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| | [Previous stamp] [Next post stamp] | | | CROATIAN INDIGENOUS BREEDS OF DOGS | Serie: 405 | Type: P | Stamps in serie: 2
The stamps have been issued in 20-stamp sheets, and the Croatian Post has also issued the commemorative First Day Cover (FDC).
|  | | Stamps no: 405
CROATIAN INDIGENOUS BREEDS OF DOGS | | Value: | 1,8 kn | | Author: | Ratko Janjić, academic painter, Zagreb | | Size: | 36,9 x 24,14 mm | | Paper: | white 102g, gummed | | Perforation: | 14, comb | | Tehnique: | Multicoloured Offsetprint | | Printed by: | "Zrinski" - Čakovec | | Date of issue: | 4.10.2001 | | Quantity: | 350000 |
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The stamps have been issued in 20-stamp sheets, and the Croatian Post has also issued the commemorative First Day Cover (FDC).
CROATIAN SHEEP-DOG
The thoroughbred Croatian sheep-dog is an entirely black, medium-sized dog without a tail. It is markedly lively, supple, mobile, enduring, resourceful, most often distrustful towards unknown people and quite sharp. It learns easily and gladly, and is diligent and unpretentious.
The trunk of the Croatian sheep-dog is in the form of a parallelogram. The head is wedge-shaped with black almond-shaped eyes. The auricles of almost all members of the breed are vertical and triangled.
It holds its head under an angle of 45 degrees. The part of the spine that connects the neck with the back rises above the sturdy and flat, relatively short back. The thorax of the Croatian sheep-dog is wide and deep, like a laterally, slightly flattened, horizontally laid truncated cone. These dogs’ legs are spare, mobile, and quite harmonious. Their paws are relatively small, firm, mostly spoonlike in shape, but they can also be round, like cats’ paws. Their fur is shaggy, medium length and markedly black with short hairs on the legs and face.
The shortcomings that can be found in individual members of lower quality of the breed are all those deviations that interfere with the typical appearance of members of the breed as defined by standards.
The breed originates from specimen selected from the erstwhile very numerous and rather varied population of small, predominantly black dogs that go under a common name pulin in Slavonia. In Panonia these dogs have been used for centuries to help manage herds of sheep, cattle and pigs.
The bases of the contemporary breeding of Croatian sheep-dogs were laid in the 30s of the previous century by the eminent Croatian cattle-raising and veterinary expert of the older generation, Stjepan Romić. He invested enormous effort and great knowledge into the beginnings of the systematic raising and selection of Croatian sheep-dogs. Working for decades on the development and affirmation of the Croatian sheep-dog, he has created a breed that can compete with the best similar breeds in the world, bred in Hungary, England and Australia.
For the present-day breeding of the Croatian sheep-dog, it is of utmost importance that the majority of the breed population has remained continuously associated with working with cattle.
These black, markedly lively and rather sharp dogs are unrivalled when it comes to managing herds of cattle, pigs and sheep, even horses. Recently they have shown to be valuable in the hardest work of all for this category of dogs: managing goats on the natural rocky pastures.
The Croatian sheep-dogs follow the instructions of the shepherds with great attention, and manage herds instead of them: they take the herds to pastures, watch them grazing and sort the cattle afterwards; they do all the necessary work round the pens, sheds and milk-sheds. Experienced shepherds say that a good and well-trained Croatian sheep-dog can have a better effect than two trained workers.
On modern, well fenced off farms, Croatian sheep-dogs can be of great help. They are watchful and sharp guardians, exterminators of rodents, alert and fearless helpers in calming down truculent, frightened or run-away animals.
In the last twenty years or so, Croatian sheep-dogs have become a customary occurrence in the cattle farms in the mountainous regions of Velebit and Dalmatinska Zagora, in Istria and Konavle, and not so rarely on those islands where small-stock breeding has either survived or been revived.
These dogs can also be successfully raised in city conditions, but it is exactly those psychophysical characteristics of the breed so valuable for cattle-breeding farms that makes their numbers among pet dogs rather limited. | | |
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