Polynesian Dog: One Population Under Five Names

What the Polynesian Dog was, and why it is one animal rather than four

The Polynesian Dog is a collective term for one extinct dog population that Austronesian voyagers carried across the Pacific, not an umbrella over four separate breeds. The island names, kuri in New Zealand, ilio in Hawaii and uri in Tahiti, are the same animal described in different languages.

Start with the thing every ranking page gets structurally wrong. English Wikipedia's List of extinct dog breeds describes this name as a catch-all term for four breeds on this list, naming the Hawaiian Poi Dog, Kuri, Marquesan Dog and Tahitian Dog. Read as written, that says there were four breeds and one label. The evidence says the opposite: there was one population and several labels.

Wikipedia's own Polynesian Dog article does not agree with its list, which is the first clue. That article lists five varieties rather than four, and it nests the Tuamotuan Dog as a sub-bullet underneath the Tahitian Dog, glossing it as possibly a longer-haired version of the same animal. Meanwhile the string Tuamotu occurs zero times in the list article, and Wikipedia's Tuamotuan Dog page is a 34-byte redirect pointing at a section of the Tahitian one.

What the animal actually was

It was a small to medium, lean, primitive, short-coated to moderately coated dog with a long back, short and often bowed forelegs, a broad head, a pointed muzzle, small eyes and prick ears. It was free-ranging in some places and penned in others, was fed a largely vegetarian diet, was raised for dog meat, hair and teeth, rarely barked, and was described by every European who met it as quiet and lazy.

It arrived with people. Dogs were one of three domesticates the Austronesian voyagers carried, alongside pigs and chickens, and the archaeological record of Oceania places them in Island Southeast Asia around 3,300 years ago and in the eastern islands of Polynesia by the fourteenth century AD.

The three questions this page answers that no other page does

1. Is this one animal or several? One, and the ancient DNA now says so directly rather than by inference.
2. Why does the popular list of four contain the Marquesas and not the Tuamotus? Because it was assembled from encyclopedia articles rather than from the archaeology, and it is the wrong way round on both entries.
3. Is anything left of it? No, and specifically the modern street dogs of French Polynesia are not survivors, which is a claim currently made by a page ranking in the top ten for this term.

Bonbeno's two-condition test, applied as a table

To count as a breed on this site an animal needs two documents, a written breed standard and a studbook, and the Polynesian Dog has neither and never did. The formal verdict is type, and the more precise description is a single dispersed indigenous population that no register ever held.

The verdict set runs breed, breed in formation, type, brand, and register without standard. This one is not close to the boundary. It ended before the institutions that would have to hold it were founded.

Why the verdict is type and not breed in formation

Breed in formation is the verdict for a live programme with a standard and a register in progress, and it is the one this site applied to a Spanish population with a draft standard and a DNA-verified private register. Nothing of that kind exists here and nothing can, because there is no population left to enrol.

It is worth saying plainly that the test is a proxy and that this population met the purpose of neither condition. It was not defined by a document and it was not controlled by a register. It was defined by an ocean, and the isolation an ocean provides did the work a studbook does, which is why the island populations stayed recognisable for centuries and then dissolved within a generation once European ships began arriving with dogs.

The evidence that this is one population and not four breeds

Four independent lines of evidence say the island dogs were one animal: an 1839 binomial coined for two of them together, a nineteenth-century taxonomist calling the third a close relative, a shared name across the whole ocean, and a single modern haplogroup spanning four archipelagoes. The genetics is the newest of the four and the strongest.

This is the section the page exists for, so the evidence is set out in order of when it arrived rather than in order of strength.

1. The 1839 binomial was coined for two islands at once

Charles Hamilton Smith did not name a Tahitian dog and a Hawaiian dog. He named one animal covering both. Verbatim from his own text: the native race, known by the name of The Poe Dog (Canis Pacificus, Nob.), Uri-Mahoi of Tahiti and Ilio of the Sandwich Islands, from Uri a dog, and Mahoi indigenous.

The running head over the following page of that section reads DOG OF THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS, and the New Zealand dogs are described a few lines later within the same section, after Forster, as a long-haired breed resembling the sheep-dog. So the scientific name that Wikipedia now files under a four-breed umbrella was invented as a single name for two of those four, with the third handled as a variant in the same passage.

2. The taxonomists who followed said the same thing

Luomala's survey records Fitzinger in 1867 filing the Tahitian dog as found in the Hawaiian and Society islands together, with only minor differences from the New Zealand dog, its closest relative. It records Smith distinguishing the poe dog of the Society and Sandwich islands from its relative the New Zealand dog, and noting that in the Society Islands it was already mixed in breed while in Hawaii the pure breed was better protected.

Read those together and the nineteenth-century position is clear and consistent: Tahiti and Hawaii held the same animal, New Zealand held a larger version of it, and the differences were treated as differences of degree. The modern encyclopedia carries the same reading without drawing attention to it: Wikipedia's Tahitian Dog article states that the animals were closely related to the Hawaiian Poi Dog and the New Zealand kuri, and that the kuri is believed to be a descendant of the Tahitian breed. A descendant relationship is not a sibling-breed relationship.

3. One name travelled the whole ocean

The linguistic evidence is small but it is very direct. When Cook stood off Atiu in the southern Cooks in April 1777 he eventually gave the islanders one of Omai's two British dogs, and the Cook Islands Natural Heritage Trust records that the locals called it kuri, the widespread traditional Polynesian name for dog.

That is islanders 3,000 km from New Zealand applying the New Zealand word to a British animal on sight. The name is not a New Zealand invention attached to a New Zealand breed. It is the Polynesian word for dog, and Bennett records the Tahitian equivalent working the same way, with uri as the generic small-animal name that Tahitians extended to a monkey as uri-taata, the man-dog.

4. The ancient DNA, which settles it

The modern evidence is the decisive one and it arrived in 2018. Greig and colleagues sequenced seven new complete ancient mitogenomes and five partial mtDNA sequences from archaeological dog specimens across Mainland and Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Their sequences from Atafu in Tokelau and from Hawaii, together with previously published sequences from New Zealand and the southern Cook Islands, form a single haplogroup, A2b2, separate from dingoes and New Guinea Singing Dogs.

Four archipelagoes, one haplogroup. And Greig's 2015 work on the New Zealand end shows how tight the founding population was: fourteen complete mitogenomes from Wairau Bar yielding five closely related haplotypes, all of them carrying control-region haplotype A192, which is otherwise reported only from some modern village dogs in Bali.

The honest limit on all of this

One gap matters and this page will not paper over it. No Society Islands or Tahitian dog has ever been sequenced. The strings Tahiti and Huahine occur zero times in Greig 2018, and the only mention of the Society Islands in that paper is inside a reference title. So the genetic case for one population rests on Hawaii, New Zealand, the southern Cooks and Tokelau, and the Tahitian branch is joined to them by the historical and linguistic evidence rather than by a sequence.

