Saint Bernard origin: how a monastery dog became a rescue legend

Part 1

The Great St Bernard Hospice and its monks

Bernard of Menthon, an Augustinian monk, founded a hospice and monastery on the pass around the year 1050. Crossing the pass was dangerous at any time of year, and travelers could easily get lost or trapped in snow. The canons who ran the hospice, along with their servants, went out to rescue these travelers, and eventually they began bringing dogs along to help. If your own dog has ever led you home through fog or dark, you have a small sense of the skill these dogs offered the monks.

Napoleon crossed the pass with around 46,000 soldiers in May 1800.

Part 2

Early ancestors of the breed

The monks acquired their first dogs at the hospice sometime between 1660 and 1670, originally as watchdogs. The dogs were typically reddish-brown and white, a coloring common among farm dogs across Switzerland. When the hospice needed more dogs, the monks could simply replenish their pack from this local stock.

The earliest written record of a dog at the hospice comes from 1707, when an archive entry simply noted that a dog had been buried. Paintings from around 1690, by the Italian artist Salvator Rosa, show two dogs at the hospice. Written descriptions from the early 1700s already describe the dogs as large, though smaller than the Saint Bernards you would recognize today.

Part 3

From avalanche rescue to formal breed

By 1750, servants called marroniers were routinely accompanied by the dogs as they guided travelers across the pass. The dogs turned out to have a strong sense of smell and could find people buried in snow, so the monks began sending them out in small packs on their own. Over about 200 years, the dogs and their handlers were credited with saving roughly 2,000 people. The most famous of these dogs was Barry, who worked at the hospice from around 1800 to 1812 and is credited with saving more than 40 people during his life. You can still see Barry's preserved body on display at the Natural History Museum in Bern.

Severe winters between 1816 and 1818 brought heavy avalanches that killed many of the rescue dogs while they were working. The line at the hospice came close to dying out as a result.

The last documented rescue happened in 1897, when a dog woke a 12-year-old boy who had been trapped in a crevice. Today mountain rescue on the pass relies on helicopters instead.

Part 4

Giving the breed its modern shape

Starting around 1830, the monks began crossing their dogs with Newfoundlands, hoping a longer coat would protect the dogs in the cold. The plan backfired: the longer fur iced up in the snow, and the dogs became less effective at their rescue work. Because of this, the monks gave many of the longer-haired dogs to people living in the surrounding valleys instead of keeping them at the hospice. If you have ever seen your own dog struggle with ice balling up between its paws or in its coat after a snowy walk, you can picture the problem.

An innkeeper named Heinrich Schumacher began breeding the dogs in 1855, keeping a studbook and supplying the hospice as well as exporting dogs to England, Russia, and the United States. For a long time the breed had no single name, and people called the dogs Hospice Dogs, Alpine Mastiffs, Mountain Dogs, Swiss Alpine Dogs, or Saint Bernard Mastiffs, while many Swiss simply called them Barry Dogs in tribute to the famous rescue dog. The Swiss Saint Bernard Club was founded in Basel on 15 March 1884, and the breed was entered into the Swiss Stud Book that same year. A formal breed standard followed in 1888, and the Saint Bernard has been considered a Swiss national dog ever since.

The dogs at the hospice were never given special training by the monks; instead, younger dogs learned rescue work by watching older dogs. During the First World War, Saint Bernards helped the Red Cross by carrying supplies to troops in mountain terrain that was hard for mules and horses to reach. As late as 2004, the hospice still kept 18 of the dogs, largely out of tradition and sentiment, and that year the Barry Foundation was formed to take over breeding at kennels down the mountain in Martigny. If you keep your own dog's history in mind, it is worth remembering how much selective breeding and simple chance shaped the breed you see today.