American Lo-Sze Pug

The firmest source here is the breed's own website, live in the early 2000s and preserved in the web archive. It describes itself as "the official site of the American Lo-Sze Pugg™ Dog" and directs every question about the breed to Rebecca Manns, whom it calls the developer of the breed. The site has sections for history, the standard, health, things you might want to know, a breeders' page and a photo gallery.

The chronology it gives runs like this. In 1989 Rebecca Manns began researching the history of today's pugs; she concluded that the short-legged, brightly colored ancestors had been allowed to disappear in favor of taller fawn and black dogs, and set about reconstructing the older type. In 1998 she coined the name American Lo-Sze Pugg™, and the first dogs were entered in a rare-breed registry. After that, the site says, registration proceeded with another American registry, the Animal Research Foundation, which worked "very closely" with her and adapted its paperwork to her needs.

Three things repay careful reading, because they are the first to vanish in retellings.

• The name is a trademark, not a canine classification. The site answers its own question — what does the ™ after the name mean — without ambiguity: the words American Lo-Sze Pugg are registered as a trademark, violators are to be pursued to the full extent of the law, and breeders are to be "licensed". What is being controlled is a name, not a breed's recognition by a kennel federation.
• The composition of the breed is not disclosed — and the site says so openly. Asked directly which breeds were used to create the American Lo-Sze Pugg, it replies that the originator "wishes not to divulge the exact genetics used in her breeding program", for security reasons: so that the breed is not exploited by unscrupulous breeders. Any statement along the lines of "pug plus pekingese", or "pug, pekingese and Tibetan spaniel", therefore comes not from the program but from reference sites copying one another. We give no such recipes: the program never published them.
• The word "recognized" has a narrow meaning here. Asked whether this is a recognized breed, the site says yes and immediately explains by whom: the breed is "recognized and registered by the Animal Research Foundation". That is a private American registry, not a national kennel club. Neither the Fédération Cynologique Internationale nor the American Kennel Club recognizes the breed.

One more checkable detail from the health section: the founder reported that her breeding stock was examined by veterinary ophthalmologists, quoted the Canine Eye Registry Foundation certificate numbers issued in 2000 for three breeding animals, and offered puppy buyers an eighteen-month guarantee against hereditary crippling defects. It is a rare case of a small private project leaving behind something verifiable rather than photographs alone.

The breed's own site stopped being updated in the early 2000s, and its later versions no longer open in the archive. Everything we write about the program therefore describes the state recorded in archive copies from 2000 to 2002, and it should be read that way.

The most interesting part is that the 1921 book describes the lo-sze very concretely, and that these details, unlike the legend, barely make it into modern texts.

• The point most sought after by Chinese breeders was the "Prince" mark: three wrinkles on the forehead with a vertical bar, forming the Chinese character for "Prince". The Chinese saw the same character in the stripes on a tiger's forehead. The white "button" blaze on the forehead was encouraged too, but counted for less than the wrinkles. All that survives of this in the modern American Lo-Sze Pugg standard is the dry line "nose wrinkle is preferred".
• The second point was elasticity of skin, present, according to Collier, to a far greater degree than in the pekingese.
• The ears are described as small, likened to a dried half apricot, set with the outer face against the head and pointing slightly backwards; the "horn ear" was also admissible.
• The Chinese docked the tail for the sake of symmetry, though the curl and the double curl were both known.
• The most admired and rarest variety was the "loong chua lo-sze", the dragon-claw pug: short-coated everywhere except the ears, the toes, the backs of the legs and the chrysanthemum tail, all of which were well feathered. Collier writes that this appears to have been a distinct race, extinct about half a century before the book appeared.

