In Israel, a battle to save the ancient Canaan dog (WASHINGTON POST) By Nicolas Brulliard SHA’AR HAGAI, Israel 03/28/12)
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SHA’AR HAGAI, Israel — Pricked, pointy ears and almond-shaped brown
eyes. A tan or black-and-white coat and a tail that curls upward. For
many in Israel, this is the description of a pesky stray that feeds
on garbage. But for a passionate few, it is a cultural treasure that
should be preserved.
Meet the biblical dog.
“When they talk about dogs in the Bible, it was these,” says Myrna
Shiboleth, who has done more than anyone to rescue the breed formally
known as Canaan dog. “It was the same dog.”
The archaeological evidence bears it out, from 1st-century rock
carvings in the Sinai to the skeletons of more than 700 dogs from the
5th century B.C. discovered south of Tel Aviv. When Jesus and Moses
turned their heads to the sound of a barking dog, it was the Canaan
that they saw.
But after surviving the birth of three religions, the Crusades and
countless wars, the Canaan dog — one of the oldest known breeds of
pariah dogs — is the focus of a battle that pitches people who
believe in the value of preserving the primitive breed for scientific
and sentimental reasons against modern bureaucracy. As often is the
case in Israel, land use is at the heart of the battle.
In recent decades, scores of Canaan dogs were destroyed in rabies
eradication programs, and now only a few hundred subsist in the Negev
desert, often living at the edges of Bedouin camps. But as Bedouins
increasingly settle in cities, the Canaan dogs either are left to
fend for themselves or lose their breed’s traits by mating with urban
And now the Israeli government is threatening to close the operation
that has been helping preserve the breed by collecting rare specimens
in the desert, breeding them and shipping their offspring to kennels
around the globe, where they are recognized by major organizations,
from the American Kennel Club to the Federation Cynologique
Internationale, the international canine federation.
In an eviction notice sent late last year, the Israel Land Authority
argues that Sha’ar Hagai Kennels is illegally occupying government
land. Sha’ar Hagai’s Shiboleth says she moved more than 40 years ago
to what was then an abandoned water station and paid rent to the
water company only to find out that it didn’t own the land. She says
she asked the land authority about regularizing her situation and
heard nothing — until she received the eviction notice. Moving, she
says, would be prohibitively expensive, and few neighborhoods would
welcome noisy kennels.
In an online petition, about 2,000 people from dozens of countries
and nearly every U.S. state have taken up Shiboleth’s case, voicing
outrage at what they see as Israel’s lack of attention to the fate of
the “holy dog.” One even goes so far as to compare its fate to that
of the Jewish people and their narrow escape from annihilation.
The matter is to be decided in court. If she is not successful there,
Shiboleth and her dogs face an exodus that will most likely put an
end to her breeding program.
What surprises many people is that the dog is getting so little
support compared with other beasts of the Good Book.
Starting in the 1960s, Israel launched an ambitious program to bring
back “the animals of the Bible to the land of the Bible,” says David
Saltz, an ecology professor at the Ben Gurion University of the
Negev. Targeted species included the Asiatic wild ass (a big success)
and the ostrich (a complete failure). The reintroduction efforts went
to extreme lengths: In one spectacular instance, four Persian fallow
deer were smuggled out of Iran.
The Canaan dog has been recognized as Israel’s national breed, but
today’s conservationists don’t put the hound on a par with the
Arabian white oryx, which receives full support from Israeli
authorities after four of the antelopes, purchased from the Phoenix
Zoo, were reintroduced in 1978.
The Canaan dog is “what they call a mutt,” Saltz says.
A mutt is what the Canaan dog was to most observers until an Austrian
biologist came to Palestine in the 1930s and started looking for dogs
that could serve the nascent Jewish defense forces. Rudolphina Menzel
identified them as a native breed that tolerated the climate well and
named them after the biblical Land of Canaan.
The pooches were used in patrols and landmine detection units and
performed as messenger dogs. Jewish settlers also prized the Canaan’s
alertness and counted on them to bark at Arab intruders.
In 1965, the first Canaan dogs arrived in the United States, and it
didn’t take long for Shiboleth — then an animal trainer in New York —
to get hooked. She moved to Israel in 1969 with an American-born
female Canaan in tow. In 1970, she and a handful of others founded
Sha’ar Hagai in the Judean Hills, using Menzel’s breeding stock and
dogs collected in the wild.
The Canaan dog was originally popular with the Jewish diaspora, but
soon others were attracted by its natural look. Its profile was
raised when John F. Kennedy Jr. purchased a Canaan in the 1990s.
Today, the dog can be found in households across much of Europe and
North America as well as in Russia and South Africa.
There are 2,000 to 3,000 Canaan dogs across the world, but most are
closely related. If the gene pool is not continually strengthened
with new bloodlines from the wild, experts say, the breed could
develop degenerative diseases.
“Unless some true effort is made, they will just fade into history,
and that would be a shame,” says Janice Koler-Matznick, an Oregon-
based biologist and expert on primitive dog breeds.
The only person who regularly provides fresh blood is Shiboleth, who
makes a couple of annual trips to the desert to find wild dogs or to
get her females to mate with the Bedouins’ males.
Often, she comes back empty-handed.
“They’re disappearing much faster than I thought they would,” she
Cynthia Dodson and David Golden of Falls Church say they were “quite
analytical” when they decided to get a dog 14 years ago. They liked
the look of the pariah dogs they saw during trips overseas and wanted
a dog that would be free of the genetic ailments that affect many
breeds. They settled on the Canaan and got a pair.
“You can see in all their behavior how they’re closer to the wild,
but they’re still very domesticated,” Golden says. “It’s not like we
brought wolves into the house.”
Golden says he likes to imagine the relatives of his two dogs
frolicking in the wilderness and jokes that he and Dodson tell
stories to their couch-loving dogs about their wilder cousins.
“The story is important to us and to a lot of people,” he says. “To
lose this linkage [to] thousands of years would be a real tragedy.”
Brulliard is a freelance writer. (© 2010 The Washington Post Company
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