Pomeranians
Used to Weigh
30 Pounds?

The full narration of the video.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a Pomeranian weighed thirty or forty pounds. And the tiny Pom on your sofa comes from a family of sled dogs. Don't believe it? Let's rewind and watch it shrink, stop by stop.

Today, most Poms weigh three to seven pounds, small enough to hold in one hand. Pointed ears, a fox face, a tail curled over the back, and a big puff of fur. Remember those. They'll be there at every stop on the way back.

Rewind a hundred-odd years. The Titanic is sinking. Twelve dogs were on board. Only three survived, and two of them were Pomeranians. They were small enough to carry in your arms, into a lifeboat.

Being small saved their lives. But Poms weren't always this small. Rewind again, to 1888. Queen Victoria brought a Pomeranian home from Italy. His name was Marco. About twelve pounds, a small one for the time.

The Queen showed Marco at a dog show, and suddenly everyone wanted a small one. Rewind another century. An earlier English queen kept Pomeranians, and painters put them on canvas. The dogs in those paintings filled your arms: thirty to fifty pounds, heavier than a corgi.

The name itself is a place: Pomerania, on the coast of today's Germany and Poland. There, they guarded houses and herded sheep. Working dogs. Go further north and further back, and you reach the family's old home, near the Arctic Circle.

There, big pointy-eared dogs pulled sleds and guarded camps. The Samoyed is a distant cousin of the Pom. That thick double coat was made for ice and snow. How does a forty-pound dog become a five-pound one? No surgery. People picked, litter by litter.

It's like saving seeds: keep only the shortest plant's seeds each year, and in a few years the whole bed is short. Breeders did the same: from every litter, they kept the smallest pup to breed the next one. Each generation is only a little smaller. In Victoria's lifetime, the breed shrank by half.

This has a name: selective breeding. People choose the parents, and the next generation grows toward what people want. The seeds in the garden become the smallest puppy in each litter. The size changed, but the old gear stayed: the double coat is still there, so summer heat is hard on it.

It won't back down from big dogs, and it barks at every knock. The guard-dog spirit is still there too. Its cousin the Samoyed still pulls sleds today. One family: one weighs five pounds, the other fifty. What other dog have you seen that people bred smaller, generation by generation?