Small Međimurje Dog: Croatia's Seventh Native Breed

What the Small Međimurje Dog is

The Small Međimurje Dog, or Mali međimurski pas, is a 28 to 33 cm Croatian farmyard guard and ratting breed recognised by the Croatian Kennel Association on 30 December 2010 as the country's seventh native breed, and not recognised by the FCI.

This is the rare rare-breed page where the best sources are official and specific. Croatia's Ministry of Agriculture publishes an annual report on its national programme for indigenous and endangered domestic animal breeds, and this dog has an entry in it, with numbers.

The report was retrieved as a 13.3 MB PDF and extracted directly to 34 pages and 82,861 characters of real text, so nothing below is taken from a summary.

What the state record says about the dog

Section 5.9.7 of that report records that the small Međimurje dog is assumed to have been bred in north-western Croatia for over a hundred years in the role of a guard dog in rural yards, and that recognition of the first breed standard came in 2010. Its stated purpose is one phrase: guard dog.

On characteristics the report lists liveliness, mobility, intelligence, obedience, persistence and perseverance in work, incorruptibility, attachment and cordiality. On appearance it gives a harmoniously built small dog of medium body build, of the lupoid type, of proud bearing, with a generous and lively gait and a rectangular body, coloured bicolour and tricolour with various patterns, and a coat that is short, hard and straight.

Incorruptibility is an unusual word to find in a state breed description, and it is a compliment about a guard dog rather than about a pet. Taken together the list describes a rustic farmyard dog rather than a companion: the qualities named are the ones farmyard work selects for, and none of them is about appearance.

The recognition question, settled by a Croatian state table

Croatia recognises seven indigenous dog breeds, and its own Ministry of Agriculture proves six of them with an FCI standard number and the seventh with a Croatian Kennel Association decision, which is the cleanest statement of this breed's status anywhere.

The table in question lists each recognised indigenous breed alongside its proof of indigenousness, its year of recognition, its effective population size and its FAO endangerment category. Read down the proof column and the answer is immediate.

Six FCI numbers and one kennel-club decision, printed in one column by the state itself. No English-language page carries that table, and it settles in a single glance what a paragraph of hedging usually fails to.

The FCI numbers were checked independently, and all six resolve

Bonbeno did not take those numbers on trust. Enumerating the FCI nomenclature server across records 1 to 400 and reading each page's own title back, all six returned the right Croatian breed: 153 DALMATINSKI PAS, 277 HRVATSKI OVCAR, 355 TORNJAK, 151 ISTARSKI KRATKODLAKI GONIC, 152 ISTARSKI OSTRODLAKI GONIC and 154 POSAVSKI GONIC.

That is a six-for-six cross-check between a Croatian government document and the FCI's own register, which validates the table and the method at the same time. And no record anywhere in the 400 carries the name Međimurje under any spelling.

Note in passing what those titles reveal: the FCI register names breeds in their own language, so a searcher looking for 'Dalmatian' or 'Croatian Sheepdog' in that register finds nothing at all. An English-language absence check on the FCI would have manufactured six false absences here before reaching this breed.

Two more registers, checked with controls

The Royal Kennel Club's Breeds A to Z, read at HTTP 200 with anchor tags deliberately kept because on an A-Z index the breed names are the anchors, holds neither this breed nor the Croatian Sheepdog, with ten in-document controls returning. The Orthopedic Foundation for Animals holds a CROATIAN SHEEPDOG entry in its breed list but no Međimurje entry, and returns zero statistics rows for either Orthopedic Foundation for Animals disease….

That last detail is worth separating carefully, because it is a distinction this project has had to correct on other pages. The Croatian Sheepdog holds an OFA breed code and has no published statistics row, which is a different state from being absent from the OFA altogether. This breed is absent altogether.

Bonbeno's two-condition test, applied to a national breed

To count as a breed on this site an animal needs a written breed standard and a studbook. The Small Međimurje Dog has both, held by a national kennel body and backed by a state conservation programme, so the verdict is breed.

This is the only one of Bonbeno's five verdicts that this cluster of pages reaches positively, and it is worth showing why the evidence clears the bar here when it does not for the Sardinian or Patagonian cases.

