That’s one aspect of it (though nowadays, a Rottweiler that bites a person would be re-defined as a “Pit bull type”). Another is that, simply because they’re big and strong, if a Rottweiler does decide to attack a human, they’re going to do some serious damage. By contrast, if you take the meanest, cussedest, evilest toy poodle that ever yipped, it’s still probably not capable of doing serious damage to a human, and a lot of people will just go “Aw, how cute!” if it tries.
The meanest dog I ever owned was a big, goofy looking female Dalmatian. She loved us to a fault. She was never at ease when other people were around. I never trusted her around kids or off leash in public. Very smart and a master manipulator. She was a handful. So it doesn’t have to be a power breed to equal unsavory behavior.
yep. I’ve read that a lot of serious dog bites/attacks have been from Black Labs.
The one dog fatality from my neighborhood (lates 80s) when I was a kid was a labrador mauling a kid. Damnedest thing, too, as it seemed like a very sweet, loving family dog. No idea what happened there. In a neighborhood where German Shepherds and Dobermans were very popular, and pit bulls were starting to become en vogue, it definitely wasn’t the one I expected to snap (based on popular conceptions of these breeds. I myself am a pit bull owner these days.)
Rotties certainly can be very friendly but they are large and powerful and can be aggressive just like any dog, they can do a lot of damage and have killed people. I think the answer is it just depends on the individual living conditions/training or lack thereof. Random story: When I was a teenager I got really drunk at a friend’s house and started walking home. In my neighborhood, the kids had a habit of cutting through people’s yards, even jumping over fences to get where we wanted to go. I was trying to make it back to my house faster and decided to jump some stranger’s fence in the middle of the night to get to my home.
Well I climbed the neighbor’s fence and landed on the ground and noticed I was standing in a very large, enclosed chain-link fence that was obviously a dog pen. Then I realized there were three very large Rottweilers who had taken notice of my presence. I was pretty scared, I thought I was about to get torn apart. It was the middle of the night and I was intruding into their territory and they all jumped on me at once. It turned out they were extraordinarily friendly and started licking my face and playing with me. I stayed in the yard for like ten minutes playing with them before I scaled the fence on the other side of the yard and made my merry way back home.
Heh… We used to joke with our first dog that any intruder would get licked to death. I guess maybe it was true.
A casual relationship between breed and aggression toward humans in dogs is something lots of people think they ‘know’, but there’s little to back it up. Dogs called Rottweilers are more likely to actually be (mainly) of the breed Rottweiler than dogs called ‘pit bulls’ which tend to be a wider variety of actual breeds and mixes. And, Rottweilers are/were in part herding dogs where there would be a reason to breed in suspicion of unknown humans, strangers around herds are often up to no good. But actually showing it to be the case in controlled study, such evidence doesn’t exist, it’s what people ‘just know’ and what people ‘just know’ has contained loads of BS forever. And it makes no particular sense for ‘pit bulls’ both because the term as commonly used refers to a general appearance not a breed, and even the main actual breeds under the rubric were for work where suspicion of strangers wasn’t useful.
However dogs which are very powerful can do more damage quicker than dogs which aren’t, all else equal. Though even there it’s not typically equal since people are often, not always of course, more wary of big strong dogs they don’t know than little ones.
Right.
In my experience, there’s much more of a relationship between the aggressiveness of the owner and the breed that they choose. And then they raise & discipline the animal so as to make it conform to the image they want.
The prime breed for a ‘macho man’ used to be Dobermans. Then it was Rottweilers. Now those guys go for a pit bull breed. And it’s no surprise that the dogs become aggressive, given the way their owners (mis)treat them – most of the time, it’s what the owners want.