Rudolphina Menzel

Rudolphina Menzel was born in 1891 in Vienna

Menzel was born in Vienna in 1891 to an assimilated Jewish family. She earned a doctorate at the University of Vienna. As a student she was active in Zionist groups and founded the Vienna branch of the youth movement Blau-Weiss.

She married Rudolph Menzel, and the couple settled in Linz and began training dogs. In a 1930 paper she showed that trained dogs could tell apart the scents of individual people. She advised Austrian and German police and armies on dog training, and stopped working for them in 1934.

After the German annexation of Austria in 1938, the couple fled to Mandatory Palestine. There she founded an institute for dog research and training and bred the local pariah dog into the Canaan Dog. From 1942 her institute supplied mine-detecting dogs to British forces in North Africa, on condition they never be used against Jews.

After 1948 she turned to training guide dogs for the blind and founded an institute for this work. In 1962 she became an associate professor of animal psychology at Tel Aviv University. She wrote the Canaan Dog breed standard, accepted by the FCI in 1966, and died in 1973.