What was considered and rejected

• Breed in formation was rejected. That verdict fits a population whose national body has started but not completed recognition, as with the Cane Fonnese in Italy's open supplementary register. Croatia completed this one in 2010 and has been counting the dogs ever since.
• Type was rejected outright. A type has no standard and no register. This dog has both plus a state gene-bank entry with a published effective population size.
• Register without standard was rejected, because the standard exists and its recognition date is recorded by the state.
• Brand was rejected. Međimurje is a Croatian county, owned by nobody, and no trademark is involved.

Why FCI recognition is not the test

This page files the breed positively while acknowledging the FCI holds nothing, and that combination is the point. The FCI is one federation. It is not the definition of a breed, and treating it as one would mean telling a Croatian farmer that the dog his country counts in a national gene bank, with a standard and a register and a recognition date, is not a breed.

The useful question for a buyer is never which international federation approves, but which document defines the animal and which register holds it. Here both answers are Croatian, both are dated, and both are checkable.

The population figures, and how the columns were recovered

Croatia publishes an effective population size of 116.67 for this breed, and the head-count columns behind it can be recovered by arithmetic as 70 breeding females and 50 males Bonbeno's own arithmetic recovery….

This is the most concrete rarity figure on any of the five pages in this cluster, and it took a small piece of forensic work to make usable, which is worth showing because the method generalises.

The state report prints a three-number head count per breed. Extracted from the PDF, those numbers arrive without resolvable column headers, so the raw reading for this breed is 70, 50, 11 and nothing tells you which is which. Publishing that would be guessing.

The arithmetic that identifies the columns

Effective population size for a two-sex population is conventionally four times the number of males times the number of females, divided by their sum. Testing that formula against the printed Ne values resolves the columns immediately.

Three of three reproduce exactly. That identifies the first column as breeding females and the second as breeding males, and it means this page can state with confidence that Croatia's 2023 national programme counted 70 breeding females and 50 breeding males of this breed.

The third number, 11, is not resolved by this method and this page does not guess at it. An honest empty cell is worth more than a filled one that was inferred.

What the numbers mean in context

The FAO endangerment category the state assigns is critical. Among Croatia's seven indigenous dog breeds, four of the seven carry that classification and this is one of them, alongside the Dalmatian, the Croatian Sheepdog and the Istrian Wire-haired Hound.

The breed accounts for 7.2 percent of the total population of Croatia's recognised indigenous dogs. Those shares sum across the seven breeds to 100.1 percent, which is rounding rather than error, and the fact that they close is itself a check that the figures were read correctly.

History, and what the genetics can and cannot say about it

The Small Međimurje Dog has been bred in north-western Croatia for over a hundred years as a farmyard guard, and a 2019 mitochondrial study is the only genetic characterisation it has Janeš M, Brajković V, Držaić I, Zorc M.

Croatia's state report is careful with its own history claim, and the care is worth copying. It says the breed is *assumed* to have been bred in north-western Croatia for over a hundred years in the role of a yard guard dog, and that recognition of the first breed standard came in 2010. An assumption marked as an assumption in a government document is more trustworthy than a confident century elsewhere.

The peer-reviewed paper says the same thing in the same register: the breed has been bred for over a hundred years in Međimurje, a region in the northern part of Croatia. Neither source reaches further back, and neither claims antiquity.

The mitochondrial study, and what it found

Janeš and colleagues analysed the mitochondrial DNA control region across 160 sequences 551 base pairs long, comparing this breed against 115 samples from widely distributed dog breeds. They identified eight haplotypes in the whole dataset, of which this breed carries six, distributed across all three of the main worldwide canine haplogroups: haplogroup C, where haplotype H3 is the most frequent in the breed, haplogroup A with haplotypes H2, H5 and H7, and haplogroup B with H4 and H6.

Read that carefully rather than as a headline. Carrying six haplotypes across all three major haplogroups is a sign of maternal diversity rather than of a narrow founder base, which is encouraging for a population of 120 breeding animals. It is not a claim about age, and the authors make none.

What they do say is that the results correspond to other mitochondrial studies of native dog breeds, and that for better genetic description and optimal future breeding management, further analyses of the nuclear genome are recommended. That recommendation is the practical finding for a critically classified breed.