And now the central mismatch, which is not a small one. The whole idea of the modern program rests on the claim that the "original" lo-sze was low and short-legged and that European breeding made the Pug taller and longer in the leg. The old literature itself contrasts the lo-sze with the Pekingese the other way round: a formulation that has travelled through English-language pug works since at least the middle of the twentieth century distinguishes "the longer-legged, short-coated lo-sze" from "the short-legged, long-coated pekingese". Collier notes in the same direction that the lo-sze's legs are "but slightly bent at the elbow". The modern American Lo-Sze Pugg standard asks for the opposite: forelegs "moderately short… curved", feet "large, flat, not round", the forefeet turned out.

This is not a reason to call the program dishonest. It is a reason to name things accurately: the modern American miniature pug is a new type assembled in the 1990s under an old name, not a restored ancient one. The feature chosen as its defining one — short, curved legs — was not what distinguished the lo-sze in the earliest detailed description of it.

A separate word on the doubled "g" in Pugg. The breed site explains it thus: "This spelling is taken from the Old English term for endearment." English etymological reference works date pug as a general term of endearment to the 1560s, and the sense "small dog" to 1749; the form puggy did exist. But the 1560s belong to early modern English, not to Old English, which ended some four hundred years earlier. The explanation rests on a correct observation and the wrong era.

A small, thick-set dog of 2.3 to 6.8 kg with a compact, almost square body in profile and a low stance. The head is broad and flat between the ears, the stop deep, the muzzle "very short and broad" by the standard. The eyes are large and round, and the standard treats overly protruding eyes as a fault — a rare instance of a document warning explicitly against an extreme that toy-breed writing usually praises.

Head and bite

The bite is described in more detail than anything else in the standard: the undershot jaw is compulsory, the lower incisors must protrude over the upper ones, the lower jaw is broad and strong, the incisors stand in a straight row, neither bunched nor tilted, and neither teeth nor tongue should show when the mouth is closed. A wry mouth is a fault. The nose is wide, with open nostrils; unlike many toy-breed standards, this one says "open nostrils" explicitly, and that is not a cosmetic requirement — narrowed nostrils in short-muzzled dogs bear directly on breathing.

Body, legs, tail

The body is "rather long", the chest broad, the topline level, the neck short and moderately thick. The forelegs are moderately short, with good bone, set wide and curved; the hind legs may be slightly lighter in bone but must be firm. The feet are large, flat and not round, the front ones turned out. The tail is set high and lies over the back in a full or loose curl on either side. It is precisely this combination — a short curved foreleg with a large flat foot — that produces the rolling gait breed descriptions call charming.

Coat and color

The standard asks for a short, soft, smooth coat with an undercoat and permits all colors and patterns without exception. That is noticeably wider than in the modern pug, and here the declared idea of "returning to a parti-colored ancestor" really is visible in the document and not merely in the retelling: parti-colored and white dogs are not excluded. The second coat type — long, with feathering on the ears, legs, tail and toes — reference works describe as "undesirable but accepted".

This breed is often described as one whose breeders "deliberately avoid extreme brachycephaly". Nothing of the sort appears in the program's documents. The standard asks for a muzzle "very short and broad". The health section of the breed site opens by saying that most of these dogs' problems involve the head, as in the pug and the pekingese, and speaks separately of "the extreme shortness of the nose" of the breed, because of which the dog overheats quickly. It is the breed's own material, not its critics, that calls it brachycephalic.

This matters, because a conformation label is not a property of a name but the result of measuring a particular dog. Veterinary science works here in numbers, and the numbers are worth knowing.

• There is a threshold figure. The Finnish Food Authority recommends a craniofacial ratio — muzzle length to cranial length — of no less than 0.33. Reviewing the results of Finnish breeding tests from 2017 to 2022, the researchers note that only 13 dogs in the entire sample would have reached that limit, mainly English bulldogs.
• Within a single short-muzzled breed the ratio discriminates poorly. A Cambridge study from 2017 on 604 dogs, 189 of them pugs, asked which measurements were associated with obstructed breathing in each breed separately. In pugs the significant ones were eye width relative to skull width and the skull index, not the craniofacial ratio; the authors also questioned how reproducibly that ratio could be measured between two observers.
• Nostrils are the most reliable predictor. In the same study, stenotic nostrils were associated with obstructed breathing in all three breeds examined. And in the Finnish data 71 % of the pugs examined had moderate or severe nostril stenosis — the highest figure of any breed tested.

