Breed Profiles

The name has nothing to do with China. In the late eighteenth century, British merchant ships coming back from the East logged their miscellaneous cargo — ginger, porcelain, curios, oddments nobody wanted to itemise — under the pidgin term chow chow. Live dogs sometimes travelled in with the bric-a-brac, and the label stuck to them. The Chinese names are older and far better: Songshi Quan, the puffy-lion dog, and a handful of regional ones meaning wolf dog or bear dog.

The breed itself is genuinely ancient. Han dynasty pottery and bas-reliefs from around two thousand years ago show a heavy, square, curl-tailed dog that any Chow owner would recognise instantly. Genetic work places the Chow among the older, basal branches of domestic dogs, which means a long separate lineage rather than any recent wolf in the family. In northern China they hunted, hauled carts, guarded temples and property, and — this part gets skipped over in glossy breed write-ups — were also kept for meat and for their pelts. Queen Victoria acquired one in the 1880s, Britain lost its head over it, and the modern show Chow follows from there.

Now the tongue. It is blue-black, and so are the roof of the mouth and the gums. Puppies are born pink and the pigment comes in over the first eight to ten weeks. The Shar-Pei shares the trait and nobody has a satisfying explanation for either. A pink spot or two means a dog that will not win in the ring and is otherwise entirely fine. Worth separating from the emergency version: any dog whose tongue suddenly turns blue or grey is short of oxygen, and that is a phone call to the vet, not a breed quirk.

What actually defines living with one is the temperament, and the usual shorthand for it is cat-like. That is closer to accurate than most shorthand. A Chow picks one or two people and is politely indifferent to the rest of humanity. It will not fetch. It will not follow you room to room hoping for something to do. It shows contentment by lying down in the same room as you, often facing the other way, and it will be mildly offended if you make a fuss about it. People who want a dog that adores them find this heartbreaking. People who like a bit of dignity in the house find it wonderful.

The manhandling problem is the one that gets Chows into trouble. They dislike being grabbed, hugged, lifted, rolled onto their backs or restrained, and they do not do the long series of warning signals that a Labrador offers before it runs out of patience. There is a physical reason layered on top of the personality one. The eyes are small, deep-set and triangular, and the ruff is enormous, so peripheral vision is genuinely restricted. Approach a Chow from the side, fast, with a hand out, and you have startled a dog that could not see you coming and does not enjoy being touched by strangers. That is how the incidents that get written up as unprovoked actually happen.

Which puts a lot of homework on the first six months. Handle the paws, ears, mouth and tail daily from the day the puppy arrives, pair every bit of it with food, and teach a muzzle as a normal cheerful object long before anyone needs one. Find a groomer who will do a puppy visit with no grooming in it. Plenty of adult Chows have been turned away by clinics and salons, and once a dog has had one bad restraint experience you are unpicking it for years.

Two coat types exist, and both shed enormously. The rough is the one everyone pictures, with the standing outer coat and the lion's mane around the head and shoulders. The smooth has a hard, dense, shorter coat with no ruff and no feathering — it looks like a completely different dog and carries the same thick undercoat underneath. Twice a year they blow that undercoat and you will fill bin bags. A rough needs proper line brushing three times a week, right down to the skin, with particular attention behind the ears, through the ruff, in the trousers and under the tail. A smooth still needs a weekly going-over. Shaving a Chow in summer is a bad idea: it wrecks the coat's regrowth and removes the insulation that keeps heat out.

Heat is a real hazard anyway. Thick double coat, fairly short muzzle, stocky build — walk them early and late in summer and take the air conditioning seriously.

Health is where the budgeting happens. Entropion tops the list: the eyelid rolls inward, the lashes scrape the cornea, and you see a young dog squinting, weeping and rubbing its face. It is painful, it causes ulcers, and it needs surgical correction, ideally from an ophthalmologist rather than a general practice. Dogs that have had the operation should not be bred, whatever anyone tells you. Then hip and elbow dysplasia, patellar luxation, hypothyroidism, a scattering of autoimmune conditions and some risk of gastric torsion. Expect nine to twelve years, 45 to 56 cm at the shoulder and 20 to 32 kg.

Exercise is refreshingly modest — two half-hour walks suit most adults, since nobody built this dog for distance. The right home is a calm adult one, without small children who grab, belonging to someone who wants company rather than devotion. Buy from a breeder who shows you the mother, talks openly about eyelids and hips in the line, and asks you more questions than you ask them.