So, I googled "rottweiler attacks" and here are the results from the first TWO pages:

Rottweiler attacks boy - not first attack | KTVB.COM | Idaho News

I agree Rinzou!  It's not the dog!!!!  It is the human!!  And what I found even more amazing, the person that posted this owns a German Shepherd.  They're also on the bad breed list.

I worked at a shelter that has had Rottweilers.  One in particular that I have pictures of (and I am willing to post these pictures if I need to) was named "Lightening".  She was a female rottie that was THE BIGGEST TEDDY BEAR!!!!!  OH I LOVED HER!!!!

The meanest ones we had were actually toy poodles & chihuahuas.

Sorry Emily- you're wrong on this one.  It's not good to generalize, no matter what.  You should think again before you go out and say this kind of stuff, especially to a group of dog lovers that can and will tell you otherwise.   You'll make a lot of enemies, really fast.  Do you think a certain race of people are bad because they have a higher rate of violence?  Discrimination is against the law in the human world, what you are doing is the same thing. 

Ok, so you're telling me that ALL those dogs attacked because of the owner?What about the one where the dog attacked his own owner while the guy was WALKING him?Sounds like he was taken care of to me. I'm an extremely passionate person when it comes to dogs, and I am one to always say "it's the human's fault"--except with these dogs. They should not be kept as pets, but woking dogs. They're happiest as workers, not pets!

Ok, so you're telling me that ALL those dogs attacked because of the owner?What about the one where the dog attacked his own owner while the guy was WALKING him?Sounds like he was taken care of to me. I'm an extremely passionate person when it comes to dogs, and I am one to always say "it's the human's fault"--except with these dogs. They should not be kept as pets, but woking dogs. They're happiest as workers, not pets!

Also, if you wanna take a chance with them...go ahead...and I don't care if I make enemies...I know I'm right.I've had experience with dogs of every size,shape,breed,etc...I've also studied the breeds...I know the date EVERY AKC recognized breed was recognized,for goodness sakes!And,yes I do have,not own(he's not a thing)a german shepherd, a breed known for their protectiveness, not viciousness.You never hear about a gsd attacking his own OWNER!I'm sure there has been one, maybe, but no other dog is as unpredictable as the rottweiler.

HOW AWFULL rotties are lovely it is not the dogs at all it the humans every time theses are loving protective dogs who will just give it back to the humans who try to bully them not one of us would stand for the ill treatment so why should the dogs the only difference the dogs will still trust us  its not right blaming the dogs for the sins of humans      NO DOG IS BAD    they all have a reason

WELL U GUYS ITS JUST THAT THE OWNER DIDNT TRAIN THE DOG!!!!!!!!

WATEVER EMILY BECAUSE YOU SHOULDNT JUST JUDGE A DOG BY ITS BREED YOU GOT TO GET TO KNOW THIER PERSONALITY EVERY DOG HAS A DIFERENT PERSONALITY UR PRETTY RETARDED SAYING ALL ROTTWRIELERS ARE BAD CAUSE DATS NOT TRUE!!!!!!!!!

This is the MOST ridiculous post I've seen on this site!!!! Are you honestly saying, Emily, that every single rott in the world is BAD???? That's ignorance. I don't care if you have one of every other breed in the world! People like and dislike breeds for all kinds of crazy reasons, but anyone who would say they are all bad really needs a lesson in animal behavior. While you were busy memorizing all the dates of breed recognition, you could have looked up all the dates those breeds attacked humans too. THEY ARE ANIMALS!!!!! Yes, some have attitude from the start, but I would NEVER say ANY animal (including humans) are just bad because of some stupid google search. Are you kidding me??? I have a Great Dane and people are scared of their size...does that mean because they can take a human down in one pounce they are all bad? Certainly not! Maybe you could google a class for behavior. The horrible people turn these and the rest of the "bullies" bad, not nature! I can't believe you even have the spine to post on a dog site that ALL of a breed are bad. RIDICULOUS!

AMEN TO SOPHYRAMOM!!!!!!!

And you won't see me ever saying bad things about poodles & chihuahuas on here.  (I said something about them in the previous post).

