Azawakh

About the Azawakh

Across the Sahel, in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, nomadic herding peoples kept the Azawakh to course gazelle and hare by day and to sound the alarm around the camp at night. That second job explains a wariness of strangers found in no other sighthound to the same degree, and it is a trait to understand rather than to breed out carelessly.

The build is extreme even by sighthound standards: leggy, flat-muscled and so lean that the hip bones and the last ribs show, with dogs measuring somewhere near 64 to 74 cm under a coat barely thicker than paper. Sand, red, brindle and a range of white markings all occur. British numbers are tiny, so anyone planning to use one at stud is working inside a very small population; ask where the line traces back to and what the coefficient of inbreeding would be for the pairing.

You will not find the long catalogue of DNA tests that a popular breed accumulates. Ask instead for hip scores and a current eye certificate, raise thyroid function and autoimmune problems in close relatives, and find out what the breed club currently advises. In a rare breed, an honest account of how the older dogs in the line have aged is worth more than any single certificate.

Health & breeding

We check every hip, elbow, eye and DNA result you give us against the Royal Kennel Club’s public records by hand, and we record who checked it and when. The Royal Kennel Club’s public records may not include all the screening a dog has had, so a dog with no Royal Kennel Club record showing is not necessarily untested.