That is still a strong position, because the Tahitian dogs sit geographically between Hawaii and the Cooks and arrived by the same voyages. But it is an inference, and a page that told you the Tahitian dog had been genetically matched to the kuri would be inventing a result.

Which islands actually had dogs, and why the popular list is wrong at both ends

Four archipelagoes had living native dogs when Europeans arrived: Hawaii, New Zealand, the Society Islands and the Tuamotus. The Marquesas did not, and its dogs had been extinct or very rare since about 1595. The widely repeated four-breed list gets both of those the wrong way round.

Luomala states the distribution plainly and this page quotes her rather than summarising: the dog was present at the time of European discovery of Polynesia in only a few archipelagoes, and the Tuamotus, Society Islands, Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand had dogs which she believed they did not get from any known European explorers.

She is equally plain about the Marquesas. Four Polynesian archipelagoes, Hawaii, New Zealand, Society and Tuamotus, had living native dogs at the time of European discovery, and archaeological evidence from the Marquesas shows that dogs had become extinct or very rare there by 1595, when Europeans first reached the islands

So the popular list is inverted at both ends

Set that against Wikipedia's list of four, which names the Hawaiian Poi Dog, the kuri, the Marquesan Dog and the Tahitian Dog. It includes the archipelago whose dogs were gone before any European described one alive, and it excludes the archipelago whose dogs were not only alive but supplying a long-distance hair trade.

That is not a small editorial quibble. It means the best-known list of Polynesian dogs is organised around which Wikipedia articles happen to exist rather than around where the dogs were, and a reader working from it will spend their time on the emptiest of the four records and never hear of the Tuamotus at all.

A disagreement this page publishes rather than resolves

The two best sources here do not agree about Samoa. McCormack, writing for the Cook Islands Natural Heritage Trust, lists Samoa among the places Europeans encountered Polynesian dogs. Luomala says no dependable evidence has been found of the dog's presence in western Polynesia at the time of first European contact.

Both are serious sources, one an anthropologist writing in Pacific Science and one a career Pacific biodiversity director. This site's rule where sources disagree is to name both and let the reader see that the question is open, rather than averaging them or picking the more convenient one. Nothing else on this page turns on which is right.

The dogs moved after contact too, and that muddies later records

One documented event is worth knowing because it explains some confusing later reports. After Atiu in 1777 Cook sailed to Tonga, where there were no dogs, and gave a chief a male and a female Polynesian dog taken from Tahiti. They bred, and Mariner reported dogs common in Tonga by 1811.

So a Tongan dog in the early nineteenth century may well be a Tahitian dog two or three generations removed, moved there deliberately by a European expedition. By the time missionaries reached Rarotonga in 1823 with their own dogs, the people had lost the word kuri entirely and coined puaka-aoa, literally barking pig, which tells you both that the old animal was gone and that the new one behaved differently enough to need a new name.

The names: kuri, ilio, uri, peto and nuhe

The Polynesian words for dog are closely related across most of the ocean, which is itself evidence that the animal travelled with one set of voyages. The exception is the Marquesas, whose southern word for dog sits outside the family entirely.

Names are weak evidence on their own and this site has a standing rule against building an origin theory on a word. Used carefully, though, the pattern here corroborates what the genetics says.

What the pattern supports, and what it does not

Kuri, ilio and uri belong to one family and sit on three widely separated archipelagoes, which is consistent with one animal carried by one expansion. That is a modest claim and the genetics carries the weight anyway.

What the pattern does not support is any theory built on peto. Its resemblance to the Spanish perro has been used to argue for a Spanish introduction, and the same inference was drawn in New Zealand from the alternative Maori name pero. Two identical false inferences 6,000 km apart is better evidence for a Polynesian word than for a Spanish loan, and this page draws no conclusion from it beyond that.

Canis pacificus, and the four different dates in circulation for it

The Polynesian dog carried at least six Latin names and none survives. Canis pacificus, the best known, was retired to a junior synonym of the domestic dog, and the four sources that give its authorship date disagree with each other by six years.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century naturalists repeatedly tried to give this animal species rank, mostly without having seen one. Luomala's whole 1960 paper is a survey of those attempts and it is the reason this section can be written at all.

Four dates for one name, and which to use

This is a small forensic point but it is exactly the kind of thing a directory should get right. Four sources give four positions on when Smith published Canis pacificus.

• 1839, per Wozencraft in Mammal Species of the World, which lists it as Canis pacificus C. E. H. Smith, 1839.
• 1839, in his 1840 book, which is how English Wikipedia's Polynesian Dog article phrases it in a single sentence.
• 1845, per Luomala, who cites Smith 1845 at pages 210 and 296.
• 1845, per English Wikipedia's Tahitian Dog article, which lists Canis pacificus (1845) by Charles Hamilton Smith in its own list of names.

The volumes were issued as part of Jardine's Naturalist's Library across 1839 and 1840, and the later date almost certainly reflects a reprint. For taxonomic purposes the authority date is 1839, because that is what Mammal Species of the World records, and Mammal Species of the World is the instrument that decides such questions. This page uses 1839 and prints the disagreement rather than hiding it.

The name has no standing anyway

It is worth being clear that none of this changes what the animal was. Wozencraft's third edition lists Canis pacificus as a junior taxonomic synonym for the domestic dog. So the Polynesian dog is Canis lupus familiaris, exactly like every other dog, and the nineteenth-century attempts to give it species rank were the product of naturalists classifying second-hand descriptions of an animal none of them had examined.

Luomala says as much in the sentence this page quotes more than any other: their source material came at second and third hand from impressionistic descriptions by members of the expeditions of Captain Cook and other eighteenth-century explorers, none of whom give a single measurement or preserved a specimen for scientific study.

Ancient DNA, genetic diversity, and the founder haplotypes

The genetics of this population is genuinely good science and it is the newest part of the record. It establishes where the dogs came from, that the island populations share one haplogroup, and that they did not come through Taiwan and the Philippines.

Three studies carry almost all of the weight, and each answers a different question. None of them is quoted here from a summary; each was read in full.

Where they came from: not the northeastern route

Oskarsson and colleagues mapped the founder haplotype distribution for dingoes (A29) and ancient Polynesian dogs (Arc1 and Arc2) across 424 Southern East Asian and 219 Island Southeast Asian dogs, including 36 from the Philippines and 52 from Taiwan. Verbatim: all three haplotypes were found in South China, Mainland Southeast Asia and Indonesia but absent in Taiwan and the Philippines.