One tempting connection this page will not make

Croatian archaeology offers an obvious hook and it does not reach this breed. Mihelić and colleagues analysed seven crania and ten lower-jaw halves of Early Bronze Age dogs from the Vučedol site in eastern Slavonia and concluded they were a dolichocephalic type corresponding to a smaller dog breed, in the first place a type of Croatian sheepdog or Hungarian Mudi.

That is a real finding about small Croatian dogs four thousand years ago, and it names two other breeds rather than this one. Connecting it to the Small Međimurje Dog would be exactly the move this site exists to catch: an ancient artefact, a modern breed, and an inference in between that nobody made.

Small Medimurje Dog price in india, and the emptiest search on this site

No Indian price exists, and this breed produced the starkest market result across the five pages in this cluster: eight results, eight generic puppy marketplaces, zero mentions of the breed.

The check was run through an instrument proved in the same session, with a Labrador Retriever control returning eight genuine Indian listings carrying real rupee ranges from named Indian sellers. The tool works.

Asked for this breed under both its English and its Croatian name, the engine returned eight results and every one was a generic Indian puppy-marketplace homepage or breeder directory. Not one named the breed. Not one carried a rupee figure attached to it. There was no merchandise, no substituted breed, and no converted foreign price.

Why that is a cleaner result than it looks

Across this cluster of five breeds, four produced some form of contamination. The Xoloitzcuintle returned Etsy prints under a title reading 'Buy Xoloitzcuintli Dogs Online In India'. The Techichi returned eight Chihuahua results. The Sardinian Shepherd Dog returned German Shepherd sellers matched on the token 'Shepherd Dog', plus an Etsy poster. The Patagonian Sheepdog returned a print-on-demand handbook and a Rs 289 silhouette pack.

This one returned nothing at all attached to the breed. The engine simply dropped the name and served the generic category, which means the commercial index holds no document anywhere connecting this breed to India. For a reader, that is the cleanest possible signal.

Why no supply chain forms

The population is 120 breeding animals in one Croatian county, classified critical by its own state. There is no FCI number, so no FCI-nomenclature pedigree can be issued, which is the route Indian pedigrees run through as a full FCI member country. A critically endangered national breed with no international pedigree route does not develop an export market, and it should not.

Monthly cost of ownership for a small dog in India

A small short-coated dog costs roughly Rs 3,000 to Rs 6,000 a month to keep properly in an Indian metro, and this breed's coat makes it one of the cheapest possible dogs to maintain.

No purchase price exists, but the Indian running costs are real and apply to any small short-coated dog, so they are the useful figures for a reader whose interest ends in owning something similar.

Two caveats travel with that table. VOSD's consultation and vaccination ranges are published byte-identically by a large general insurer, so two organisations agreeing to the rupee on two separate quantities is evidence of copying rather than corroboration, and this page counts them once. And the Vetic figures are promotional floors from a single chain that quotes different course prices on different city pages.

Where this coat saves money

The Rs 1,359 haircut line simply does not apply to a short, hard, straight coat Vetic Pet Clinic Delhi grooming price list. Combined with a small dog's low food requirement, that puts this type at the cheap end of Indian dog ownership, and it is one of the genuine practical arguments for a small smooth-coated dog in an Indian city.

Boarding is the line that does not scale down. A Bengaluru operator publishes an overnight stay to 24 hours at Rs 899, and most Indian facilities price per animal rather than per kilogram, so a 5 kg dog costs what a 30 kg dog costs.

The free option is worth naming again. The Greater Chennai Corporation runs six municipal pet clinics providing all treatment and anti-rabies vaccination free of cost, and issued 9,115 licences in 2024 against a Rs 50 fee. Delhi charges Rs 500 to register and Rs 500 to renew, with a Rs 100 monthly late fee, and reports 71 of 1,006 applications rejected this financial year. Microchipping runs about Rs 1,250 at a named Chennai clinic.

Suitability for the Indian climate

Continental Croatia is more humid than most Indian metros at 77.39 percent annual relative humidity, so damp is not this breed's problem; heat is, with Čakovec peaking in July at 22.51 C against Delhi's June mean of 35.88 C.

Every point below was queried by explicit latitude and longitude with the grid-cell elevation NASA POWER returns echoed against the real elevation, because POWER returns a cell rather than a point.

Both Croatian cells are usable at plus 85 m and plus 37 m, so the figures can be read as the towns rather than as averaged terrain.

