“Haldis,” Hiddenite Skye Haldis of Threshing Oar, is a Norwegian Lundehund. The breed is known for its unique traits, including at least six fully functioning toes and extra paw pads. Owned and handled by her breeder, Kristina Maze, in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the 11-month-old rare breed will compete in conformation at the 2025 AKC National Championship presented by Royal Canin.
This entry won’t be Haldis’s first time in the conformation ring. The puppy achieved her AKC Puppy of Achievement (POA) title in September 2025. The POA is an introductory AKC certificate for young dogs who earn 10 points in specific puppy conformation classes before their first birthday.
A Rare Bendy Breed
According to the Norwegian Lundehund Association of America, there are only 100 Norwegian Lundehunds in the U.S. and Canada, and only 2,500 worldwide. A small dog, males 13 to 15 inches tall and females 12 to 14 inches tall, this unique breed has super-flexible neck and shoulder joints that allow the legs to extend sideways and at right angles to the body. There’s also certain grooming considerations for this overachieving polydactyl breed with seven toes. “When it comes time to trimming nails, I need a few pairs of cuticle scissors, rather than regular nail clippers,” says Maze.
What attracted Maze to this unusual breed? People fall in love with a specific breed for all kinds of reasons. For Maze, a yoga instructor, choosing a Lundehund at first was all about the stretch, but the more she learned about the breed, the more passionate she became.
“When the AKC recognized the Norwegian Lundehund in 2011, another yoga instructor told me about the breed and said, ‘It’s flexible like you are,’” Maze says. The Lundie’s flexibility and foxlike, primitive appearance match Maze’s extreme stretching ability. Besides the obvious Upward Facing and Downward Facing Dog poses that most dogs can do, Maze’s Camel Pose, a big stretchy back bend where she’s kneeling and lifting her head back to see behind her, closely mirrors the Lundie’s elastic neck craning back to enable the head to touch the spine.
Puffin Hunting Skills Persist
The Norwegian Lundehund evolved over millennia to hunt puffins from crevices on the steep sea cliffs of Vaeroy, a 6.1-square-mile remote, rocky island off the Norwegian coast. The dogs scaled rocks to pursue puffins, valued for their meat and colorful feathers, which helped sustain islanders. “Lundies were more valuable to the Vikings and the islands than cows,” Maze says. “The Vikings did not breed them specifically to collect puffins and their eggs, but they capitalized on what the dogs did naturally.”
The dogs used their extra toes and pads on their feet to dig into the rocks to catch a nesting bird, and their flexible necks enabled them to look back to see where they were going. Now a protected species, they’re hunted illegally, but the dogs have retained their specialized skills over the years.
The breed’s one-of-a-kind characteristics fascinate Maze. “Lundies are the only breed in the world with four fewer teeth, which enables them to carry a puffin egg without breaking it,” she says. “Haldis’s mother, Dagny CH. Seacliff’s Dagny Deep once caught a fledgling in my yard, and when bringing it to me, the bird’s wings stuck out from the sides of Dagny’s mouth where there weren’t any teeth.”
Lundies use their paws to help propel them. “At the dog beach, they grip the sand to dig a large hole, and at the park on a long lead, they immediately want to run up hills and boulders mean nothing to them,” Maze says. “They scurry up and run back down in a flash.” The elongated pads on their back paws resemble the sportswear company’s checkmark-shaped logo and provide traction and braking.
Unlike other dogs with a forward-motion gait, this breed’s most distinguishing characteristic is their “rotary” gait. “Their shoulders are so flexible, the dogs look like walking eggbeaters,” Maze says. “It resembles a repetitive wax-on, wax-off-type motion.”
While walking her dogs on the street, people always stop to ask Maze what breed she has. “When I say Norwegian Lundehunds, they say, ‘Lunde-what?’” Common guesses are usually Chihuahuas, Shiba Inus, or even foxes on leashes. “For this reason, I hand out trading cards I keep in my pocket that give information about the breed,” she says.
Traveling to Puffin Land
To learn as much as she could about her dogs, Maze visited the breed’s birthplace in Mastad, the now-abandoned fishing village on the edge of the cliffs. “I wanted to see it for myself,” she says. Hiking the eight-mile round trip, Maze tackled the high, but treacherous, narrow path on her own. “Everything was clearly marked, and I took a lot of photos, so that helped … To get to Mastad, I took a ferry from Norway to the different Lofoten islands. The second stop is an archipelago, Vaeroy,” says Maze. “The people were invaluable and impressed that I would make this journey,” Maze says.
Although no Lundehunds live on Vaeroy now, a week after she left the island, Lundehund owners came from across Europe for a meetup that happens once every five years. “There’s a camaraderie of people with this breed, and they held lectures and offered a week’s worth of activities,” she says.
Through her exploration, Maze learned that on the island of Tromso, off the mainland of Northern Norway, above the Arctic Circle, airport officials use Lundehunds to collect seagull eggs to prevent bird strikes on aircraft engines. “The dogs collect hundreds of them in an hour,” Maze says. “They still have a job to do.”
Around the house, Haldis’s, Dagny’s, and Dagny’s litter sister, “Anja” CH Huffin’ Anja Puffin, FCAT3, have personalities that vary between mischief-makers and couch potatoes. Friendly and snuggly, the trio will alert their owner if someone comes to the door but know when to settle down. “They usually copy what I’m doing,” Maze says.