That result matters more than it looks, because the obvious hypothesis is the wrong one. Austronesian languages and Austronesian people did expand out of Taiwan through the Philippines. The dogs did not travel with them on that leg. The authors conclude there is no indication that these dogs were introduced via Taiwan and the Philippines together with the expansion of the Neolithic culture and Austronesian languages.

The claim currently sitting at the top of Google, and why it is backwards

This is worth naming because a reader will meet it before they meet this page. Google India's AI Mode answer for this query states that the dogs' ancestors travelled from Southeast Asia through Taiwan and the Philippines starting around 3000 BC, and attributes that claim to a TikTok account.

That is the opposite of what the peer-reviewed source says, and it is also the opposite of what Wikipedia's own article says two paragraphs into its genetics section. An answer engine has taken a video platform over a Royal Society paper on a question the paper was written to settle.

One haplogroup across four archipelagoes

Greig 2018 is the study that makes this page's central argument possible. Seven new complete ancient mitogenomes and five partial sequences, concluding at least three dog dispersal events into the region beyond the dingo introduction, and placing the Pacific material from Atafu in Tokelau and from Hawaii, with previously published New Zealand and southern Cook Islands sequences, in one haplogroup A2b2 that is separate from dingoes and New Guinea Singing Dogs.

A partial sequence from a dog burial at Graciosa Bay on Santa Cruz in the Solomon Islands carries markers consistent with the same haplogroup, which extends the pattern west of Polynesia proper.

How narrow the founding population was

Greig 2015 measured the New Zealand end and the result is a useful check on genetic diversity at the moment of arrival. Fourteen complete mitogenomes from Wairau Bar, five closely related haplotypes among them, and every one of the fourteen carrying control-region haplotype A192, otherwise reported only from some modern village dogs in Bali.

Fourteen dogs, five haplotypes, one control-region type: that is a founder population carried in canoes, and it is exactly what a maritime colonisation looks like in the mitochondria. Compare it with the Philippine village dogs Oskarsson sampled, where 36 animals yielded 17 haplotypes with three found nowhere else. A continental-margin landrace is diverse; an island founder population is not.

What they looked like, and the measurements nobody took

Every description of this animal agrees on a small dog with a long back, short and often crooked forelegs, a broad head, a pointed muzzle, small eyes and prick ears. Not one observer recorded a height, a weight or a single measurement of any kind.

The absence is the first thing to state, because it governs everything that follows. Luomala, having surveyed the entire eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, records that none of the observers gave a single measurement or preserved a specimen for scientific study, and adds separately that no numerical data exist on the native dogs of the Society Islands and the Tuamotus.

So the descriptions below are prose, written by sailors and naturalists, and they should be read as prose.

Georg Forster at Huahine, September 1773

The fullest eyewitness account of the tropical dogs is Forster's, and it is worth quoting because it is where most later descriptions ultimately come from. The dogs of all these islands were short, and their sizes varied from that of a lap-dog to the largest spaniel; the head broad, the snout pointed, the eyes very small, the ears upright, and the hair rather long, lank, hard, and of different colours but most commonly white and brown; they seldom if ever barked, but howled sometimes, and were shy of strangers to a degree of aversion.

Note the phrase the dogs of all these islands. Forster, standing in the Society Islands in 1773, was already describing them as one population rather than as an island breed.

Smith and Bennett, a generation later

Smith's own description gives the head sharpened at the muzzle, the ears erect, the back long, the limbs crooked, the hair smooth and retaining its primitive livery of tan or rusty ochre-colour. Bennett, relayed in the same volume, made it equal in size to a terrier, with a dull expression of countenance, the tail straight or slightly curled, a brown livery, a feeble but shrill bark, gentle and indolent, presenting the mixed forms of a fox-dog, turnspit and terrier.

The turnspit comparison is a gift to a modern reader, because the Turnspit Dog is itself an extinct British breed defined by a long body on short bowed legs. Bennett is telling us the Pacific dog had that outline.

The one real difference between islands

Coat length is the only feature where the sources genuinely disagree, and the disagreement is geographic rather than contradictory. The Tuamotu dogs are recorded with white hair 10 to 15 cm long, valuable enough that Tahitian warriors crossed open ocean by canoe to trade bark-cloth for it, to fringe the taumi breast ornaments worn by priests and high chiefs.

That is the only measurement of any kind anywhere in this record, and it is a measurement of hair rather than of a dog. The pictorial record is barely better. Luomala went to the British Museum in May and June 1960 specifically to look for more images, working through a collection of drawings by Buchan, Parkinson and Miller from Cook's first voyage that may have come from Joseph Banks's estate, and the entire yield was five additional sketches: two of the Maori dog, of which she noted no other sketches are known, and three of Society Islands dogs that show them less clearly than the plates she had already published. An animal that stays unrecognised by every registry is one thing; an animal for which a dedicated search of the best collection on earth adds five drawings is another, and it is why no page can honestly give you a height.

What the dogs were for: dog meat, hair and teeth

Polynesian dogs were kept as a protein source, a fibre source and a raw material, and understanding that explains almost every physical and behavioural trait in the record. They were not working dogs and they were not primarily companions.

Along with domesticated pigs and chickens, dog meat was an important animal protein source for the human populations of Polynesia, and dogs were fed a mostly vegetarian diet of breadfruit, coconuts, yams or poi made from taro.

The diet is the key to the animal. A dog raised on taro and breadfruit for the table has no reason to be athletic, no reason to be alert and every reason to be placid, and the descriptions match exactly: silent, lazy, indolent, sluggish. What reads in the journals as a poor-quality dog is a well-managed food animal.

The three products

• Meat. Served at feasts and to high chiefs, and regarded as a delicacy above pork in the Society Islands. Cook's crew ate it and compared it favourably to English lamb.
• Hair. The long tail hairs of the Tuamotuan dogs fringed the taumi, the crescent breast ornament worn by Society Islands priests and high chiefs, and the trade in it ran between archipelagoes. In New Zealand the longer hair went into kahu kuri, the dog-skin cloaks.
• Teeth and bone. Dog teeth were fashioned into fishhooks and dog bones into weapons and implements.

An economic explanation for an apparent breed difference

The Tuamotuan long coat is the one feature that looks like a separate variety, and there is a published alternative explanation worth knowing. The historian Margaret Titcomb argued that the Tuamotuan dogs may not have been a separate breed developed in isolation at all: the people of the Tuamotus could simply have eaten their short-haired dogs and kept the long-haired ones for export to the Society Islands.

That is selection by trade rather than by isolation, and it produces a visibly different population without any separate ancestry. It is a good reminder that a coat difference between islands is not automatically a breed difference, and it is the same reasoning that keeps this page from treating the Tuamotuan dog as a fifth entry.

