Portuguese Pointer

About the Portuguese Pointer

The Portuguese Pointer, the Perdigueiro Portugues, has been recorded in Portugal since the fourteenth century and is thought to lie behind the English Pointer through dogs carried north by wine traders. It hunts close, quarters methodically, and was kept by falconers long before it was ever kept by shooters.

The head is square and blunt with a flat skull and a distinctive triangular ear set high and folded, and the coat is short, dense and strong to the touch, in yellow or brown, with or without white. Dogs stand 52 to 60 cm and are smaller and stockier than most pointing breeds. Affection is a defining trait, and a stud should be easy with strangers and with other dogs.

British numbers are tiny and most pedigrees run back to Portuguese kennels, so ask for hip scores and a current eye certificate and for any Portuguese health paperwork translated into plain terms. Ask which continental testing the dog has been through and what those results actually mean. Beyond that, questions about seizures, about skin health, and about how long the grandparents lived are the ones a rare breed can genuinely answer.

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.