Earlier in 2016,  a 4.16 pound white truffle sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $61,250. It was a bargain price.  Thanks to a lot of rain, Italy had a large truffle crop in 2016 causing wholesale prices drop by 50% from two years earlier. Under any condition, however, truffles are expensive. Really expensive. Why? 

Truffles are a wild product found in nature, and so far, efforts to cultivate it have failed. Because it can’t really be controlled, it’s unpredictable, and that unpredictability contributes to the extreme prices that truffles can fetch.

In Italy alone, one retailer works with a network of about 18,000 people to hunt for truffles. A single truffle hunter with a dog can find a small amount, maybe two ounces – a quarter of a pound on a good day —so it takes a lot of people to collect the quantity needed, and all those employees drive up prices even further.

Back the day, female pigs were used to find truffles because the fungus smells like testosterone to them. The pigs were motivated to find the truffles, and they did it easily, but pigs ate the truffles they found, and wrestling with a 300 pound pig to get at a truffle resulted in lost fingers and broken bones.

Dogs were minimally used, but when the use of pigs to hunt truffles was outlawed in 1985 because they damaged truffle beds while trying to get at them, all eyes turned to the dogs. Many breeds have been used with success, including spaniels, Beagles, Poodles, Dachshunds, Retrievers and mutts. In fact, several companies, like the Truffle Dog Company, will teach your dog to hunt the fungus. The undisputed truffle hunting breed, however, is the Lagotto Romagnolo.

Truffle hunters of Romagna bred their dogs towards one goal: A dog that would find truffles. Years of selective breeding made this once water-retrieving breed into one with with an uncanny talent for scenting, but with the hunting instinct suppressed so that a Lagotto isn’t distracted by the smell of game while working.

Between the two world wars, almost all of the truffle dogs of Romagna and the adjacent areas were Lagotto Romagnolo. In subsequent decades,  the steady disappearance of woodlands, and the increasing use of the use of concrete pylons to support grapevines has made the truffle even harder to find, but the Lagotto can find them on all kinds of terrain.

To their credit, most Lagotto Romagnolo clubs including the “Quintino Toschi” (Italian Lagotto Club) and the AKC parent club hold organized working aptitude tests and trials.  A Working Standards Proposal was made for the breed (the only copy we could find for this proposal is here).

We don’t know if a Lagotto was used to find the 4.16 pound white truffle referenced in the first paragraph, but if one was, that made the dog responsible for finding a fungus worth over $15,000 per ounce.

Watch a Lagotto at work in the short video below:

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Thumbnail image found on Pinterest and happily credited upon receipt of information.