They never went feral, and there is a reason

One structural fact separates these dogs from almost every other landrace this site covers. They never became feral, because the native forests of these islands held too little food to support a free-living dog. A dog that cannot survive away from people is a dog whose reproduction is entirely under human control, which is why the island populations stayed recognisable for so long, and why they disappeared so fast once European dogs arrived.

The extinction date, island by island, from primary sources

There is no single Polynesian dog extinction date, because each island branch ended separately, and the best-dated evidence comes from one witness who saw two of them at once. Frederick Debell Bennett's note, published in 1840, records the Society Islands animal as already gone while the Hawaiian one still survived.

This site's rule is to date an extinction claim from a primary source rather than repeating a secondary assertion, and this one can be dated unusually well.

The Bennett note, which dates two extinctions at once

Bennett was a naturalist who travelled the Pacific aboard the whaler Tuscan between 1833 and 1836. He supplied a note on the Pacific dogs to Charles Hamilton Smith, who printed it in full. Verbatim: amongst the Society Islands, the aboriginal dog, which was formerly eaten as a delicacy by the natives, is now extinct, or merged into mongrel breeds by propagation with many exotic varieties. At the Sandwich group, where the custom of eating them was still pertinaciously retained, the pure breed of the Poe dog has been better protected, and although becoming yearly more scarce, examples of it were yet to be met with in all the islands, principally as a delicacy for the chiefs.

He then dates his own last sighting precisely: as late as October 1835, in the populous and well civilized town of Honoruru at Oahu, he noticed a skinned dog suspended at the door of a house of entertainment for natives, to denote what sumptuous fare might be obtained within.

That single note gives a reader more than any secondary summary. At one moment in the mid-1830s, the Society Islands population was already absorbed and the Hawaiian one was surviving in reduced numbers, with a dated, located, specific observation attached.

A citation correction, because the top-ranking page has it wrong

English Wikipedia attributes that quotation to Bennett's own book, Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, volume I, page 86, introducing it with the words By 1834, British traveler Frederick Debell Bennett noted. That attribution is wrong and the error is checkable in about a minute.

Bennett's volume I was read in full for this page from the Internet Archive, 554,261 characters. Page 86 does discuss the Tahitian dog, and what it actually says is: The aboriginal dog has also merged into a mongrel breed. The Tahitians formerly considered a dog, fed on vegetable food, a delicate dish; and although the impairment of the purity of the breed, and the prejudices of Europeans, have done much to abolish this taste, it is still not unfrequently indulged. The phrases 'propagation with many', 'exotic varieties' and 'is now extinct' occur zero times in the entire volume.

So the quotation is real, Bennett did write it, and it is not in that book. It is the separate note he gave to Smith, printed at pages 210 to 211 of Smith's volume 2 under the introduction To Mr. Frederick Bennet we are indebted for a note on these dogs, which we here insert. Wikipedia attaches both references to the sentence, so the Smith half is right and the Bennett page reference is not.

How they ended, which matters more than when

None of these populations died out. They were absorbed. The distinct island populations became extinct between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through interbreeding with introduced European dogs, with the declining consumption of dog meat as a contributing factor.

That distinction has a practical consequence. An animal that dies out leaves no descendants; an animal that is absorbed leaves its genes distributed thinly through a mixed population. Which is exactly the question the next section takes up.

Is anything left? The street dogs of French Polynesia, tested

Nothing survives of this population as a distinct animal, and the specific claim that its descendants live on today as French Polynesian street dogs does not survive testing either. The largest village-dog survey ever run found South Pacific populations almost completely derived from European stock.

A page currently ranking in the top ten for this query states that the Polynesian dog is now extinct and that descendants of these native dogs live on the streets of French Polynesian islands. It is an appealing claim and it is the kind a reader wants to be true.

What the genotyping actually found

Shannon and colleagues genotyped 549 village dog samples from 38 countries on a 185,805-marker array, alongside 4,676 purebred dogs. Their finding on this exact question is unambiguous. Verbatim from the significance statement: indigenous dog populations in the Neotropics and South Pacific have been largely replaced by European dogs. And from the abstract: some populations, notably those in the Neotropics and the South Pacific, are almost completely derived from European stock.

So a street dog in Papeete today is, on the best available genomic evidence, overwhelmingly a European-derived dog rather than a surviving Polynesian one. Some ancestry may persist at low levels, and this page does not claim it is zero. What it does say is that calling those dogs descendants of the native population, without qualification, is not supported.

The comparison that should be on every Indian page

The same sentence in the same paper contains the finding that matters most to this site's readers, and almost nobody quotes it. Verbatim: importantly, many populations, including those of Vietnam, India, and Egypt, show minimal evidence of European admixture.

Read the two halves together. The famous island landraces of the Pacific have effectively been replaced. The Indian village dog has not. An Indian reader looking for a genuinely indigenous, genetically diverse, heat-tolerant, hardy landrace does not need to look at the Pacific at all, and on this evidence the Indian animal is the better-preserved one.

Why a mitogenome cannot bring one back

It is worth stating why revival is not on the table even in principle, because a reader who has met the Salish Wool Dog's 2023 genome may reasonably ask. Everything published for the Polynesian dogs is mitochondrial, which is inherited down the maternal line and represents a tiny fraction of the genome. No nuclear genome of a Polynesian dog has been sequenced. A mitogenome can tell you where an animal came from and which population it belonged to, and it cannot tell you what it looked like or how to rebuild it.

Kennel club recognition: none, and the check takes two minutes

No kennel club has ever recognised any Polynesian dog, and the reason is chronological rather than judgemental. The populations were absorbed during the nineteenth century, before studbooks and written standards existed as institutions.

The check was still run rather than assumed, because this site's rule is that an absence is only real when a control succeeded in the same session on the same instrument.

The FCI's letter P nomenclature index was read in full and enumerated: 27 entries, from Parson Russell Terrier 339 to Pumi 56. POLYNESIAN occurs zero times and PACIFIC occurs zero times. Controls that returned as expected in the same read: Pharaoh Hound 248, Podenco Canario 329, Pug 253 and Puli 55.

The FCI's provisional register was read separately, at the working path rather than the decoy one that serves an English Setter page. POLYNESIAN and TAHITIAN each occur zero times, with Macedonian Shepherd Dog Karaman 378 returning as an in-document control.

An honest limit on the letter index

That P index served original-language names on this fetch, which is why it reads Perro de Agua Espanol and Polski Owczarek Nizinny rather than their English forms. A letter index alone therefore cannot prove an absence, because a breed can file under a different letter in a different language. It is quoted here as corroboration rather than as the decisive instrument, and the decisive point is the chronological one: there was nothing left to register by the time any of these bodies existed.