And Emily you should watch a season of The Dog Whisperer.  Every season that I've watched The Dog Whisperer, he's talked all through the season about a pack of Rottweilers he's rehabilitated.

Working dogs are pets too!!!!!!

By the way....................................

I know that Cujo was a fictional character.  But he was played by a St. Bernard.  But that doesn't mean that all St. Bernards are bad.  Doesn't even mean that Cujo was bad, just means he was trained to do what he did.

Emily ~ you need to understand how the media works. Juicy news "sells", rotties are juicy. We have rotties in animal assisted therapy, and perhaps you should should check out the Carl series?!

No...not every single last rottweiler is "vicious"...I've met...I think 4 that were sweet...BUT they could snap at any moment.They're very unpredictable.

I do not like the dog whisperer,either.His training techniques are weird...Victoria Stillwell is better in my opinion.

Be Nice!  LONG POST (not q-checked, errors are my own).

Disagree, fine...but attacks on each other in this community is not fine .

I'll try to be nice.  I totally disagree in principle with any breed being BAD; I do support that there are breeds that are more tightly wound than others.

And personally, I've known some absolutely beautiful and well-mannered Rotties - I've also seen Rotties that'll make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.  And as a shelter worker, I've not seen anywhere near as many Rotties exhibiting that behaviour as I've seen terriers (not just the bully terriers either!).  You don't often get that kind of reaction from a Goldie, but I also don't see that many goldies in the shelter.

I'd have to agree with the majority of the posters on this topic.  As an animal trainer, evaluator and rescuer, my experience is that the majority of dogs, regardless of breed, suffer at the hands of irresponsible owners (where the owners help propogate a breed-specific fear by not taking appropriate actions with their dogs and encourage undesireable behaviour).

Having said that, I also would sustain an argument that there are breeds who are more prone to being moved from a docile state to an aroused attack state.  This includes much of the bull terrier breeds but is not limited to them. It also includes more docile breeds and dogs that are viewed as 'attack' dogs.

Training is NOT the end-all/be-all of dog behaviours.  You can have a dog who's perfect in every respect suddenly turn into the proverbial Cujo, with little or no warning.  A dog perfectly happy on a walk with his owner, can, with sufficient provocation or miscommunication, turn into a beast that decides to revert to their canine code and disengage that part of their brain that says behave.

Has anyone heard of the service dogs that are used to assist epileptics inhibit the onset of a seizure?  Of course you have, right?  But what do we  really know about that kind of help? We can only surmise that causal "A" equates to activity "B", based on clinical and empirical observations. 

A dog who's pleasantly walking with the owner, without provocation, turning on that owner and ripping his/her arm off IS RESPONDING to a particular stimulus.  That no one was able to identify what it was doesn't mean that it didn't happen; all the amount of training in the world will not disconnect the canine brain from responding if the stimulus is strong enough. 

One can only try, and hope for the best - and for the most part, everything turns out okay.

But do you know what sets your dog off?  Do you really know?  Or are you applying a general paradigm to what you see?

But if you don't recognize the part that failed or can't see the signals the dogs radiate, you may very well assume the dog's "gone bad". 

And perhaps there are breeds that are more prone to behaviour programming than others and there are breeds that are less prone to programming.  Training is programming at its basic level - you are feeding a dog a set of instructions for a particular scenario/behaviour in a particular framework.  Read that sentence again.  Training is programming for a specific condition within a specific framework. 

You can adjust the framework and adjust the conditions - but you cannot merge one framework with another framework and hope the conditions applied in the first framework will apply to the second. Humans are very good at drawing conclusions intuitively - dogs are cognitive thinkers (Human - non-linear thinking; dog, linear thinking) and less likely to be able to adapt one set of conditions to another environment.  There's mountains of experience and empirical evidence to support the conditions that a dog will act differently for the same desired behaviour in a different environment - the adaptability depends on crystal-clear communication between the requester (human) and the dog.  Crystal-clear communication is extremely important when you're dealing with cross-species communication when the two are so unalike.

Humans don't speak dog fluently - and dogs are likewise not very good at human.  This counts for the largest part of all adverse reactions; we're the smart ones, why can't we understand that our dogs are saying?

