History of the Pug

By Lee Connor

This adorable toy breed has, from its very beginning, always been at the very center of controversy. And, as we hurtle through 2018, that shows no sign of changing anytime soon!

In both the UK and the US, the Pug has seen its numbers soar and as its popularity has increased so has the volume of the voices speaking out against it. In the UK, we’ve seen calls for them to be banned from advertisements; we’ve had celebrity vets warning people not to buy them; we’ve had tawdry little campaigns like, ‘say no pugs’, animal charities declaring ‘war on pugs’ and even efforts to persuade birthday card makers to stop using pug images. Of course, none of these efforts have had the least effect on halting the pug’s meteoric rise. People simply love their pugs!

And it is quite fascinating tracing this little dog’s history back and witnessing a whole series of peaks and troughs in its popularity along with open displays of both love and loathing in the press.

As I said before, the Pug has always courted controversy and argument and this also extends to its history. Various countries are pinpointed as being the breed’s place of origin. Statements appear that it was brought to England from Holland and, indeed, in the early 19th century the breed was commonly styled as the Dutch Pug. But, of course, this theory doesn’t trace its history back far enough, and it should be remembered that in that period the Dutch East India Company (one of the earliest multinational trading companies) was in constant communications with the Far East.

Other sources confidently declare that Russia was the original home of the breed. In the Sportsman’s Cabinet (1804) there is an illustration of two pugs drawn by Reinagle; a cropped dog with a black mask, curled tail, and toying with a much smaller specimen (which I always assumed to be a puppy) but it too is also fully cropped (it was common practice to literally cut the ears off early Pugs and round them close to the head) thus the inference made by this drawing seems to be that there were two distinct sizes of pugs, one of which must have weighed 14 lbs. or more, the other less than half that weight.

Short URL: https://caninechronicle.com/?p=150761

Posted by Alex on Sep 19 2018. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.