How Did We Get The Modern Boxer Dog
This beautiful dog, the boxer dog. The best companion dog in the history of dogs period.
Where does this breed originate? How did the boxer we love and enjoy today come to be? It is a cross between a couple different dogs, but I wanted to look into its heritage and see for sure. This is what I came up with. The name for the Boxer was commonly believed to originate from the way that a boxer plays. It rears back on its hind legs and comes at you with its paws swinging, kind of like a boxer. You have to be careful, because they can land a couple arm scraping punches quickly, thus the need for a well trained boxer dog.
However this explanation is incorrect. Actually, the name “Boxer” is taken from an ancestor, the smaller BullenBeisser(Barbanter) that were known as “boxel”. The name “Boxer” is thought to be a corruption of that name that propagated through time.
The boxer dog started out as a cross between the German Bullenbeisser and the English Bulldog. The German Bullenbeisser was a robust sized hunting dog for centuries. It was commonly used when hunting large game like wild boar, bear and deer. Its primary purpose was to run down wounded prey and subdue it until the hunters came.
A common attribure seen on many boxers is the snipped pointed ears. I thought this was just for show, but it actually served a purpose related to their use as hunting dogs. When tracking and holding wild animals, the dogs would occasionally suffer severly torn ears. cropping started to avoid this problem. As time went by, smaller dogs came into favor and the German Bullenbeisser was purposfully bred smaller and smaller.
This smaller version of the German Bullenbeisser was then called the Bullenbeisser(Brabanter). In the late 19th century, the Brabanter was crossed again with the English Bulldog. This was the starting point for what would become the modern Boxer.
In 1894, the breed was stablized and exhibited in 1895. The story of the dogs that took part in the early genealogy is rather interesting. An intreaging tale of boxer breeder breeding and selection. A man from Munich Germany, named George Alt crossed a brindle-colored female dog Brabanter named “Flora” with a local dog of unknown ancestry named “Boxer”. This resulted in a fawn and white puppy they called “Lechners Boxer”.
When Lechners Boxer came of age, “Lechner’s Boxer” was mated with his mother “Flora” and one of the litter was a girl dog called “Alt’s Schecken”. “Alt’s Schecken was registered as a Bierboxer or Modern BullBeiser. “Alt’s Schecken” was then bred with a English Bulldog named “Tom” that produced a puppy named “Flocki”, the first boxer entered into the German Stud Book.
“Flocki’s” sister, the white “Blanka von Angertor” was then bred with “Piccolo von Angertor” the grandson of “Lechners Boxer” to create “Meta von der Passage”. It is “Meta Von Der Passage” that would have a huge impact on this breed. She is considered to be the mother of the modern breed of Boxer. “Meta von der Passage” had litters that resulted in a line of sires that define the look of the present day boxer.