The humidity finding, which inverts the usual argument

Čakovec runs 77.39 percent annual relative humidity and Zagreb 78.72 percent, both higher than Mumbai at 67.28, Bengaluru at 67.84, Pune at 66.68, Chennai at 72.39 and Kolkata at 73.84. So the reflex claim that Indian humidity would trouble a continental European dog is simply wrong here. This breed comes from a genuinely damp place.

The problem is heat, and specifically the combination. Čakovec's peak wet bulb is 17.49 C in July. Kolkata's is 27.09 C in June. That is a gap of nearly ten degrees in the measure that describes the thermal load an animal actually has to shed.

Where this breed does better than most European imports

Three things work in its favour and they are worth stating, because most European breeds get an unqualified no on this site. The coat is short, hard and straight rather than a double working coat. The dog is small at 28 to 33 cm, and small dogs shed heat faster relative to their mass. And Hall and colleagues found bodyweight at or above the breed and sex mean carried an odds ratio of 1.42 for heat-related illness, rising to 3.42 over 50 kg, so being light is protective.

Bengaluru and Pune, both peaking in April rather than May and running the lowest wet bulbs in the table, are the two Indian cities where a dog of this type would be least constrained.

Temperament, from a state description rather than a breed club

Croatia's national programme lists liveliness, mobility, intelligence, obedience, persistence and perseverance in work, incorruptibility, attachment and cordiality as this breed's characteristics, which describes a working yard dog rather than a companion.

That list is unusual for two reasons. It comes from an agriculture ministry rather than a breed club, so it has no commercial reason to flatter, and it puts work qualities before household qualities.

Read in order, the emphasis is clear: liveliness and mobility first, then intelligence and obedience, then persistence and perseverance in work, then incorruptibility, and only then attachment and cordiality. A guard and ratting dog is being described by what it does before what it is like to live with.

What incorruptibility means in a guard dog

It is the quality of not being won over. A yard dog that can be befriended by anyone offering food is not doing its job, and a state document listing incorruptibility among a breed's defining characteristics is telling you the dog was selected to stay suspicious.

For an Indian household that is the single most important sentence on this page's temperament. A small alert guard dog in a shared building, with domestic staff, deliveries and neighbours arriving constantly, will announce all of them, and that is the breed working correctly rather than failing.

Who this dog would suit in India, if any existed

• Suits an independent house with a yard, an owner who wants a small watchful dog and accepts barking as the job.
• Suits a household that can give a busy small dog real mental work, since persistence in work is on the state's own list.
• Does not suit a shared apartment building, because the alerting is the breed rather than a training failure.
• Does not suit anyone wanting a small dog that greets visitors, which is the opposite of incorruptibility.

Training a small working guard

Croatia's state description lists obedience and intelligence among this breed's defining characteristics, so the training problem is not compliance but channelling a busy, alert small dog's job instinct.

An obedient, intelligent, persistent small dog that was selected to guard a yard and kill rats is an easy dog to teach and a hard dog to bore safely. Those two facts define the training plan.

• Socialise broadly and early, because a small guard breed that finds the world alarming becomes a reactive dog, and small reactive dogs are routinely tolerated until they are not.
• Train an interrupt and a settle above all else, since the behaviour that needs managing is alerting rather than disobedience.
• Protect the dog from being teased at a gate or a window, which is how yard-guard instincts turn into frustration barking.
• Screen the environment rather than relying on obedience alone: manage where the dog is when visitors arrive, and the training has less work to do.

The ratting instinct, which needs an outlet

Štakoraš means ratter, and a dog selected for killing rodents has a strong, specific motor pattern that does not switch off in an apartment. Scent games, snuffle work and puzzle feeders genuinely satisfy it. A cushion does not, and a bored ratter will find its own target.

Indian timing

The socialisation window overlaps the vaccination course, whose per-vaccine Indian prices run from Rs 699 for anti-rabies to Rs 1,349 for kennel cough at one national chain. For a guard-type breed the behavioural cost of waiting is high, so plan carried, controlled exposure and discuss the schedule with your nearby vet rather than deciding alone.

Daily exercise requirement

A small working yard dog needs 45 to 60 minutes of daily activity split across two or three outings plus real mental work, and in most Indian cities that moves to dawn and after dark from March to June.