The India question, answered from the same documents

The Kennel Club of India is the FCI member body for India and issues pedigrees against FCI nomenclature, so a breed the FCI does not hold is one no Indian pedigree can exist for either. That is the correct way to answer the Indian recognition question, and it avoids a trap this site has documented: the KCI publishes no breed list at all, so a query against it returns zero for every breed including well-known ones, which is a broken instrument rather than a finding.

Screening registries, and why an absence there is structural

The Orthopedic Foundation for Animals publishes its own inclusion threshold, and it explains this absence better than any speculation: for hips a breed needs at least 100 evaluations, and for its other databases at least 50, before it appears in the published statistics at all. A population with no register and no living members cannot accumulate a single evaluation, so nothing about the absence is informative.

What the breed sites publish about a dog nobody has seen for a century

The result set for this term mixes genuinely good sources with content that cannot be right, and telling them apart is a service this page can perform. The best material comes from a New Zealand government encyclopedia, a Cook Islands biodiversity trust and two peer-reviewed papers; the worst comes from an answer engine citing a video platform.

This site judges the page rather than the domain, because a known-weak site can carry an accurate page and a strong domain can carry a bad one. Where a Wikipedia article is quoted here it was read as raw wikitext and its revision history was checked, so the byte sizes of the articles quoted match the articles that were fetched and neither moved between reads.

The specific thing to watch for on this animal

A pattern this site has recorded repeatedly is a content farm publishing a different real breed under an obscure or extinct breed's name. It has already been documented on this exact group: one aggregator's Marquesan Dog profile is entirely the kuri, complete with Maori migration dates, kahu kuri cloaks and the Te Papa specimens, and it recommends an annual hip evaluation for breeding dogs of an extinct breed. Its own similar-breeds module then lists its separate kuri profile as a 90 percent match, so the site holds the same animal twice under two names and does not notice.

The general defence is cheap. Before taking any figure about one of these animals from a breed site, check whether the page gives it a lifespan, a weight range and a health-screening recommendation. Those three fields cannot be filled honestly for an animal with no measurements and no living population, so a page that prints them has generated them.

Polynesian dog price in india: there is none, and here is the proof

There is no Polynesian dog price in india because there is no Polynesian dog. Every branch of this population was absorbed into European stock during the nineteenth century, so no animal exists to price, and any rupee figure attached to this name was generated rather than observed.

This page quotes no breed price. That is the correct answer rather than a gap, and this section sets out how to recognise the figures you will be shown instead.

One good result, recorded because it goes the right way

This site normally reports answer engines fabricating an Indian price immediately after saying none exists. On the closely related Tahitian Dog query in the same session, Google's AI Mode did the honest thing: it answered that there is no price because the breed is completely extinct, and printed no rupee band at all.

That is worth publishing. The failure mode is real and well documented, and it is not universal, so the check remains worth running rather than assuming the worst.

What a fabricated price looks like when it does appear

And a reminder about result counts

One thing this page will not do is treat a small number of search results as proof of a thin market. This site tested that reasoning and abandoned it: the same fixed control query returned About 16,200 results on one pull and About 9,290 on another within a single session, a 43 percent swing on an unchanged query. An absolute result count measures nothing about demand.

What does evidence an absent market is composition rather than volume: zero listings against a passing control, listing shells selling a different animal, converted foreign figures, and carousels containing none of the breed. For an animal extinct since the nineteenth century, the argument is simpler still.

Monthly cost of keeping a dog of this kind in India

Budget roughly Rs 3,000 to Rs 8,000 a month for a 12 to 20 kg short-coated village-type dog in an Indian city. The monthly cost is dominated by food and parasite control, and the widest variation in the whole table is not between breeds but between ways of buying the same vaccine.

There is no animal to cost, so the useful question is what a dog of this size and coat costs to keep in India. Every figure below was read from a named seller or a municipal page rather than from a breed site's cost table.

The spread is the finding, not the average

One identical vaccine costs very different amounts depending only on how it is delivered, and this is the most actionable line in the section. The same 9-in-1 runs Rs 600 at a Goa government veterinary hospital inclusive of vaccine and certificate, from Rs 899 at a private clinic chain, and from Rs 1,999 through a vet-at-home service that adds a further Rs 699 visit fee. Anti-rabies spans Rs 100 to Rs 1,199 across those same three routes.

That is a 3.3 times spread on the vaccine and a 12 times spread on rabies for the same drug. A reader who changes only where they vaccinate moves their annual bill further than any choice of dog would.

Greater Chennai Corporation's six municipal clinics provide treatment and anti-rabies vaccination free of cost, and the Corporation issued 9,115 pet licences in 2024 at Rs 50 each. Delhi's MCD charges Rs 500 to register a pet dog and has issued 18,958 certificates since 2021.

Heat tolerance: the Society Islands against Indian cities, measured

The tropical Polynesian dogs lived in the most stable warm-humid climate on this site, and the comparison with coastal India is unusually close. Huahine runs an annual mean of 26.96 C at 79.19 percent humidity in a band two degrees wide, and its peak wet bulb sits about a degree below Chennai's.

Climate is the one section of an extinct-animal page that can be genuinely new work rather than borrowed prose, because the homeland can still be measured. Every figure below came from a single-point NASA POWER climatology query by explicit latitude and longitude, with the grid-cell elevation echoed back and compared against the real one.

The instrument, and why these particular cells are trustworthy

POWER returns a grid cell rather than a point, and in hilly or small-island terrain the cell can sit a kilometre away from the ground vertically. These cells do not. Huahine's cell reports 4.41 m against a real elevation of about 5 m, an error of 0.6 m, which is among the most accurate cells this project has measured anywhere in the world. Rangiroa in the Tuamotus reports 0.04 m against about 3 m. Papeete reports 62.97 m against about 2 m, an error of +61 m, which is the least good of the three and still well inside the usable band.

No two of the Pacific points returned an identical series, so none of them is the same cell queried twice, which is the check that catches a small island being collapsed into one grid square.

What the table says, and the surprise in it

Three readings matter. First, the Society Islands have almost no seasons. Rangiroa's annual range of 1.82 C and Huahine's 2.04 C are the narrowest on this site, against Delhi's 22.27 and Kolkata's 14.22. A dog from there had never met a cold month, and had never met a hot one either.

Second, and this is the surprise, Kochi is a very close match. Its 3.51 C annual range and 78.83 percent humidity sit almost on top of the Polynesian figures, and its peak wet bulb of 25.79 C is within 0.8 C of Huahine's. Of all the extinct breeds on this site, this is the one whose homeland India can most nearly reproduce.

