Polish Hunting Dog

In November 2017 the international canine federation gave definitive recognition to a new dog breed: the Polish Hunting Dog, the Gończy Polski, the fifth from Poland. On paper, then, it is Poland's youngest dog, younger than Instagram. In the mountains of south-eastern Poland the news was received without excitement. People there had known it for several hundred years, long before it occurred to anyone to write breed standards, and had never doubted that it existed. It lacked only one thing: papers.

After the Second World War Poland's scent hounds were saved by two colonels. Piotr Kartawik bred the heavier type, which became the Polish Hound, the Ogar, recognised internationally in 1966. Józef Pawłusiewicz was looking for lighter, faster dogs, and found them in the Bieszczady mountains and the Subcarpathian region. That decision did not include his dogs. They stayed in the mountains and got on with the job. The colonel wrote the first standard for them, but he did not live to see it either: he died in 1979, and the breed was registered in Poland four years later. The federation accepted it provisionally in 2006 and definitively in 2017. The British followed in 2024.

Poles have a saying for the dream of escape: to drop everything and move to the Bieszczady, the wild, empty mountains in the country's far south-east. Every Pole has wanted to do it at least once. The Polish Hunting Dog is from there, and it shows. It is built light and compact, with bone that is strong but not heavy, in black and tan, chocolate and tan, or red. It is tough, self-reliant and brave in a way that needs no audience. It can keep up an even trot for two hours with its nose to the ground and show no sign of tiredness; the one who gets tired is at the other end of the lead. Where the Ogar is still thinking it over, this dog is already halfway up the slope. With its own people it is gentle and even-tempered; with strangers it is polite but unenthusiastic, much like a local towards tourists in August. It learns easily and willingly. Its voice is loud and melodious, and it uses it when it decides there is something to say. In town it behaves like someone who has come down from the mountains to settle one piece of business: politely, watchfully and with an obvious wish to get back. The concept of a Sunday spent on the sofa it does not understand and does not intend to. Once it has had its run, though, it is quiet at home and surprisingly affectionate: it lies down at the feet of whoever it has chosen as its own and does not leave them until evening.

With us it is different. We mostly talk about the Bieszczady. We would drop everything, but there is the mortgage, there is work, it is Tuesday. The Polish Hunting Dog does not know the saying; it simply needs a piece of that life every day, and does not accept that it cannot be done. At six in the morning it is standing by the bed. At five in the afternoon it is standing by the door. And so, without asking your opinion, it does with you what you would never do yourself: it gets you out of the house. Not for ever and not far, for an hour or two, but every day. After a year you know the woods behind the estate better than your own street: where the bird cherry blossoms in May, where water stands after rain, and what time it gets dark in December. You never planned to know any of that. The phone stays in your pocket, work stays behind the door, and you walk straight ahead beside a dog that looks as if this was what it had in mind from the start.

You go into the real mountains with a rucksack, and in a Polish rucksack there are dried sausages and chocolate. The dog should have neither. Chocolate is poisonous to it, and the sausage is mostly salt and fat. On the trail this dog needs water above all, preferably from its own bowl rather than from a puddle. It eats its portion after coming back: first a quarter of an hour of calm, then supper.

You will probably not drop everything. Hardly anyone does; that is what the saying is for. But you can have someone from there at home who, twice a day, reminds you that the Bieszczady are not only a place on the map. They are also an hour in which you walk straight ahead and do not have to do anything.

It has already fetched the lead.