Croatia's own description names liveliness, mobility and persistence in work, which is a dog with a working tempo rather than a lap dog's. A yard dog patrols, investigates and hunts rodents all day at low intensity, and an Indian apartment supplies none of that by default.

For a small dog the pavement is the acute hazard rather than the air, because a 30 cm dog walks with its whole body in the superheated layer just above Indian tarmac and its pads are in direct contact with it. Check every surface with the back of your hand before setting out.

Exertion is the trigger

Hall and colleagues confirmed 395 heat-related illness events across 905,543 UK dogs and found exertion rather than vehicle confinement to be the dominant trigger. The protective news for this type is that bodyweight at or above the breed and sex mean carried an odds ratio of 1.42, rising to 3.42 over 50 kg, so a light dog sits at the favourable end of that finding.

Indoor work counts, and for this breed it counts double

Scent games and puzzle feeding substitute for a hot-afternoon walk better in a ratting breed than in almost any other type, because the motor pattern being satisfied is searching rather than running. That is a genuine advantage in an Indian summer and it is the main practical recommendation of this section.

Grooming, which is the easiest on this site

The Small Međimurje Dog's coat is short, hard and straight, so the entire grooming routine is a weekly rubber curry and a bath every six to eight weeks.

Croatia's state record gives the coat in four words and that is genuinely all the description needed: short, hard and straight. Colour is bicolour and tricolour with various patterns, which varies per dog and changes nothing about the care.

This is the lowest grooming load of the five breeds in this cluster and one of the lowest on the site. In Indian terms that matters more than it sounds, because coat is where Indian humidity does most of its damage to imported breeds.

The Delhi price list gives bathing from Rs 934 and complete bath and styling from Rs 1,869, with a haircut from Rs 1,359 that this breed never needs.

The Indian advantage of a short hard coat

A double coat holds monsoon damp against the skin for hours and is the reason hot spots and ear trouble cluster in July and August for many imported breeds. A short hard flat coat dries in minutes and lets you see and feel the skin underneath, which makes the weekly tick check genuinely reliable rather than a hopeful rummage.

Health issues, life expectancy and an honest empty record

No breed-specific health data, screening scheme or life expectancy exists for the Small Međimurje Dog, and the only genetic work is the 2019 mitochondrial study Janeš M, Brajković V, Držaić I, Zorc M.

State the absences precisely, because a specific absence is a finding and a vague one is nothing.

• Screen results: none. The OFA holds no entry for the breed and returns zero rows for Medimurje in its 12,047-row statistics dump, while controls returned 109 rows for the Labrador, 170 for the Bulldog and 61 for the Beagle.
• Life expectancy: unmeasured. McMillan and colleagues' Table S5 lists 345 breeds including many considered and excluded, and carries no Medimurje row at all, so the breed was never in that UK dataset's frame.
• Clinical literature: none. PubMed returns zero for every form of the breed's name against 1,109 for the Labrador control in the same session.
• Genetic characterisation: one paper, on mitochondrial variability, which reports diversity rather than disease.

The lifespan absence is the one worth stating carefully, because McMillan and colleagues' UK longevity study publishes its breed-level detail in supplementary tables rather than in the article body, so a reader checking the main text alone would wrongly conclude that many breeds were missing from it. Table S5 lists 345 breeds including those the study considered and rejected, and it carries no Medimurje row at all, which means this breed was never in that dataset's frame rather than having been weighed and excluded.

The OFA absence is expected rather than alarming, and its own threshold explains why: a breed needs at least 100 hip evaluations, and 50 for every other database, before it appears at all. A breed with 120 breeding animals in one Croatian county will never reach that.

What the population size implies, marked as an implication

An effective population of 116.67 is small, and small populations carry elevated risk of expressing recessive disease over time. The mitochondrial finding cuts the other way, since six haplotypes across all three major haplogroups indicates real maternal diversity rather than a narrow founder base.

Those two observations are not in conflict and neither is a health measurement. The paper's own recommendation is the sensible reading: further nuclear genome analysis is needed for optimal future breeding management. Mitochondrial diversity describes the maternal lines only.

One finding that applies to any small dog in India

Redondo and colleagues analysed 55,019 anaesthetics, 54,542 after exclusions, with an overall mortality of 0.69 percent, and found that after adjusting for ASA physical status most between-breed differences disappeared, with the authors concluding that they largely reflected case severity. That is a useful frame for any owner facing an elective procedure: ask about the dog's ASA status rather than its breed, and consult your nearby vet.

