Other Names: Hungarian Pumi, Hungarian herding terrier.
The Pumi (in Hungarian, the plural form is pumik) is a medium-small breed of sheepdog from Hungary. They are versatile stock dogs equally adept at gathering, driving and keeping stock under control. They have a long head with semi-erect ears, a whimsical expression, and a tail that forms a circle over the back. The coat (black, white, grey, or fawn) is a combination of wavy and curly hair forming curls all over the body.
The Pumi is considered to have arisen from the cross-breeding of Hungarian Pulik with French and German herding dogs from the 17th century onwards. The international breed standard was approved in 1935. The Pumi became an officially recognised breed in the US in 2011 and in the UK in 2015. There are over 2,000 Pumis registered in Hungary, with notable populations in Finland and Sweden and small but growing numbers of registrations in the US, UK and Germany.
Some refer to the Pumi as the “Hungarian herding terrier” because it has some terrier-like attributes such as quick movement, alert temperament, and a quadratic, lean and muscular body type.
History
The breed is closely related to the longer-haired Puli. It is a sheepdog from Hungary that is thought to have been introduced by the migration of the Magyars from Central Asia more than 1,000 years ago. It can probably be traced back to Tsang Apso (Tibetan Terrier). The ancestral Hungarian herding dog appears to have been brought west during the migration from the Ural-Altay regions around 800 AD. The Pumi arose from later cross-breeding with French and German sheepdogs, such as the Spitz and Briard.
The breed evolved spontaneously and was not the result of planned breeding. Pulis was cross-bred with German Pomeranians, French Briards, and several varieties of terriers during the 17th and 18th century. In the 18th century, many Merino sheep were imported to Hungary, along with small Pyrenean Mountain Dogs that probably contributed to the development of the Pumi producing dogs with a shorter and curlier coat. The first known drawing of a Pumi is from 1815.
The breeding of pedigree dogs began on the initiative of Count István Széchenyi, founder of the Hungarian Academy of Science. Within the Austro-Hungarian empire, during the later part of the 19th century, breeding of native Hungarian dogs was not encouraged. During the early twentieth century, Hungarians separated their herding dogs into the various breeds according to their phenotypes, and so the first distinction between Puli and Pumi was published in 1902. The Puli was most common on the east Hungarian plains the Pumi in the hills of West Hungary with the Mudi common in southern Hungary. In the 1910s, controlled breeding began, but many large herds and their dogs were lost during the First World War and the subsequent division of Hungary.
Dr. Emil Raitsits who created the Pumi breed standard in 1921, referred to it as a “sheepdog terrier”. Numbers rose between the wars with 130 of the dogs registered in 1924 when they were seen in the show ring and as working dogs. Raitsits was keen to preserve its typical terrier qualities. Before 1923, Pumis had been shown as local varieties of Pulis, but, by 1927, the two breeds had been officially separated. The Pumi standard was approved by the FCI in 1935 along with the scientific name Canis familiaris ovilis villosus terrarius-Raitsitsi. This had been proposed by Csaba Anghi to reflect the great deal of terrier in the Pumi both in its features and character. The early breed standards focused on the differences between the related breeds noting for the Pumi with its distinctive features such as a longer muzzle, smoother stop line, upright folding ears, and its non-corded coat.
During the Second World War, food shortages and lack of veterinary care reduced their numbers again and many dogs were shot by soldiers. Ria Hörter wrote that “Ilona Orlay, one of Dr. Raitsits’s assistants, walked through a burning Budapest pushing a chart [sic, ?cart] containing valuable Hungarian sheepdog papers, from the office of the Hungarian Kennel Club to a place of safety.”
Breeding became possible again in the period after the 1956 uprising. The 1960 breed standard, which remained current through to the 1980s, allowed any solid coat colour, but the variations seen within the breed during the 1950s had since been reduced. It was first exported to Finland in 1973 and Sweden in 1985 and then to Italy and the Netherlands and the US in the early 1990s. The current international breed standard dates from September 2000. In 2016, the Hungarian government named the Pumi as one of its eight indigenous dog breeds, created a gene bank to preserve its characteristics, and announced support for breeding at the Hungarian national breeding centres.