Mudhol Hound

The Mudhol Hound is a lean South Deccan sighthound from Mudhol taluk in Karnataka's Bagalkot district — not a livestock guardian dog. It is a coursing hound, historically run after hare and small game by the Bedar tribal community and later refined into the "royal" Mudhol Hound by the rulers of the former Mudhol State.³ Today it is best known as a modern military and paramilitary working dog: it was the first Indian breed inducted into the Indian Army, used for explosives detection, guard duty and tracking.⁴ It carries no livestock-guardian tradition in the documented record, and appears on this site as a documented non-guardian to mark that boundary.

I History & origins Documented

The breed is named after Mudhol taluk on the Deccan Plateau. Its modern form was revived and standardised by Shrimant Rajesaheb Malojirao Ghorpade of Mudhol State (1884–1937), who observed the Bedar / Berad tribal community using the dogs for hunting and used selective breeding to restore what is now called the "royal" Mudhol Hound.³ The Maharaja of Mudhol is said to have presented a pair to King George V in the early 1900s, popularising the breed in Britain.³ The Ghorpade origin narrative also credits crosses of Persian and Turkish sighthounds onto local dogs in the 1920s.⁴ The breed was featured on the 2005 India Post native-dog stamp set alongside the Rajapalayam, Himalayan Sheepdog and Rampur Hound, and roughly 750 breeder families in and around Mudhol town raise the dogs for market.³

II Physical & conformation

Recorded coat is Short & smooth; long-coated "Pashmi" variety. A full physical profile — coat structure and care, climate tolerance, skeletal conformation and sexual dimorphism — is not yet collected for this breed.

III Working role Documented

The Mudhol Hound has two documented working roles, neither of them livestock guarding. Historically it is a coursing sighthound — hunting hare and small game by speed and vision — used by the tribal Bedar / Berad and later by Deccan royalty.³ Its modern niche is as a military and paramilitary working dog: the RVC at Meerut has trained Mudhol pups for obedience, periphery guarding, explosives and mine detection, risk perception and assault since 2015, and the Indian Army began formal induction in December 2017 — the first Indian breed to serve in this role. RVC trainers report that Mudhols complete explosive-detection tasks in about 40 seconds, versus around 90 seconds for a Labrador or German Shepherd.⁴ A Border Security Force (BSF) induction was reported as planned in 2025 news, alongside the Rampur Hound.⁷ This is a coursing hound and modern working dog — a documented non-guardian boundary case — not a flock-bonded livestock guardian; no livestock-guardian tradition appears in the retrieved literature.

IV Behavioral profile Qualitative

The Mudhol Hound is a sighthound, and the trait reads below are qualitative inferences from its documented working role as a coursing hunter and trained military working dog — not measured behavioural scores. No breed-specific behavioural survey of the Mudhol Hound appears in the available sources, so traits that are not described are shown as gaps rather than guessed. As a coursing hound it is not a flock-bonded animal and carries a strong prey drive toward small quarry; its documented guard and periphery-security work in a military setting supports high watchfulness, but that is guarding of people, posts and property, not of grazing stock.⁴

V Health Qualitative

There is little peer-reviewed health data on the Mudhol Hound; what exists is at the level of institutional and journalistic reporting from the breed's military-training programme:

• The breed is described in reporting as hardy in harsh tropical conditions and disease-resistant — an RVC-report-level claim, not a peer-reviewed finding.⁴
• It is reported to be sensitive to very low temperatures: the breed's research centre expects roughly two generations of adaptation would be needed before Kashmir deployment.⁴

No systematic, peer-reviewed health or lifespan survey of the breed was located in the available sources. Widely repeated Wikipedia weight figures (about 9–14 kg) appear low for a coursing sighthound of this build and are flagged as likely under-reported, so no reliable measured height or weight range is published here.

VI DNA & origin research Peer-reviewed

The Mudhol Hound is unusual among Indian native sighthounds in having published molecular-genetics work. Microsatellite DNA-polymorphism studies characterised genetic diversity within the breed,¹ and a genome-wide ddRAD-GBS SNP study of indigenous and exotic canine breeds owned in India included the Mudhol Hound as one of six sampled Indian breeds — the first genome-wide SNP characterisation of the breed.² These studies describe within-breed diversity and phylogeographic placement rather than assigning the Mudhol Hound to a named breed clade, so no clade is claimed here.

VII Related & compared breeds Documented

The Mudhol Hound sits at a naming boundary that causes real confusion. The Kennel Club of India registers the breed as "Caravan Hound," while the Indian National Kennel Club and ICAR-NBAGR use "Mudhol Hound" — a documented naming tension between Indian kennel bodies. The long-coated variety is the Pashmi Hound (unrelated to Pashmina goat wool), and "Kathewar Dog" is an older alternative name. It is compared with India's other formally recognised sighthounds below — points of comparison, not a claim of a shared clade.³

VIII Conservation & status Documented

No formal FAO/DAD-IS or IUCN conservation status for the Mudhol Hound was located in the available sources. Unlike an endangered landrace, the breed is under active development through a dedicated programme rather than in decline:

IX Setting the record straight