The Indian health risks that would actually apply

Tick-borne disease is what an Indian owner of any small yard dog should plan for first, and published Indian series report it at levels overseas guidance does not prepare owners for Venugopal V, Deepa PM, Muhasin Asaf VN.

For a breed with no clinical literature, the risks that would shape its Indian life are Indian rather than genetic, and this is the section that would be identical whichever small dog you owned.

The framing caveat is mandatory: these studies sampled clinically suspected dogs or clinic caseloads rather than random populations, so the correct reading is 'among dogs tested at veterinary clinics';. A figure of 76.54 percent is not any individual dog's risk.

Two details are worth carrying for a small yard dog specifically. The Kerala series found infection peaking before the monsoon in March to May rather than during it, which inverts what most Indian owners assume. And the Odisha series found 75 percent of Ehrlichia-infected dogs were over 20 kg, which is a size band this breed sits well below, though 79 percent of infected dogs had a tick history and a yard dog spends its life where ticks are.

Monthly parasite cover is therefore the highest-value line in this dog's Indian budget, at around Rs 1,103 for the 15 to 30 kg band and less for a small dog.

Heat and the law

Second Schedule Part IV paragraph 21(1) of India's Dog Breeding and Marketing Rules 2017 bars keeping in outdoor facilities, without the attending veterinary practitioner's written approval, dogs not accustomed to local temperatures and breeds that cannot tolerate them. A yard dog is by definition an outdoor dog, so for this breed in particular that clause would be the first legal question an Indian owner faced.

Feeding a small working dog in India

Feed a 28 to 33 cm working dog to body condition in two meals, and weigh the food rather than eyeballing it, because a twenty percent overfeed on a small dog is invisible and enormous.

No published weight range exists for this breed, only a height of 28 to 33 cm, so there is no chart to feed toward and the dog in front of you is the target.

Life stages

1. Puppy, to six months. Three to four small meals daily on a complete small-breed growth food, and never a long gap, because small puppies drop their blood sugar faster than large ones.
2. Adolescent, six to twelve months. Two meals. Weigh portions, since a working small dog looks lean when it is correct.
3. Adult. Two meals daily, adjusted seasonally, with intake typically falling from March to June in most Indian cities.
4. Senior. Two meals with protein maintained, and an annual dental conversation with your nearby vet, because small breeds accumulate dental disease faster.

Feed training rewards from the daily ration rather than in addition to it. For a busy, food-motivated working dog in a household that trains often, this is the difference between a lean dog and an overweight one, and the arithmetic is unforgiving at 5 kg.

One thing not to buy

A joint supplement bought to prevent hip dysplasia. The OFA states plainly that hip dysplasia is a polygenic inherited disease, that a high-calorie diet during rapid growth may exacerbate changes in hips that are already dysplastic but will not create hip dysplasia, and that there is no evidence in the scientific literature that supplements such as vitamin C prevent it. Feed a growing puppy moderately instead, which costs nothing.

Month by month through the first year

A small guard-type puppy's first year is dominated by socialisation breadth and by teaching an off switch early, because the alerting instinct arrives on its own.

The decision that matters most

Socialising to arrivals specifically. A yard guard puppy that learns before sixteen weeks that people coming through a gate are ordinary will alert and settle. One that does not will alert and escalate, and in an Indian building with constant arrivals that difference decides whether the dog is manageable.

What a responsible source shows you

• Verify the mother on the premises with the litter, and watch her reaction to the person handling her.
• Compare the puppy against its littermates rather than against a chart, because no reliable growth chart exists for this breed.
• Screen what can be screened locally, since no registry certificate exists: a patella check and a general examination by your own vet.
• Adopt the position that any paperwork will be Croatian rather than FCI, which is correct for this breed and not a warning sign.

Head to head against the breeds it is compared with

This breed is cross-shopped against the Croatian Sheepdog and other small European farm dogs, and the differences are in registry status and size rather than in job Izvješće o provedbi Nacionalnog programa….

That table contains a fact worth sitting with. All four of those Croatian breeds are classified critical by their own state, and the FCI-recognised Dalmatian has the smallest effective population of the four at 88.89. International recognition and population health are separate axes, and the most famous Croatian breed in the world is the rarest of them at home.

