Swiss benefactors save St Bernard rescue dogs

Benefactors in Switzerland are giving €3.1m to keep Saint Bernard rescue dogs on the mountain pass that gave them their name, it was announced today.

Rudolf Thomann, president of the Swiss Saint Bernard Club, said two philanthropic foundations were being created to buy and care for the dogs.

They would also build a museum dedicated to the animals’ exploits in saving some 2,000 travellers over the past 200 years on the Saint Bernard Pass on the border with Italy.

The brothers of a religious order have kept the dogs on the Grand St Bernard mountain pass since about 1660.

After centuries, however, the Congregation of Canons of the Great Saint Bernard said in October that maintaining the kennels was too costly.

One of the new organisations, the Barry of the Great Saint Bernard Foundation, will buy nearly 20 dogs from the brothers, probably at the end of January, Thomann said in a telephone interview.

The dogs would continue to spend winters in a kennel in the city of Martigny in the valley below the pass and take turns at the monastery during the summer, he said.

“That was a condition of the monks,” said Thomann. “They would sell only under the condition that during the summer months when the pass road is open the dogs would continue to be up there.”

The foundation, which also will buy the kennel building in Martigny, is to be named after Barry, a Saint Bernard who lived in the monastery from 1800 to 1812 and who helped save more than 40 people.

The foundation will be created on January 28 with €497,000 donated by Christine Cerletti, a singer based in the northern Swiss city of Basel, Thomann said.

He said it would work in partnership with a second foundation, which was created on Thursday by former Geneva private banker Bernard de Watteville and his wife, Caroline. De Watteville said he would give at least €2.6m.

Monks founded their travellers’ refuge atop the St. Bernard Pass – 2,469 meters (8,100 feet) above sea-level – in the 11th century. Large mountain dogs have been kept at the hospice since the middle of the 17th century.

Now the dogs’ work is largely performed with the aid of helicopters and heat sensors.