At a guess, many generations of breeders who care more about the dog’s appearance than it’s health and well-being?
This is my pet peeve with pedigrees- you get recognised breed conditions that are in some cases agonisingly painful for the animal, and often emotionally and financially stressful for the owner, and yet the kennel clubs make little or no effort to adjust the breed standard to ameliorat the condition. Boxers are probably not the worst case, but the list of common medical problems is as long as your arm.
I was a bit surprised when reading this. I’ve never heard of it and just checked the health section for the Swedish boxer club. Health issues aroiund here include HD (of course), renal failure and some heart disease. Could this be something that’s spreading through the American lines of breeding?
And no, boxers aren’t stupid. Buster the Boxer is quite smart, though as others have noted, stubborn as hell. And silly.
Remember, boxers have just about the longest adolescense of any breed, often lasting over three years. They are also meant to work alone as guard dogs, being creative and taking initiative. This means they aren’t very well suited for normal obedience training of the type german shepherds, border collies. They also get easily bored, so a short energetic lesson in obedience is to prefer.
Also, if you’re getting a boxer pup, please don’t dock the tail. The wagging tail is truly a large part of the boxer’s charm.
I know that, thanks. After that first time, we gave him some space. And there were no hard feelings, but we learned to be careful.
Some would say the wagging nub is part of the charm!
Anyway, Riley was a gift from my SIL. Her and her husband Nick have a breeding pair and they sell the pups down where they live in Tennessee. They just automatically bob their tails and remove their dewclaws (not sure why that’s done?) but they don’t dock their ears. That seems to be a practice that’s falling away. In fact I haven’t seen a Boxer with docked ears except in photographs.
Boxers with ears and tails docked look weird, IMO. Maybe because it’s been illegal here for 21 years. It’s illegal in Germany too, and since the boxer is a German breed, the breed standard will probably be updated presently, making a docked tail non-standard.
BTW: Why are all great breeds German: The shepherd, rottweiler, riesenschnauzer, dachshund, dobermann and of course boxer…
I doubt the AKC will ever go for undocked tails.
Gimme floppy ears and nub tails any day. Lttle known fact: docking a boxer’s tail makes their tongue grow…
The boxers I’ve known pretty much strike me as the jocks of the dog world.
He’s defeinetely strong, and on the larger end of the weight scale, especially at his young age. Playing “tug of war” with his chew toy is definetely exercise. I can only overpower him with a good bit of effort, and he tosses my 7 year old son around like a rag doll playing the same game.
I love him, he’s a good boy. I hope he lives through this.
One thing I wondered about: any of you others that experienced their Boxers having seizures, did they happen at certain times or during certain activities, or was it random?
Both times with Riley he was sleeping. I wonder if that’s a common occurence for it to happen while the dogs are asleep.
I owned a Boxer/Pit Bull breed. I hope your dog will be ok. Mine was dumber than a box of hammers but she balanced that out by being a real sweetheart. If you can picture an 80lb dog rolling over for tummy rubs at the slightest sense that I was in a bad mood…
Aside from their slobberiness, excessively stinky dog-farts, overexuberance, stubborness and their earned reputation as destructive chewers, yeah, they’re great dogs…
You’ve summed up nicely the traits that make them great dogs. Think of them as 4-legged fratboys… 