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Originally Posted by jaden  As I stated before, and this is my last post concerning the subject, my dogs are neither ill mannered, dominant, agressive and no closer to killing my children than our pet gerbil. A Rottweiler's natural instinct is to herd. She does not "sit" on my children until they turn blue in the face nor does she ever nip or bite them. She listens to any commands they give her as well. The fact that she feels protective over our whole family is not a bad trait. When anyone new comes around she lets me decide if they are "safe" and then she has no problem happily greeting them. If she was dominant she would bite anyone coming through our front door. Continue to feel anyway you want, but if you want to educate people about the breed, try not to come across as an over bearing, know it all. Maybe then more people would heed your advice. |
Jaden, no one is saying your dog is a monster. However, you would do well to read some books on dog behavior and body language.
As I said before, dominance is not a black and white thing. Leaning/standing on our feet is a SUBTLY dominant behavior. A dog sitting ON small children
is disrespectful. Dogs don't usually come out of the gate biting unless there is a real weakness in temperament, or the dog is ultra dominant (very FEW people are even capable of dealing with an ultra dominant dog). Most dogs are what we would consider 'middle of the road' in temperament. Dogs who growl and give warning are the types of dog who let you know when they are nearing their bite threshold. Some dogs don't warn - that's how I lost a huge chunk of my own arm 3 years ago when I was attacked by a friend's dog.
Any/every dog will bite. Each dog, just as each human has their own individual temperament with various strengths and weaknesses. We have seen tragic examples time and time again of people who come here telling us how "cute", "wonderful" and "well behaved" their dog is, and in their next paragraph, they tell us of how their dog has bitten them, or their child resulting in injury (or worse!), and they appear to think this incident just somehow happened with no prior warning. Nearly 100% of the time, the dogs did give warning after warning which was ignored by their owners. After enough warning (in the dog's mind), the ante must be upped to get their point across.
Dominance is rarely exhibited by a bite, (or there'd be a lot more people in the hospital, and dogs would not be man's best friend!) but rather through various physical queues and posturing. Body language IS a dog's vocabulary, and it would serve ALL of us well to be more in tune with the true meaning of these postures.
There are plenty of structured activities that dogs and children can participate in together, and ANY time dogs and small children are loose in a house, there should be proper supervision 100% of the time. It truly concerns me that your children are yelling to you from ACROSS the house to get your dog off of them.
You see, anti dog laws are really fueling up around our "free" Country. Mandatory spay and neuter laws are popping up all over, Breed Specific Laws are popping up all over, and every time there is an incident involving a targeted breed (the Rottweiler IS a targeted breed) my friend, that lessens the probability that
I will be able to own the dog breed of my choice, or even a dog at all in the very near future. That pisses me off, because I manage my dogs with the utmost care, and I don't trust them any further than I can pick them up and throw them, and I certainly don't expect my dogs to make a rational choice based upon human morals and ethics when put into a position to fail because I
respect them for what they are; Dogs. For me to put the responsibility of a child's safety in the paws of a dog is setting my dog up for failure, and that would be the least of my worries.
Please rethink your defensive attitude and try to absorb what is being said here.