Something about the map below might strike you if you are a student of dog breeds, and yes, that’s a map of Switzerland.
The map shows the twenty cantons and six half cantons in the country, all of them member states of the Swiss Confederation. Each has its own government, legislature, constitution, and judicial system, and with four distinct language regions, some cantons are bilingual or even trilingual.
Familiar names to dog people will be the cantons of Bern and Appenzell because two mountain dog breeds are named for them, the Bernese Mountain Dog and the Appenzeller Mountain Dog (the Entlebucher Mountain Dog is named for a region in the canton of Lucerne). Of Switzerland’s eleven breeds, three mountain dogs are named after the cantons in which they originated. The oldest of them, the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, existed centuries before written records were kept of dog breeding; indeed, most experts agree that its first appearance occurred in 58 B.C. when Romans invaded the area of modern-day Switzerland. It’s sheer speculation on our part, but perhaps because this breed predated the formation of many of the Swiss cantons, it was simply named after the whole region. That said, another source suggests that the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog received its name because of how it compared physically with the Sennenhund breeds.
Speaking of sennenhunde, the aforementioned breeds are of a general molosser type called Sennenhunde (the plural of Sennenhund) in Swiss German; “Senn” refers to Alpine herdsmen and dairymen (an Alpine meadow is called a Sennelager), hund means dog, and as noted in paragraph above, three of the breeds are preceded by the name of the canton from which they originated. Learning this helps even the newest of dog people know that the Appenzeller Sennenhund is a pastoral dog from the canton of Appenzell, the Berner Sennenhund is from Bern, and so on.
Sennenhunde, particularly the largest ones, began to dwindle in numbers in the 19th century as the need for carting and butcher’s dogs diminished. Alpine geologist and indigenous Swiss dog breed expert, Albert Heim, (1849-1937) brought various examples of of these mountain dogs to an International Dog Show in 1908 to underscore the importance of preserving the breeds, and at that point, Heim and members of the Swiss Kennel Club began sorting the dogs by what they determined to be representative breed types. We are delighted that their success resulted our being able to enjoy these marvelous dogs today.
Image found unattributed on-line and happily credited upon receipt of information