Rare earth dogs
This little earth dog-like guy is the Norwegian Lundehund, which at first glance looks unremarkable and is one of the rarest and oldest dog breeds in the world. Lundehund is a compound noun consisting of two elements, lunde and hund, lunde means puffin in Norwegian and hund means dog. True to its name, the Lund was originally bred as a special working dog to hunt puffins and find puffin eggs in cliffs and caves that are inaccessible to humans.
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Lund dogs have a lot of very special things, first of all, they have six toes, rather than fours like other dogs.
Climb the mountain as steadily as a dog
All six toes are fully formed, joint, and muscular. This makes the Lund very well suited to climbing those narrow cliff paths.
Feel like dancing at any time
The joints of their whole body are very flexible, for example, turning their front legs to the side at a 90-degree horizontal angle to the body, which is very similar to a human arm. Lund dogs can also bend their head backwards along their spine, and these joints, which can move widely, can help them adapt to narrow passages and also get rid of them. For hundreds of years, they struggled to help the Norwegians catch puffins on the cliffs.
Standing between mountains and seas
However, as the times went by, Norwegian interest in puffins declined, and the government set a dog tax, and lund dogs became increasingly unpopular. Around 1900, they were still found only in the isolated village of Måstad in Norway. During World War II, when the canine distemper hit, the breed nearly went extinct. In 1963, there was another outbreak of canine distemper, this time, only six dogs survived.
Finally, the six dogs were carefully bred under strict guidance and passed down from generation to generation, and decades later, as of 2010, there were about 1,400 Lund dogs worldwide and about 600 in Norway.
Now, the Lund, who has completely retired from the puffin hunting work, has ushered in a new job opportunity. Norwegian air traffic and airport authorities are conducting reemployment tests for Lund dogs at the airport, and Lund dogs are out of the old business, this time not puffins, but responsible for searching all the nests around the airport, and the eggs are disposed of as a solution to the problem of the first bird attack at the airport.
Congratulations on them.