What is a freeze?  What is the aroused tail position of a Rottie?  What does a curled tail wag on a Sheltie mean when compared to a Chow?

I could add lists and lists of signals dogs exhibit and thanks to the wonders of digital technology, have been fortunate enough to have observed those signals the dogs radiate across the board, through a large sequence and range of emotional and physical/mental conditions.  Sometimes, a dog will spend micro-seconds moving from one state to the next; other times, they don't and the longer they spend signaling the state they're in, the more likely non-canines will detect that.  One thing stands out - although the dogs may not agree to the messages being exchanged, the communication Intraspecies is clear as a bell - when the boundary is inter-species, that language breaks down significantly.

Okay, having meandered around a bit...

Are all dogs trainable?  Yes.

Are all dogs trainable to the same level of comfort zone?  No.  This is most especially true when the Comfort Zone is defined by the human, not the dog.

Are any breeds more aggressive than others?  This is a human-behaviour question aimed at a totally different species, with one answer - the answer is yes, with conditions.  The conditions are the same as with any specific behaviour - each breed has a strength and weakness, that which must be developed by the owner (and I own my dogs, according to state law). 

Every breed has its shining examples - herding dogs that are perfect in herding cattle but lousy at making human contact, scent hounds that can't find a bucket of beef two inches from their nose and working dogs who'll move a mountain but won't get off the couch.

Are there "dangerous breeds"?  No.  There are Dangerous Dogs - its the mentality of the people who turn that into a breed fear.  Its the depiction of dogs in movies that have instilled this fear in humans.

Do you trust your dog?  If so, why?  I love my kids.  they're reasonably well-mannered, generally do what I ask them to when i ask them to.  But I do not and never will "trust" them.  What is trust?  If you let your dog off the leash - why does it not run away?  Are you trusting that the dog wants to come back to you?  What's the dog's motivation?  And can that motivation be overridden?  Given sufficient reason, a dog will not pay any attention to you, no matter how well you trust it to. 

I know more "broken" dogs than I know of the other kind.  There's a Border Collie I know that scares the willies out of me and I've known and worked with this dog since he was a pup.  He's been scarred primarily due to his environment.  I see him almost every day now and each time we're near each other, I do my best to help him be a better dog.  How?  I try to talk dog to him (not baby-talk, talk dog!).  Its not easy, and sometimes I don't get it right.  Fortunately, I've learned over the years to read dog better than I used to and I've been able to de-escalate.  With the right person (and he's got the right people), the right dog can be helped along, but even when they've got the right people, you can't TRUST the dog. 

Any breed is that way; not limited to Rotties.  its just that Rotties and Pit Bulls (along with Dobies, GSDs and the Am/Staffs) have been labeled by humans as DANGEROUS BREEDS, so more people sensationalize and report them.  And people are basically stupid when it comes to speaking dog.

In my opinion, what's the worst "breed" to have?  Which dogs are the most violent?  The miniatures, primarily the Chihuahuas and the Rat Terriers.  You don't see the report about those dogs as much because as a whole, they are MUCH better at telegraphing "Back OFF!" than some of the other breeds.  Their body language is much louder than the larger dogs and we pay attention more.   At the same time, people tend to radiate less fear (you might not think you're afraid but dogs see your body language different than you speak it) around the pint sized dogs than they do around a 70 pound muscle-machine.

A dog being labeled BAD simply because it belongs to a profiled breed is as intelligent as saying that people of a certain ethnicity are bad simply because they fit a particular profile.  The Nazis demonstrated that particular intelligence rather well.  There are always exceptions to every case - which is why its important to figure out if you've met the exception and which exception it is. 

In closing - Honey, my Sheltie girl, has one of the shortest escalations I've ever seen, especially in a sheltie.  She's not particularly violent, but when she says enough, you have about a quarter of a second to listen before she takes it to the next level and that next level will generally be aimed at your face (a particularly dangerous target area in dog language).  She needs a special person (in fact, she's a euthanasia candidate from a rescue perpsective) who is able to see what she says. 

If anyone wants to know a couple of really good references for reading dog (both video and book) and speaking dog, let me know.

dwain

sorry about the length, but I think there's something for everyone in a post like this.

