Eurasian

Coming from Germany, this breed is quite recent. It was in the 1950s that Konrad Lorenz, the famous ethologist, tried to reconstitute a very old breed that had long since disappeared, the Laika de Nenets.

This very old breed was the result of a cross between the Chow-Chow and the Wolfspitz (German Spitz). The Laika de Nenets lived in the wild at the time.

It is exactly the same initial crossbreeding that led Konrad Lorenz to create the Eurasian. He guided Julius Wipfel in his selection work on the breed.

Mr. Wipfel wanted to obtain a medium sized dog of Nordic type with an attractive look and a great adaptability to all lifestyles.

He wanted to create a dog with a stable character, never aggressive and able to live as much on a farm, in the suburbs, in a large city house as in a smaller apartment. It was the outcrossing with the Samoyed that stabilized his temperament and refined the look of the current breed.

After this outcrossing with a Samoyed female in the 1970s, the breed was officially recognized in 1973 by the FCI (Fédération Cynologique Internationale) under its current name, Eurasian.

Once officially recognized by the FCI, the breed spread considerably throughout Europe but always in rather limited numbers. Even if the breed is known in Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Holland and of course in Germany, it has never managed to achieve the same success as the Chow-Chow.

As the Eurasian comes from the Chow-Chow and looks a lot like him, it seems that the latter is always more popular than the Eurasian, which remains much less known than his ancestor.