Breed of the Week: The Braque D'Auvergne

History

The history of The Braque d’Auvergne has all the elements of a great adventure novel. It goes something like this: On June 12th, 1798 Napoleon tricked his way onto the island fortress of Malta turned his troops against the ruling Knights of St. John and forced their leaders to capitulate. He then banished the knights from the island and dissolved their order. According to legend, some of the knights returned to their native France and brought with them a type of black and white pointing dog They had discovered on the island. Those dogs eventually developed into the modern Braque d’Auvergne. It is a great story, but there is a problem: it is not true.

In 1944, dog expert Paul Mégnin published the results of his enquiry into the origins of the breed. Among the holes he poked in the Maltese Knight story is the fact that their order was never actually disbanded. The Knights did indeed disperse after the battles of 1798, but the order survived in Russia and Italy and was eventually restored, even in France. Mégnin also discovered that, despite a thorough search conducted by the order’s own archivist M. Chauvelot, no mention of any kind of hunting dogs is to be found in the records. Even the incredibly detailed tome Histoire des Chevaliers de Malte, written in 1726 by the Abbot René Aubert de Vertot, is completely devoid of any reference to hunting dogs on the island. Mégnin even interviewed the ancestors of Commander de Fargues, a Maltese Knight originally from the Auvergne region. None of them had ever heard of their forefather bringing back black and white dogs from Malta. And, despite Mégnin’s myth busting, the Knights of Malta story is still repeated today, although serious scholars simply discount it as nothing more than a charming fairy tale. 

Most experts now believe that the Braque d’Auvergne is another regional variant of the classic old braque found throughout much of France. The black and white coat, they contend, comes from either scent hounds and/or pointing breeds. Even the breed’s FCI standard sort of sidesteps the Maltese origin, saying: Descending from a multi-pointer common source, derivation has been made by a selection to which the Knights of Malta might have participated. 

Whatever the origin, a type of black and white pointing dog had been known in the Auvergne and Cantal regions for generations. It was generally referred to as the Braque d’Auvergne, or the Braque Bleu d’Auvergne due to its blue-black coat. In 1913 a club was formed and the breed’s standard accepted by the Société Central Canine (SCC, the French kennel club). In the 1920s and ’30s growth was slow but steady as the breed gained a reputation as a tough, hard-working gundog. 

But like all the other gundog breeds, the Braque d’Auvergne fell on hard times during the Second World War and by the 1950s was in serious trouble. There were very few breeders left and some of them had taken to crossing English Pointers into their lines in an effort to develop a lighter, faster version of the breed. Fortunately the breed’s parent club was able to restore order and the situation had improved in the 1970s as a new generation of breeders began to make their mark in field trials and interest in the breed increased among the public. By the 1980s and ’90s an average of 300 Braque d’Auvergne pups were being whelped every year. That number remains more or less constant today.

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