Sometimes given the slightly longer name of Chinese Crested Dog, in China this toy breed was originally known as the Treasure House Guardian. In addition to the hairless type there is also a fully haired version called the Powderpuff.
This dog has caused a greater division of opinion than any other breed. Few are indifferent to it; it is either loved or hated. Almost entirely naked, with only a few tufts of hair on its head, tail and feet, this breed has in the past been described as a freak, and naked puppies have often been culled by breeders. Despite this unpromising beginning, it has survived and grown steadily in popularity until today it can boast a strong and devoted following. This is largely due to its happy-go-lucky personality, for this is a dog that exudes an infectious playfulness and joy of living.
Its origins have long been debated. An early opinion was that its ancestors came from Africa and then moved east to Asia and Orient. After this it is supposed to have continued its expansion until it arrived in the Americas, to give rise to the Mexican Hairless and various New World Indian breeds of naked dog. This theory sees the gene for nakedness appearing only once and then spreading outwards from its source. An alternative view would suggest that, instead, the gene for hair reduction appeared in. depen- dently on a number of occasions, in a variety of locations worldwide.
When naked dogs were encountered by early European travellers and explorers, they made an immediate impact as ‘living curiosities’ and were sometimes acquired and brought back to Europe for their novelty value. One of the earliest accurate portrayals of a Chinese Crested dog appears in Robert Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire, published in 1686. He described the dog in question as ‘being curiously spotted, and for the most part naked, his head only adorned with an English Peruque, and his tail with a single tuft at the end’. His illustration shows a dog that is almost identical to the modern Chinese Crested.
The tufts of hair on the feet are called ‘socks’, on the tail the ‘plume’ and on the head the ‘crest’. The ears are held erect. The reduced dentition that accompanies the nakedness of this breed involves the absence of premolars. The body skin is hot to the touch, a fact which has given rise to various medical myths. For instance, it is claimed that arthritis can be cured by using one of these little dogs as a ‘heating pad’. And in 1928 the breed was briefly given the title of ‘Fever Dog’, because it was believed that simply to touch its skin would cure a patient of a feverish condition.
The advantage of owning a naked dog is that it has no body odour, no heavy shedding and no fleas. And people who are allergic to other, hairier breeds, may find that this one causes them no problems. The disadvantage is that a naked dog must wear protective clothing of some kind during cold winter months, and be kept out of the hot sun in the summer.
In England a Chinese Crested Dog Club was established in the 1960s. In the United States a similar club was formed in the 1970s, and the breed was accepted for registration with the AKC in the 1990s. Because of the draconian attitude of the Chinese Communist government, which sees the ownership of a pet dog as a decadent bourgeois act, the breed has become an extreme rarity in the land of its birth. Fortunately there are already enough of these intriguing little dogs in other, more enlightened countries, to ensure the breed’s future survival.
In the United States the famous striptease artiste Gypsy Rose Lee owned several Chinese Crested dogs (presumably because her dogs, like herself, were notorious for being semi-naked) and helped to make them famous there.
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