The ninth-century Celtics of northern France created the shaggy berger picard herding breed. It is scarce and virtually extinct after World War I and II battles
The Clumber spaniel is a bird dog, and its long, low-slung build helps it maneuver through heavy brush to flush out fowl. Its name dates to the late 1700s in Nottinghamshire, England,
With short shiny coats and coiled tails, basenjis don't bark due to an unusually shaped larynx. The sound they make instead is often compared to a yodel.
The Irish wolfhound was originally used to hunt huge Irish elk, now extinct, and later to hunt wolves. The breed almost became extinct itself when the wolf population died off.
The thick-coated, aloof chow chow, with its unusual blue-black tongue, traces its ancestry to Imperial China where it was a guard and hunting dog.
The Italian greyhound, the smallest of the sighthounds, was hugely popular and prestigious among the nobility in the Italian Renaissance.
The St. Bernard comes originally from the Alps, where medieval monks used the dogs, and their superior sense of smell, to rescue stranded travelers.