The dog world is filled with myths, legends and anecdotes, and what follows is an unverified urban tale we came across while writing another post on the same breed.

As the story goes, Adolph Hitler was mulling over which breed to install as a guard dog for the Third Reich. Having heard about the Bouvier’s fabled strengths and abilities, he requested to meet one, and accordingly, a dog was brought to him. When Hitler reached out towards the dog, however, the Bouvier snapped and bit his hand.

In other accounts, it wasn’t the Führer’s hand that was bitten, but quite another place that may have explained the vile man’s monorchism. That the man had one testicle was verified by a German historian who unearthed the Nazi leader’s long-lost medical records. Produced during a medical exam following Hitler’s arrest over the failed Beer hall putsch in 1923, the notes written by Dr Josef Steiner Brin, the medical officer at Landsberg prison, did indeed indicate that Hitler suffered from “right-side cryptorchidism,” or an undescended right testicle.

We prefer the notion that an intelligent, intuitive breed sensed evil in the man and acted accordingly.