Main Auditorium

Most of the popular dog breeds are only a few hundreds years old. However, many native working breeds have been herding and guarding livestock for thousands of years. These breeds are adapted to the local conditions and have behaviors and physical features that suit them for their traditional roles. To maintain healthy populations of these breeds in modern times, their ancient gene pools must be protected as irreplaceable genetic resources.

The dog is the domesticated form of the wolf, however it is still not known where and which subspecies played a role in the process of domestication started maybe 135.000 years ago (Vila et al., 1997) and ended within the Old-World long before written history (Clutton-Brock, 1984; Kovács and Rózsáné Várszegi, 2015). Besides live or extinct Eurasian subspecies of the grey wolf (Canis lupus, L.) the role of the African golden wolf (Canis anthus, F. Cuvier 1820) might be also supposed (Kovács and Rózsáné Várszegi, 2015).

Following the onset of the internet becoming widely available in Turkey in 1995 and 1996, Ilker Unlu’s name began to pop up on the Turkish search engines as he was the first to build a website in Turkish dedicated to a dog breed: his Bull Terrier, Ares. Ares’ Website even appeared in Hurriyet, one of the leading newspaper in Turkey. Ilker went on to build another informative website on bull and terrier breeds due to the fact that their reputation seemed to be ruined by the overzealous press in the 90s.

The theme of this presentation is to show everyone excerptions from the past thirty years of the kuvasz breed. The discourse means to offer an insight into life with kuvasz dogs, social and human relations, the club life and the means of keeping contact in the former dog world, the circumstances of exhibitions and breeding and of course the appearance of the breed in both adaptibility and looks concerning the history of the Fehér-Morcos kuvasz kennel.

The demand for livestock guardian dogs (LGD) is strong in Canada due to added environmental protection laws and the continuous presence of large predators. Coyote (canis latrans) populations are at an all-time high in most places and continue to expand and are even evolving into new hybridized species, such as the coywolf. From the 1970-80’s onward the ancient tradition of utilizing LGDs has been introduced to North America.