The practical conclusion for a buyer is simple and checkable: look at the nostrils and the breathing of the particular dog, not at the name on the paperwork. A standard that permits a "very short and broad" muzzle guarantees nothing in either direction — within such a standard a dog may be born with open nostrils and equally with nearly closed ones.

It is worth knowing how this is handled where the matter is already being measured. According to the review by the Finnish researchers, Finland has run a breeding test since 2017 that combines a one-kilometer walk with recovery and temperature checks, a veterinary grading of respiratory signs and an assessment of the nostrils; for pugs it became compulsory before mating in 2021, and for both parents from 2024. The same review records that in Germany an exercise test has been compulsory for breeding pugs since 2009, and that the Swedish and Norwegian kennel clubs have forbidden the mating of brachycephalic dogs with moderate and severe respiratory signs. Note what kind of rules these are: several of them are kennel-club requirements rather than state prohibitions, and the two levels should not be blurred. None of them mentions the American miniature pug — nor need they: they work on a measured dog, not on a breed name.

And one more number that shows the direction of travel: in Finland pug registrations fell from 346 in 2017, which placed the breed 36th among the hundred most popular, to 135 in 2022, which placed it 92nd.

The figure of 12 to 15 years that circulates through every reference page comes from the breeding program's own material: that is how the "things you might want to know" page answers, and that is what the most widely copied reference article gives. No independent data on the longevity of this breed have been published, so we keep the figure in the card as the program's claim rather than as a measurement.

For the pug, however, there are data — and they show how much the answer depends on the method.

• British life tables published in 2022 (built on 30,563 canine deaths between 2016 and 2020) give the pug a life expectancy at birth of 7.65 years (confidence interval 6.99–8.20) against 11.23 years for dogs as a whole. The authors themselves warn that the sample for several breeds, the pug among them, was small (197 dogs), so those tables should be read with reserve. They also quote a Japanese estimate for the pug — 12.8 years — and explain the gap by differences in sampling.
• A British study of breed longevity published in 2024 gives the pug a median of 11.6 years, against 12.0 for crossbreds.

Two peer-reviewed British sources, two very different figures for one breed. We do not choose the more convenient one and we do not average them: the difference lies not in the data but in what is being counted — life expectancy at birth from a life table, or the median age at death. Those are two different questions, and they are entitled to different answers.

• The breed's name is a registered trademark. That is not a figure of speech: the breed site writes explicitly about registering the mark and about "licensed" breeders. Kennel federations have nothing to do with it — the name is protected by trade-mark law, not by a stud book.
• The standard describes the bite in more detail than everything else put together. Five separate requirements are devoted to it; to height, not one.
• The "Prince" mark. The 1921 book records that the most sought-after feature of the Chinese lo-sze was three wrinkles on the forehead with a vertical bar, forming the character for "Prince" — the same character the Chinese saw in the stripes on a tiger's forehead.
• The dragon-claw pug. The second, long-coated variety of the lo-sze, with feathering on the ears, toes and tail, was considered the most valuable — and, by the same book, died out about half a century before 1921. Its description matches almost word for word the "undesirable but accepted" second coat type in today's reference works on the breed.
• The word "lo-sze" is most probably a place name rather than "little one". The 1921 author suggested that the name was contracted from an older form, "lo-chiang-sze", in which "-sze" is a common suffix in Ssuchuan place names.
• A curled tail is not a screw tail. In the 2018 study that found the screw-tail mutation in bulldogs, all 29 pugs tested were clear of it, and their tails proved on radiographs to be of full length and free of vertebral malformations.