Third, the heat tolerance question comes down to wet bulb rather than to temperature, because a dog cools by evaporation and evaporation fails as air saturates. Huahine peaks at 25.02 C wet bulb, Chennai at 26.11 and Kolkata at 27.09. So coastal India is between one and two degrees harder than the homeland at the peak, which is a real difference and a small one.

Compare that with the New Zealand branch, where the gap runs to eight or nine points, and the point of this page comes through again. One population spanned climates that differ enormously, which is part of why the island populations came to look different from each other.

Two figures that are routinely misread

• T2M_MAX is a period extreme, not an average daily high. Delhi's climatology T2M_MAX sits near its all-time record rather than at a routine May afternoon, and quoting it as a mean overstates ordinary heat by eight to ten degrees. No such figure appears above.
• A wet bulb above about 35 C is physically impossible. Every wet-bulb figure here is Stull computed from T2M and RH2M, never from T2M_MAX, and the highest in the table is 27.09 C.
• Hottest months are checked rather than assumed. Delhi peaks in June and not May, Bengaluru and Pune in April, and Kochi is coolest in August because of the monsoon. Those three catch out most published tables.

Temperament: the one trait every witness agreed on

Every European who described these dogs described the same temperament: quiet, indolent, shy of strangers and reluctant to bark. That unanimity is unusual in this kind of record, and the likeliest explanation is management rather than inheritance.

Start with the sources, because the agreement between them is the finding. Forster at Huahine in 1773: they seldom if ever barked, but howled sometimes, and were shy of strangers to a degree of aversion. Smith in 1839: a silent lazy animal. Bennett in the 1830s: gentle and indolent, with a dull expression of countenance and a feeble but shrill bark. McCormack, summarising the whole record: sluggish, yelping rather than barking.

Wikipedia's article adds the general conclusion drawn from these accounts, that the diet and environment of the islands resulted in a dog with small stature and a docile disposition, and that European explorers described them as lazy.

Why that probably describes a system rather than a genotype

A dog penned or tethered around the belly, fed a fixed vegetarian diet, never worked, never hunted with, and raised for the table has no scope to be anything but placid. Several of the observed traits follow directly from the management: low activity from confinement and a low-protein diet, wariness of strangers from limited socialisation, and quietness from a life with nothing to guard.

That reading is worth stating because the alternative reading, that the Polynesian dogs were inherently stupid and lazy animals, is what the nineteenth-century sources actually assert. Smith's phrasing about the form bearing marks of decrepitude and Forster's comparison giving the New Zealand dogs little more sagacity than sheep are judgements made by people who did not know what the animals were for.

One exception, which supports the same reading

The New Zealand branch is the exception that proves it. Kuri lived largely on fish rather than on taro, grew appreciably larger than the tropical dogs, and were used in hunting birds. Same population, different management, a visibly different animal. If diet and use can do that within one population, they can account for the temperament descriptions too.

Training: nothing was recorded, and one clue survives

No account of anyone training a Polynesian dog survives, in any language, from any island. The single clue in the record is the New Zealand branch's use in bird hunting, which is the only documented working role for any of these dogs.

The absence should be stated before anything else. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century observers recorded diet, appearance, voice, temperament, uses and price in trade goods, and recorded nothing at all about how the animals were handled, taught or worked, with one exception.

That exception is worth having. The New Zealand kuri were used to hunt birds, which means at least some of these dogs were worked in cooperation with people. A dog that hunts alongside a person is a dog that has learned something, whatever the observers thought of its sagacity.

What would apply to a dog of this general type today

Since nobody can train this animal, the useful version of this section is what applies to the living village-type dogs that share its history. The general landrace pattern is consistent enough to be worth setting out.

• Pay for behaviour rather than correcting it. Dogs shaped by independent scavenging do not find compliance intrinsically rewarding, and correction-based handling produces avoidance rather than learning.
• Treat recall as a year-long project on a long line. It is the hardest thing you will teach a landrace dog and the one that keeps it alive on an Indian street.
• Socialise deliberately and in short sessions. Lifts, autorickshaws, tiled floors, umbrellas, crowds and cattle are urban Indian stressors a village dog has never met.
• Work in the cool hours. A training session is exertion, and a willing dog will keep going past the point of safety in afternoon heat.

Exercise needs: none were recorded, and the geography is the clue

No daily exercise requirement was ever recorded for these dogs, and for the tropical branches the honest inference is that it was very low. They were penned or tethered, fed a set diet, and never worked.

The record is specific about confinement. Dogs on Tahiti were tied with strings around the belly and kept in the house, raised as a food source alongside domesticated pigs. An animal kept that way has an exercise requirement close to zero by construction, and the sluggishness every observer noted is what that produces.

The New Zealand branch is again the exception, being used in bird hunting across much rougher country, which implies genuine stamina.

The Indian version of the requirement, for a living dog of this type

• 45 to 75 minutes a day for a lean 12 to 20 kg village-type dog, split across two sessions.
• Both sessions outside 10 am to 5 pm for most of the Indian year.
• Sniffing counts, and counts more than distance. Twenty minutes of scent work tires this kind of dog more thoroughly than an hour on a lead.
• Check the tarmac with the back of your hand for seven seconds before walking on it. Indian roads hold heat long after sunset.
• Long-line freedom rather than off-lead freedom, until the recall is genuinely proven.

What happens without it is predictable and is a common reason landrace dogs are surrendered: fence-testing, gate-bolting, destructive chewing and rising interest in the neighbourhood's cats. Each of those reads as a temperament problem and is usually an exercise problem.

Grooming and coat care, and the one real difference between islands

Coat care for the tropical Polynesian dogs would have been minimal, and their coat is the only feature on which the sources genuinely disagree. That disagreement is geographic: the Tuamotu dogs carried hair 10 to 15 cm long while Smith describes the Tahitian and Hawaiian animal as smooth.

Set the descriptions side by side and the pattern is clear. Smith 1839, on the Tahitian and Hawaiian dogs: the hair is smooth, but retains its primitive livery of tan or rusty ochre-colour. Forster at Huahine in 1773: hair rather long, lank, hard, and of different colours. McCormack, summarising: short to long white, brown or black hair, with the Tuamotu dogs distinctive in having very long white hair, 10 to 15 cm.

The Tuamotu coat had a market. Tahitian warriors arrived by canoe to trade bark-cloth for the hair, which fringed the taumi breast ornaments worn by priests and high chiefs. A dog population whose hair is a trade good is a dog population under selection for hair, whether or not anybody wrote a standard.

Coat care for a village-type dog in Indian humidity

For the living dog an Indian reader would actually groom, the routine is short and the monsoon is the part that matters.

