History of the Caucasian Ovcharka

 

 

First I need to point out that Ovcharka is merely a Russian word for "shepherd dog" and that I never understood why in some countries you see breeders translate one part of the breed's name, yet only transliterate the other.
This has created a lot of confusion and many people are under the false impression that the word "Ovcharka" is somehow a breed/breed type by itself.
Of course that is not true, the same way that the term "Shepherd Dog" is not a breed by itself, but rather a suffix found in the names of many different dog breeds in the English language.
For example, Anatolian Shepherd Dog and the German Shepherd Dog both have the "shepherd dog" part in their name, but they are two very different type of dogs.
So in Russian a CO is called "Kavkazskaya Ovcharka" and a GSD is called "Nemetskaya Ovcharka".
If you tell someone from Russia that you are looking for an Ovcharka, they won't know what breed you are referring to exactly.
The same way an English speaking person wouldn't know which breed you are looking for exactly if you just say that you want a "Shepherd Dog".

I also need to point out that here is no "T" in the Russian word Ovcharka (Oвчарка). I prefer to call this breed the Caucasian shepherd dog (which is the accurate translation of the breed's name as recognized by the FCI), but Caucasian Ovcharka or Caucasian Mountain dog is fine too.
When abbreviating the breed's name, I will use the term "CO". As this is the most common abbreviation used for this breed in the English language.

Caucasian shepherds are a livestock/property guardian breed from the former Soviet Union and the aboriginal strains of this breed can still be found throughout Caucasus.
The Caucasian shepherd dogs as a breed have a very long history.
Originally they were landrace livestock guardian dogs from the Caucasus Mountains, where they have been used to guard livestock from large predators for probably 2-3000 years.
The evolution of the breed was not only a result of natural selection but it was also influenced by nations that inhabited the Caucasus Region.
Which basically means that the breed would slightly vary from one country in the Caucasus Region to another.

Around 1920 the Soviets started selecting them for military purposes as guard dogs.
The Soviet military decided that this breed would make the perfect guardian dogs to guard borders and prison camps.
So they imported LGD's from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan etc (back then these countries were all apart of the Soviet Union) and started selecting them for their guarding abilities.
They standardized the breed, made them look more uniform and only what in their opinion were the best examples of LGD's from Caucasus were bred to each other.
The name "Caucasian Shepherd Dog" was given and in 1931 the very first breed standard was published.
In the then East Germany, it is said that around 7000 Caucasian shepherds were at one point used to guard the Berlin Wall.

The CO started out as a landrace, but later on they were further refined and standardized through selective breeding towards a written breed standard.
And even though the FCI Caucasian shepherd dogs were no longer a landrace breed, but instead man-made, the breed non the less kept its phenotypic diversity.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Caucasian shepherd dogs kept being used for guarding of prisons, factories, properties, homes etc but they also became more and more popular with the dog show fanciers.
Today we see that most modern Caucasian shepherds (meaning they are no longer those aboriginal dogs straight from Caucasus) are used as property guardians and no longer as LGD's.