Where does Basenji (dog breed) come from?
The basenji comes from the villages of the Congo basin in Central Africa, where it has long lived as a free-roaming village dog and hunting partner. It is the famous 'barkless' dog: instead of barking, it makes a yodel-like sound, thanks to an unusually shaped larynx.
Hunting dogs of the villages
The breed was created from stock found in Central Africa, in the Congo region and neighbouring tropical countries. There basenjis lived as village dogs that roamed free and belonged to no one, and by the 19th century villagers used them as skilled hunters to drive game into large nets. The Azande of South Sudan call them ango angari. The name basenji itself has been translated in several ways, among them 'bush thing', 'wild dog' and 'the dog of the villagers'.
Bringing the breed to England
Bringing basenjis to Europe proved hard. A pair shown at Crufts in London in 1895 as 'African Bush Dogs' or 'Congo Terriers' soon died of distemper, and six dogs brought to England in the 1920s died after distemper shots. In the 1930s Olivia Burn, an Englishwoman who had met the dogs in the Belgian Congo, finally succeeded: the Kennel Club registered her imports as 'Basenji', and they were shown at Crufts in 1937. Nearly all basenjis in the Western world probably descend from a few such imports.
Why people think of Ancient Egypt
Basenjis look very like the small, prick-eared, curly-tailed dogs shown on tombs in ancient Egypt, and the breed has been linked to an Egyptian type of dog called the tesem, painted in murals as old as 4,500 years. Britannica counts the basenji among the oldest breeds in the world, and DNA studies count it, with the dingo, among the basal members of the domestic dog family, older than the modern breeds. But the living breed comes from the villages of Central Africa.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · britannica.com ↗ · basenji.org ↗
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