• Brush weekly with a rubber curry or hound glove, twice weekly through a seasonal shed.
• Bathe when dirty, not on a schedule. Over-bathing a short coat in humid conditions strips it and irritates skin.
• Dry the ears actively after every soaking. This is the single most skipped step and the one that matters most in an Indian monsoon.
• Check between the toes and in the groin weekly through the wet months, where humid-climate skin problems begin.
• Check for ticks daily in season, along the neck, inside the ears and between the toes.

The imported-advice trap

Overseas breed clubs publish care guidance written for temperate climates and Indian pages copy it verbatim. The clearest case on this site is a parent club instructing owners to towel the dog and let him air dry, which is correct in Wisconsin and wrong in an Indian monsoon, where published Indian series place a large share of canine otitis cases in the wettest months and name bathing without plugging the ears among the commonest causes. For any coat, dry the ears actively and do not leave a damp dog in an unventilated room.

Health issues and life expectancy: no clinical record of any kind

No inherited condition has ever been described in any Polynesian dog population, no screening scheme has covered them, and no life expectancy has been measured. This section says so three times rather than borrowing a related breed's figures, and then gives the Indian health picture a living dog of this type actually faces.

Three absences, each checked rather than assumed. There is no breed-specific veterinary literature: PubMed returns 0 for the singular name form and 2 for the plural, and those two are a Madagascan dog ancestry paper and Oskarsson's haplotype study, neither of them clinical. There is no screening data, because screening registries publish per-breed statistics only for breeds with enough evaluations, and OFA's own threshold is 100 for hips and 50 for its other databases. And there is no life expectancy figure, because the large lifespan studies draw on modern primary-care records of registered breeds.

One near-miss is worth recording as a matter of method. The archaeological record does contain real health data for the New Zealand branch, in the form of dental analysis across a large number of individuals, and that material is covered on the kuri page. Nothing equivalent exists for the tropical islands.

The health issues a living village-type dog meets in India

Tick-borne disease dominates Indian canine practice and is what a short-coated outdoor dog in India is genuinely exposed to. Two recent Indian studies, each read at source, give the scale. Both sampled dogs presented at veterinary clinics rather than random populations, and that caveat is not optional.

In practice that means the screening conversation to have with your vet is a tick panel rather than a hip score, that monthly tick control is the highest-value line in the budget at about Rs 1,103, and that the pre-monsoon window from March to May is when to be most vigilant in southern India.

One structural point about genetic diversity and health

There is a real health argument buried in this page's genetics section and it cuts both ways. The Wairau Bar founding population was narrow: fourteen dogs, five closely related haplotypes, all carrying one control-region type. A founder population that narrow is exactly the situation in which recessive disorders concentrate.

Nobody can say whether that happened, because no nuclear genome exists and no clinical record was ever kept. What can be said is that the popular assumption, that a landrace is automatically healthier than a registry breed, does not follow for an island founder population. The Indian village dog, drawn from a continental-scale population, is a much better example of that argument than any Polynesian dog is.

Feeding: what they actually ate, and why it is not a diet plan

Polynesian dogs were fed breadfruit, coconut, yams and poi made from taro, with fish on some islands, and the New Zealand branch lived largely on fish. That is a historical record of a managed food animal, and it is not a model for feeding a dog today.

The diet is unusually well documented because it interested the people writing. Cook recorded that the dogs bred to be eaten tasted no animal food but were kept wholly upon breadfruit, coconuts, yams and other vegetables. Smith recorded the Poe Dog as feeding on vegetable diet such as taro and breadfruit and entirely reserved for the table. Wikipedia's article summarises the same material and notes the New Zealand exception, where the larger kuri predominantly subsisted on fish.

Why the diet explains the animal

This is the single most explanatory fact on the page. A low-protein plant diet produces a smaller, less muscular, less active dog, and the record's own comparison proves it: the fish-fed New Zealand branch grew appreciably larger than the taro-fed tropical ones from the same founding population. Diet, not ancestry, accounts for the most visible difference between the island populations.

Wikipedia goes further and reports that the soft vegetarian diet caused the dogs to develop round skulls and a small stature. Treat that as the received account rather than as a measured finding, because it rests on the same undermeasured nineteenth-century literature as everything else.

Do not feed a modern dog this way

A dog fed on taro and breadfruit today would be deficient in several things it needs, and the historical record is not nutritional guidance. Feed a complete food formulated for dogs and treat the history as history.

Feed to condition rather than to a chart, which is the only method available here anyway, since no breed weight standard exists to feed toward. Run your hands flat along the ribs: each should be easy to feel under a thin covering without pressing.

The first year: nothing recorded, and the Indian rules that apply anyway

No puppy timeline exists for any Polynesian dog population. No litter size, birth weight, growth curve or weaning age was ever written down. What follows is the timeline Indian law and ordinary veterinary practice impose on any puppy in India.

The absence is total and worth stating precisely: Luomala's survey of the entire eighteenth and nineteenth-century record found no observer who gave a single measurement of any kind, and that includes every developmental figure a puppy page would normally carry.

Two clauses to raise with any seller, whatever the animal

The 2017 Rules require that breeding dogs shall have been tested for genetic defects, including hip dysplasia, progressive retinal atrophy, night blindness, hypothyroidism, entropion, ectropion, overshot, undershot jaw, wry mouth, two or more missing teeth and cryptorchidism. The operative word is including, so the list is illustrative rather than closed.

A separate paragraph prohibits tail docking, ear cropping, de-barking, de-clawing, branding, dyeing and any change of appearance by artificial means. A seller who has not heard of either provision is telling you something useful.

Indian law: nothing to import, and the clause a revival would hit

There is nothing to import and no pedigree to import it with, so Indian import law is not the operative constraint here. The clause that would actually bite is the one prohibiting breeding to create new breeds, which is exactly what any reconstruction programme would be doing.

Second Schedule Part II paragraph 6(9) of the Dog Breeding and Marketing Rules 2017 reads, verbatim: Breeding to create new breeds of dogs or unusual looks shall be strictly prohibited. That was read in this agent's own pypdf extraction of the gazette, located with a whitespace-tolerant search and read in context, because pypdf splits words in this document.

A back-breeding programme aiming at a lost phenotype is, on the face of the text, breeding to create a breed. Two honest qualifications belong immediately beside that. The clause binds breeders in India, and what a text says is a separate question from how it is enforced, which this page cannot measure.

