogs we had seen elsewhere. This has always fascinated me and I have thought about it often. I am assuming that the original dogs that were brought there, perhaps by the French settlers, were predominantly black, and their larger size gave them an advantage over any existing dogs. Pondicherry is quite a small and isolated town so maybe that has helped to keep the gene pool fairly intact.

My own dog, Chip, is a feisty Jack Russel terrier. We didn’t see any of his kind in India and I would love to know what would happen if you released a few different breeds into the community and then went back a few years later to see how much influence they had. I am quite confident that little Chip would be the leader of a very scraggly and fearsome pack of little dogs who terrorised the community.