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Untrue Historic “Facts” It’s Time to Erase

Khalid Elhassan September 8, 2020 35 min

Siege of Budapest - World War II — Red Army soldiers marching into a captured Budapest in 1945. Radio Free Europe

37. Great Rescue Dogs

‘St. Bernards to the Rescue’, by John Emms, depicting a monk with two dogs, one bearing a brandy barrel. Store Encore

Over a period of hundreds of years, from the sixteenth or seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, the monks of the Great Saint Bernard Hospice bred an excellent search and rescue dog. However, severe winters from 1816 to 1818 saw an unusually high number of avalanches, that killed many of the breeding dogs while they were performing rescue operations.

To try and save the breed, the survivors were crossed with Newfoundland dogs, imported in the 1850s. The long fur resulting from crossbreeding with the Newfoundlands – a prominent feature of modern Saint Bernards – made the dogs less suitable for rescue work. The extra fur ended up gathering snow, freezing, and weighing the dogs down.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.