The Croatian Sheepdog is the closest comparison and the useful one for a reader, because it is the same country, the same conservation programme and the same critical category, with an FCI number and forty-one more effective breeding animals. The Tornjak shows the journey completing recently, with FCI 355 granted in 2017.

Comparison across this cluster

Against the other unregistered or partly registered breeds Bonbeno has examined here, this one is the furthest along. The Patagonian Sheepdog has no standard and no register anywhere. The Sardinian Shepherd Dog has both, in an open supplementary register, with recognition in progress. This dog completed national recognition in 2010 and has a state conservation entry with published numbers.

The Indian comparison

There is none available, so the honest advice is to look at what a small alert Indian dog can do. Indian street and village dogs guard yards, kill rodents and tolerate the climate natively, and an Indian shelter will have small watchful adults whose temperament you can assess directly rather than infer from a state document about a dog on another continent.

Mistakes made about this breed

Five errors recur, and three of them are search failures caused by the breed's own name Google India search results page for 'small….

1. Concluding the breed is unrecognised because the FCI does not hold it. Croatia recognised it in 2010 and counts it in a national gene bank, which is recognition by two separate arms of one state.
2. Searching PubMed for Medimurje and reading the 23 records as a literature. All 23 concern the Croatian county, not the dog.
3. Trusting a large result count from a rewritten query. Medjimurje dog returned 404,677 records because PubMed discarded the breed name and searched dog alone.
4. Reading the People also ask box as breed information. All four questions Google returned were generic small-dog questions, because the name begins with a size adjective.
5. Quoting a lifespan or a weight. Neither has been published, and both appear on pages about this breed.

The sixth mistake, which this page nearly made

Connecting the Vučedol Bronze Age dogs to this breed. Mihelić and colleagues identified those crania as a smaller dolichocephalic type corresponding in the first place to a Croatian sheepdog or Hungarian Mudi, and they name neither this breed nor anything like it. An ancient site in the same country is not evidence about a modern breed from a different region, and the temptation to bridge that gap is exactly how breed antiquity claims are manufactured.

How to verify this page in ten minutes

1. Verify the state figures by opening the Croatian Ministry of Agriculture's national programme report and finding the dog table.
2. Compare the proof-of-indigenousness column across the seven breeds, which settles the recognition question at a glance.
3. Screen the FCI numbers in that column by probing the FCI register by number, where all six resolve to the right Croatian breed.
4. Groom your own arithmetic: apply four times males times females over their sum to the head counts and watch the printed effective population sizes reproduce.

Adoption and responsible sourcing

Nothing can be adopted or bought in India, and with 70 breeding females and 50 males left in a critically classified population, the responsible position is to leave them in Croatia.

This is the clearest case in the cluster for saying so. A breed with 120 breeding animals, classified critical by its own state, in the middle of a conservation programme that explicitly exists to keep it alive, is not a breed to source from abroad.

What to do instead

• Adopt a small alert dog from an Indian shelter, where the type is common and the temperament is visible in an adult rather than predicted from a document.
• Verify vaccination and deworming records in writing before the dog comes home.
• Protect the arrangement with municipal registration, Rs 500 in Delhi or Rs 50 in Chennai, and a microchip at about Rs 1,250 at a named Chennai clinic SKS Veterinary Hospital, Chennai.
• Feed and budget the same either way, since food, parasite cover and vaccination cost what they cost regardless of how the dog arrived.

The legal floor applies whatever you choose. Pups under eight weeks may not be sold in India under Rule 8(1)(a), ear cropping and tail docking are forbidden under Second Schedule Part II paragraph 6(8), and outdoor housing of a breed that cannot tolerate local temperatures needs the attending veterinary practitioner's written approval under Second Schedule Part IV paragraph 21(1).

What this page is for

Nobody in India will own this dog. What the page offers instead is the best worked example on this site of checking a breed's status through a state document rather than a kennel club, and of recovering a table's meaning by arithmetic when the extraction loses its headers.

It also offers a genuinely uncommon thing: a hard, current, official rarity number. Not rare, not very rare, not endangered as an adjective. Seventy breeding females and fifty breeding males, counted by a ministry, published annually, classified critical.