Rufus

Saloni Kapur's lovely INDog-mix Rufus!















A very interesting description of Rufus, sent in by Saloni:

"Rufus is one year old. I found him on the street in Pune in mid-October 2010, during a rainstorm. The vet estimated that he was six weeks old at the time, so I am guessing that he was born around 1 September 2010.

"His fur is red-brown and his tail is erect and curled, especially when he is standing up. His ears are pointed and flexible - they can stand erect as well as go back. He has black lining around his almond-shaped brown eyes. He is very alert to sounds.

"He may have some Indian (Caravan?) hound in his ancestry as he is leaner than most Indian Pariah dogs and mongrels that I have seen. He is shorter than a hound would be though; I don't know if that has anything to do with the fact that he was very malnourished when we took him in.

"He also panics considerably whenever the local acrobats pass by our home. The first time they passed by he started trembling; happily he is more confident now, though he still reacts to their proximity.

"My mum says she's seen these acrobats with small, thin brown dogs with docked tails. I just looked up the Wikipedia entry on the Dombari community and it says, 'Adopting a mongrel dog as a pet is fairly common as is the use of the trained mongrel in their performances.' Maybe Rufus has some sort of genetic memory of old-fashioned training techniques to make these dogs perform acrobatics, or maybe he is the puppy of one of their dogs and has had a bad experience?

"Rufus is extremely agile and flexible, and leaps onto furniture. He isn't as nervous as the Indian hounds I've seen though. He's much more like a Pariah in that respect (as far as I know); he barks at strangers and is sometimes playfully aggressive with my other dog."

Story and photos: Saloni Kapur
Pune
My note: The use of the word "mongrel" in the Wikipedia entry on Dombaris, or in any other writing by a layperson, should not be taken literally to mean a mix-breed or indeterminate breed dog. It merely means a dog the writer couldn't identify so wrote off as a mongrel. I haven't seen many Dombaris but I'm guessing they use any dog locally available, perhaps pure pariah/aboriginal dogs in some cases.