I'm sure you can find sensational stories about any/all breeds of dog. In fact, I'm sure if you do a search you will find plenty of GSD's that have attacked too. Do you have personal experiences with a Rott that is bad? I see you have a herding dog...do you do herding?

Dwain ~ EXcelllent post (as usual, geesh ~ I am starting to feel like your groupie, BOL).

Emily, I referenced www.atts.org for you before. It seems smaller dogs BITE waaaaaaaaaaaaay more often  (unprovoked) that larger...yes, I'd rather be bitten by a chi than a GSD ............ uh, yea, give me the chi.

But you are WAY off judging a dog by it's breed ~ than it's deed, background, training (or lack of), environment, stimulus, etc, etc.

Aussie6pak,

I know all dogs bite...but MY POINT IS ROTTIES ARE VERY UNPREDICTABLE and they're responsible for a lot of dog-related deaths.Yes, I do have a bad rottie experience.I was at the humane society and this was before I didn't like the breed, and I went up to this rottie in a pen and said "hey sweetie" and it jumped up in like a second and wanted to kill me!!Why?I didn't provoke it!

Nah, we don't do herding.Do you? We do,or we're going to do agility, and we're going to try conformation again.

It is true, in 200...7 I believe the jack russel terrier was the #1 biting dog.

We have a lot of Rottweiler owners on here who also know what they're talking about.  Emily would you like it if they talked about your dog the way that you're talking about their dog? 

Emily, the fallacy of your original post "Rottweilers Are Bad and I Can Prove it" is that you stated you googled "Rottwieler attacks" not Rotweillers in general. Naturally all the information you got back from this targeted search was about Rotweiller attacks. To prove my point, I googled  "German Shepherd attacks". Here's the first two pages of results. I don't think Rottweilers are bad, or Gernam Shepherds are bad, etc. It is how a dog is treated and trained that determines whether it is a bad dog (of course, breeders can attempt to pass on vicious genes by breeding only the most aggressive of their dogs). Maybe once you read the following about the breed that you have you will recognize that when you go looking only for information that proves your point, that is all the information you will get.

[PDF] Dog attack deaths and maimings, U.S. & Canada September 1982 to ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML

None of the German shepherd attacks have involved predatory behavior on the. part of an otherwise healthy dog. Every one of the wolf hybrid attacks, ...

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The Ledger Independent - Maysville, KentuckyGerman shepherd attacks woman, grandchildren. By MISTY MAYNARD. Thursday, May 24, 2007 9:23 PM EDT, Print this story | Email this story ...

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first of all, you put AT LEAST two of the stories on there twice, and one of them said "german shepherd attacks rope..." but it's a puppy "attacking" a rope...

Also, most of them were kids being attacked...um...well kids being what kids are they were probably being stupid and pulling the dog's tail or something.

A change in breed, but a few years ago there was a little girl attakced and killed by a saint bernard.Naturally they put the dog asleep and then found a pencil shoved in his ear!

Anyway, you proved no point. I found more actual rottweiler attacks...why?Because they attack more...why?Because they're not pets and are extremely unpredictable.

I just found 3 other stories that you googled...one was a gsd attack on a chihuahua...and then two others were attacking intruders...hmm.

hmm...cool

Its not the dog its the owner.. NO MATTER what the breed its the owner responsibilty to train and socialize their dog... my relatives have had rotties my first encounter with one being when i was only 5.. a huge male rotti that was NOT desexed.. he was a huge teddy bear and let kids crawl all over him tug on his ears.. it didnt bother him and if it did well he would simply get up and walk away.. its the environment the dogs grown up in.. these are trully gorgeous dogs!!!

Emily you completely misunderstood my point - which is that when you only ask for information about attacks by a certain breed, that is all you will get.

As for some of the German Shepherd responses being duplicates, and one being about attacking a rope, I deliberately copied what was therewhen I did the Google search so as not to be misleading. I was not trying to prove that German Shepherds are vicious, because I don't think they are. Likewise for Rottweilers.

Again, my point was that you can't "prove" a breed is bad by seeking only one-sided information.