The neighbouring clauses

• Paragraph 6(3) prohibits two named techniques and defines both. In breeding is breeding between relatives of the 2nd to 4th grade in straight or side line within the first four generations, naming uncle to niece, nephew to aunt, cousin to cousin and grandparent to grandchild. Incest breeding is mating between parents and children or between brother and sister. Only out breeding and line breeding are permitted.
• Paragraph 6(4) provides that female dogs shall not be mated after the age of eight years, and 6(5) requires proof of a breeding female's age certified by a veterinary practitioner.
• Paragraph 6(8) forbids tail docking, ear cropping, de-barking, de-clawing, branding, dyeing, injecting substances to enhance visual appeal and any change of appearance by artificial means.
• Part IV paragraph 21(1) bars outdoor housing, without the attending veterinary practitioner's written approval, for dogs not accustomed to local temperatures, for breeds that cannot tolerate them such as long-haired breeds in high temperature locations, and for sick, infirm, aged or young animals.

Paragraph 6(3) is the one that would stop a reconstruction in practice rather than in principle. Any attempt to fix a lost type from a handful of founders runs on close breeding, and Indian law names that tool and prohibits it within four generations.

Citation form, because it is routinely got wrong

These are Second Schedule paragraphs, not Rules. The Rules themselves run 1 to 13 and stop, so any citation reading Rule 14 or higher is wrong by construction, and the strings Rule 14 and Rule 21 occur zero times in the gazette. Rule 8(1)(a), the eight-week minimum, is a genuine Rule.

Two citable absences from the same document: BAER and patella each occur zero times, checked with the same whitespace-tolerant method. Indian law mandates no hearing test and no patella grade, and anyone telling you otherwise has invented a requirement.

The four island branches, ranked by what can actually be checked

The four populations on the popular list are not equivalent in evidence, and the spread between them is enormous. Ranked by what a reader can verify, the kuri comes first by a wide margin and the Marquesan dog comes last.

The grouping is real and it hides a very uneven record. This table is the most useful thing this page can hand a reader who wants to go further.

The row that surprises people

The Tahitian row is the one worth pausing on. That branch has the best European eyewitness record of any of the four, because Cook's expeditions spent months in the Society Islands, described the dogs repeatedly, ate them, drew them and carried two aboard toward England. And it has no genetic evidence at all.

So the branch that is best described is the one that is least measured, and the branch with the most measurement, the kuri, was described by fewer Europeans over a shorter period. A reader who wants to know what these dogs looked like should read the Tahitian material; a reader who wants to know what they were should read the New Zealand genetics.

And the comparison that helps an Indian reader

Set the whole group against the Indian Pariah Dog. Both are landrace animals shaped by a place rather than by a breed club. One group is extinct, undermeasured and reachable only through documents. The other is at your nearest shelter, already adapted to the climate this page measured, needs no paperwork, costs an adoption fee, and on Shannon's data has kept more of its indigenous ancestry than the Pacific populations did.

Eight things people get wrong about the Polynesian Dog

Most errors here come from treating a collective term as an umbrella over four distinct breeds. These are the eight this page found in the ranking set, each with the document that settles it.

1. Calling it four breeds. It is one population under several island names. Smith coined a single binomial for the Tahitian and Hawaiian dogs together in 1839, and Greig 2018 places four archipelagoes in one haplogroup.
2. Putting the Marquesas on the list and leaving the Tuamotus off it. Luomala names Hawaii, New Zealand, the Society Islands and the Tuamotus as the four archipelagoes with living dogs at contact, and reports the Marquesas as extinct or very rare by 1595. The popular list is inverted at both ends.
3. Believing the Taiwan and Philippines migration route. Oskarsson found all three founder haplotypes present in South China, Mainland Southeast Asia and Indonesia and absent in Taiwan and the Philippines. Google's AI Mode currently states the opposite and cites a video platform.
4. Attributing the extinction quotation to Bennett's own book. It is a note Bennett gave to Charles Hamilton Smith, printed in Smith's volume 2. The phrases in it occur zero times in Bennett's Narrative of a Whaling Voyage.
5. Treating a prediction as a date. Bennett's will probably be soon an extinct species, written of the Hawaiian dog in 1840, is a forecast. His October 1835 Honolulu sighting is the observation.
6. Believing French Polynesian street dogs are its descendants. Shannon's 549-dog survey finds South Pacific village dogs almost completely derived from European stock.
7. Quoting a height, weight or lifespan. No observer recorded a single measurement. Every such figure in circulation was generated.
8. Assuming a landrace is automatically healthier. The Wairau Bar founding population was fourteen dogs carrying one control-region haplotype, which is precisely the situation in which recessives concentrate. Nobody knows whether they did.

A ninth, about this site's own structure

One more belongs here because it concerns how Bonbeno files these pages. Carrying five pages that touch this population could itself be read as endorsing a five-breed split. It is not, and every one of those pages says so on its own face. They exist because readers search island names, and each one links back here.

Adoption: the animal is gone, so here is what to do instead

No Polynesian dog can be adopted, bought or bred, anywhere in the world. To get the animal this page describes, go to an Indian shelter and ask for a young short-coated village-type dog, which on the genetic evidence is a better-preserved indigenous landrace than anything left in the Pacific.

The recommendation follows from the evidence rather than from sentiment. Everything attractive in the historical description, a small, hardy, heat-adapted, human-shaped dog with no kennel-club paperwork behind it, is also true of the Indian landrace, and the Indian population has kept far more of its indigenous ancestry.

What to do, in order

1. Contact a registered shelter or a municipal facility in your city. Adoption fees typically run Rs 0 to Rs 3,000 and usually include vaccination, deworming and sterilisation.
2. Meet the dog twice, on different days. One meeting tells you about that afternoon; two tell you about the dog.
3. Ask what is known about its history. A shelter that says it does not know is being straight with you.
4. Have a vet examine it before you commit, and ask specifically for a tick-borne disease panel given Indian clinic prevalence.
5. Register the dog with your municipality. Delhi charges Rs 500, Chennai Rs 50.
6. Budget monthly parasite control from day one, at roughly Rs 1,103 for a combination product.

If it is the history you are interested in

There is a great deal to read and most of it is free. Luomala's 1960 paper is open access and is the single best account of what the eighteenth-century record does and does not contain. Greig 2018 and Greig 2015 are open access and are where the genetics lives. The Cook Islands Natural Heritage Trust page is short, is written by a named biodiversity director, and contains the only measurement in the whole record.

Museums hold the physical remains. Te Papa in Wellington holds the mounted kuri; the Bishop Museum in Honolulu supplied the Hawaiian archaeological material for the 2018 genetic work; and the Australian Museum's James Cook collection holds a taumi fringed with Tuamotuan dog hair.

And if somebody offers to sell you one

Treat it as fraud. There is no living population, no register, no pedigree and no lawful route, and the correct response is to walk away rather than to ask for documentation. The same applies to any dog offered as a kuri, an ilio, an uri or a poi dog.

Compare with similar breeds

Polynesian Dog sits in 3 Bonbeno groups. Each one compares it directly against the breeds it is genuinely an alternative to, on the same figures.