The Great Pyredane is a designer dog, a cross between two giant dog breeds, the Great Dane, a 400-year-old breed developed to hunt European boar, and the Great Pyrenees, a great white canine that has been guarding flocks of sheep in the Pyrenees Mountains for about three thousand years. The Great Dane, as we know the breed, has been selectively bred for at least four hundred years and most experts believe that they are the result of crossbreeding between English Mastiffs and Irish Wolfhounds, developed specifically for the purpose of hunting one of the most savage and dangerous types of prey in Europe at the time, the wild European boar. The Great Dane was extremely popular throughout Germany as early as the 1500s and by 1876 it was declared the National Dog of Germany where it is known as the Deutsche Dogge. This breed became popular in the United States in the late 1800’s, where they are more often employed as watchdogs and family companions. The Great Pyrenees, known as the Pyrenean Mountain Dog in the UK and Europe, is an even more ancient breed than the Great Dane. They have been sharing the cold and lonely landscape of the Pyrenees Mountains with their shepherds and their flocks of sheep for somewhere around three thousand years, but where they came from before that is a matter of speculation, although the prevailing theory is that they are the descendants of large white flock guardians that existed in Asia Minor ten to eleven thousand years ago. These dogs can be found in art, literature, and historical documentation throughout the history of France, being employed not only as protectors of sheep but also as guardians of property and jailer’s dogs. In the 1600s, Dauphin Louis XIV dubbed this breed the Royal Dog of France, and they are believed to have been instrumental in the development of both the modern Newfoundland and Landseer breeds.
