From the Huffington Post:
Yeti the dog already had a litter of pups to care for when the piglets adopted her as a second mom.
Ever since then, the Cuban farm dog has been pulling double-duty, nursing not just her own young but also the 14 swine.
Farmer Mannorkys Santamaria said the piglets also take milk from their mothers, but when they see Yeti, they run to her for a meal. On a recent day the young porkers followed her around the farm as if she were their real mother.
“No one imposed this on the dog,” Santamaria said. “The piglets discovered this on their own and began nursing with her when they turned 15 days old.”
Santamaria, 35, and his wife Eida Fernandes, 40, raise pigs, chickens, doves and turkeys on their small farm in the eastern province of Camaguey. There are also several mixed-breed dogs who have showed up on the property over the years and stayed.
So far, Yeti is the only one to become an adopted mother to pigs. Fernandes said she doesn’t seem to mind. All but one of Yeti’s biological offspring have been given away, and the one pup remaining nurses alongside the swine.
“When the piglets ventured outside their pen, it seems they smelled the dog’s milk and began screaming at her,” Fernandes said. “In the beginning we didn’t think the dog would let them suckle, but they insisted so much they ended up nursing with her.”
My only correction to this article is this dog really isn’t a mixed breed.
She’s of a specific type of village dog native to the Caribbean and part of tropical Latin America.
The ones that are found in northern South America and some of the Lesser Antilles are being developed into a breed known as the Carib Tyke.
These dogs are not purebred in the same sense as a breed. They are a landrace that may still possess some Native American dog ancestry. This particular dog wouldn’t likely fit the breed standard being proposed for the Carib Tyke.
Of course, this part of the world has influence from Europe, Africa, the Middle East , and the Indian Subcontinent, and dogs from those regions surely have played a role in developing this particular landrace.
It is likely that this dog has German shepherd blood coursing through its veins.
But I have seen very similar dogs when I went to the Bahamas as a young teenager. At the time, I didn’t think of them as being unique.
It was only when I saw a photo of a coated xoloitzcuintli that I began to think about these dogs again.
No pure Native America dogs still exist. All of them have been crossed with Old World imports– even the xoloitzcuintli, which is often thought of as ancient American purebred dog.
I will have to say that this dog has by far the best name ever given to a tropical village dog.
Yeti, you may not be the missing link as your name might suggest.
However, you could have some interesting things in your pedigree.
Yeti reminds me of a dog breed found in Pakistan. It is called Bhagyari (wolf) Kutta (dog). My parents must have kept one in a rural setting that I vaguely remember from my childhood.
I do remember seeing them in the rural Sindh province during a road trip to that region in 2003 or so.
Interesting origin described here:
http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/p/pakistanishepherddog.htm
That’s an interesting breed.
It is often said that the pallipes wolf, the Indian wolf, couldn’t possibly be an ancestor of the domestic dog, because some of them have unique mtDNA sequences. But you could get Indian wolf, even ones with unique mtDNA sequences, if male Indian wolves were mating with dogs.
It’s shame that some of these dogs have been crossed with German shepherds, but that’s what has happened to a lot of Eastern breeds with prick ears.
Like everywhere else, German Shepherds are very popular ‘urban’ dogs in Pakistan. The closest a Bhagyari Kutta gets to a bigger city, the higher the probability that it is going to be cross-bred with a German Shepherd.
However, the Bhagyaris in the vast desert areas of rural Sindh province are as pure as anything.