The Leonberger Is a Rare Breed

The worldwide dog population is estimated to be 900 million, including 471 million dogs kept as pets, 200 million stray dogs. There are also village dogs, federal dogs and there are many millions of wild dogs such as wolves, coyotes, jackals, dholes, foxes (35 species). In the United States, 69 million households own at least one dog. There are at least 3 million Labradors around the world. The AKC currently recognizes 197 dog breeds. A close cousin of the Leonberger, the St. Bernard comes it as the 53rd most popular breed in the United States whilst the Leonberger comes in at place 102.

Below is an excerpt from my book

According to an estimate prepared by BioMed Central, there were around 30,000 Leonbergers in the world in 2020. See Anna Letko et al., “Genomic Diversity and Population Structure of the Leonberger Dog Breed,” Genetics Selection Evolution 52, no. 61 (October 2020)

There are around 3,300 Leonbergers in North America, 2,300 in the United States and 1,000 in Canada. The five countries with the most Leonbergers, in order, are France, with nearly 8,000; Germany, with more than 4,000; and Great Britain, the United States, and Sweden, with approximately 2,300 each. The country with the highest number of Leonbergers per capita is Finland, with nearly 2,000 Leonbergers among a population of 5.5 million people. (Information from the October 2018 LeoLetter).

In summary, the Leonberger is a rare breed. However, a few times in history the Leonberger was not just a rare breed but close to extinction.

World War I was tough on the breed. Some Leonbergers were used to pull ammunition carts and small cannons during the conflict, and others were left to wander unattended. Often, these dogs starved to death. But after the war, two Leonberg businessmen, Karl Stadelmann and Otto Josenhans, worked hard to save the breed. They scoured the countryside looking for Leonbergers who were still alive. They were able to find twenty-five of them whose owners were willing to cooperate in reestablishing the breed. Of these, only five were suitable for breeding. None of the Leonberger clubs had survived, so they founded a new one in 1922 called Deutsche Club für Leonberger Hunde (DCLH), and Stadelmann created an updated version of Albert Kull’s breed standard.

I’ve read that World War II was even more devastating to the breed. Supposedly there were only eight Leonbergers left in the world after the end of the war, and all Leonbergers today are descendants of those eight surviving Leonbergers. That’s once again a fascinating and simple story that’s easy to remember and spread, but the truth is rarely simple.

The Leonberger, like so many other dog breeds, was devastated by World War II—kennels were destroyed; dogs were left unattended or used for food—but Leonbergers weren’t used in the war effort itself, and there were more than eight left afterward. However, there was indeed a “genetic bottleneck” of Leonbergers in the 1940s, meaning that the population was greatly reduced in size, limiting the genetic diversity of the species. This was largely because people repeatedly bred the dogs they thought were the best specimens in a misguided attempt to improve the breed. Of course, for breed (and species) health, you need diversity. Scientific pedigree analyses demonstrate that the Leonberger has twenty-two founder animals, or animal ancestors unrelated to one another (ten males and twelve females).

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