“A Girl in Every Port” is cringe-worthy with today’s sensibilities, but it was a “winkie winkie” phrase associated with sailors “back in the day.” Perhaps it had its roots in a silent comedy movie made in 1928, though the phrase endured long enough for Groucho Marx to make a movie by the same title in 1952. Some will point to the maritime culture that (again – winkie winkie) tacitly understood that sailors had a girlfriend in every point to which they routinely sailed.

Some make the argument that people need to be judged by the times in which they lived, and we’re rolling with that. It’s a colorful segue into the world of dogs, and more specifically, the Polski Owczarek Nizinny, what many of us know as the PONs, or Polish Lowland Sheepdog (sometimes called a “Nizzy” for short).

There are historians who maintain that some of these Nizinnys were traded for goods by Polish sailors as they reached different ports, and it didn’t take long before sailors had a dog in every port (which should now make sense of the post title).

Historically, it’s believed that the breed was introduced to the British Isles in 1514 when a Polish merchant, Kazimierz Grabski, sailed a shipment of grain to Scotland. The grain was supposed to be traded for sheep, so reasonably, Grabski brought along his Polish Lowland Sheepdogs to help move the flock from land to a docked boat. A local Scottish Shepherd saw the dogs in action, and was so dazzled by them that he asked Grabski about getting a breeding pair.

The shepherd offered a mature ram In exchange for the dogs, and after a bit of back and forth bartering, the local shepherd got two female Polish Lowland Sheepdogs, and a male. It’s believed that these dogs introduced the PONS to the British Isles for the first time, and the rest is history.

For those not inclined to read history, the Polish Lowland Sheepdog was bred with local Scottish dogs that resulted in a line of herding dogs in Scotland, one of them the Bearded Collie. Some cynologists also think the Polish Lowland Sheepdog was a partial ancestor to the Welsh Collie, the Old English Sheepdog, and probably other herding breeds produced in Great Britain.

Image: Polish Lowland Sheepdog House Flag by Debbie Fagan of DoggieOfTheDayShop is available for purchase here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/DoggieOfTheDayShop?ref=l2-shop-info-name