India · prices in rupees, weights in kilograms
International siteCompare Dog Breeds for India
Two or three breeds, side by side, on the things an Indian buyer has to weigh: how big the dog gets in kilograms, whether it can live in your summers, what the coat costs you, whether anybody formally recognises the breed, what a puppy costs and what the first year of keeping one costs.
Native Indian breeds sit in the same table as the imports, which means some cells are empty. Those cells say what is missing rather than filling in a plausible number, and that is the most useful thing on the page.
- native and imported, one table
- 51 breedsnative and imported, one table
- side by side at once
- Up to 3side by side at once
- rupees and kilograms throughout
- ₹ and kgrupees and kilograms throughout
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Ready-made
The comparisons people actually want
Each of these answers a question we were asked by the search data rather than one we invented.
- Indian Spitz vs PomeranianThe commonest mix-up in Indian dog buying, and the one that costs people the most money.
- Rajapalayam vs ChippiparaiTwo registered Tamil Nadu sighthounds from neighbouring districts.
- Kombai vs RajapalayamA guarding hound against a sighthound, both registered, both from Tamil Nadu.
- Mudhol Hound vs Siberian HuskyIndia’s tallest native hound against the most fashionable import, on climate and cost.
- Indie dog vs LabradorThe dog you can adopt against the most popular dog people buy.
Method
How to read this table
The adult weight row is the one to read first, and it is the row where the two kinds of source differ most. For an imported breed it is the kennel club standard, which is a target: it describes the dog the standard wants, and a pet-bred dog of that breed may sit outside it. For a native breed it is either a breed bureau descriptor or a study that went and measured dogs in the villages that keep them, which is a description of what exists. Both are in kilograms here and the conversion is exact, but they are not quite the same kind of claim.
The climate row is the one most likely to change your mind. A breed marked as struggling in Indian heat is not a breed that would rather have a fan: our sources treat cooling for those breeds as a welfare requirement, which in practice means air conditioning through the hot months, every year, for the whole of the dog's life.
The price row is empty for most native breeds, and that is a fact about the Indian pet market rather than about the dogs. They are not sold through the channels that publish prices. Nothing on this site invents a figure to fill that gap.
What is not in the table
Temperament. We do not rank breeds on it, because our sources do not support it, and a table is the worst possible place to do it: a single word in a cell reads as a fact about every dog of that breed. What the breed was kept for is on each breed's own page, sourced, in sentences.
FAQ
Questions about comparing breeds
- Why does a row say nothing is published rather than giving a figure?
- Because nothing is published. Most native Indian breeds have no measured adult size from a registry or a study, and most have no price from three dated Indian sources. Rather than borrow a figure from a breed that looks similar, the cell says what the state of the evidence actually is. Half the value of a comparison table is in seeing where the gaps fall.
- How do you compare an Indian breed with an imported one when the sources are so different?
- Imported breeds carry weights in pounds from a kennel club standard; native breeds carry kilograms from a breed bureau descriptor or a characterization study. Everything is converted to kilograms here, because the India pages work in kilograms. The conversion is exact; what the two kinds of source mean by an adult weight range is not quite the same thing, and a kennel club standard is a target while a characterization study is a measurement of dogs that exist.
- What is the first-year figure?
- Food, grooming, the full puppy vaccination course, deworming, routine vet visits and starter accessories for twelve months, from the same Indian sources as the price calculator. It excludes the purchase price and it excludes cooling, which depends on your house rather than your dog. It is only available for the imported breeds, because those are the only breeds our sources price food and grooming for.
- Can I compare three breeds?
- Yes. Pick a third and it appears as another column; pick a fourth and it replaces the first. Two is usually more legible on a phone.
- Are the growth curves measurements of these breeds?
- No, and the chart says so. They are built by scaling a published veterinary growth curve for the size class to the breed’s adult weight range, which is the same method the puppy weight calculator on this site uses. A breed with no published adult weight gets no curve at all rather than a borrowed one.
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Other ways through this
Breed facts, prices and the first-year figures last checked . Prices move, so treat anything older than a few months as a guide rather than a quote. Estimate only. For health questions, ask your vet.