Breed Profiles

My neighbour Ellen brought home a Great Dane puppy the spring her son left for university. She said she wanted company. What she got was a dog who, by fourteen months, could rest his chin on her kitchen counter without stretching and who once knocked her flat with nothing more sinister than a happy turn.

I have watched that dog grow up over the fence. He is the reason I no longer believe a word of the phrase gentle giant when people use it as a shopping decision.

Danes are enormous. Males routinely hit 80 centimetres at the shoulder and 60 kilos, some more, and they carry it on legs that look too fine for the job. The breed came out of Germany, bred to hunt wild boar, and somewhere along the way the aggression got bred out and the size stayed. What is left is a dog with the temperament of a slightly needy labrador living inside a body the size of a pony.

The size is not the interesting part

Everybody stares at the height. The thing that actually changes your daily life is the lean. A Dane greets people by pressing his full weight sideways into their thigh, and if that person is elderly or small or holding a hot drink, you have a problem that no amount of charm fixes. Ellen taught hers to sit for greetings before he hit six months, which in hindsight was the single smartest thing she did.

Then there is the reach. Nothing on a worktop is safe. Nothing on a dining table is safe. A loaf of bread went missing at her house and she genuinely searched the bin before she understood what had happened. Bins need lids that latch. Doors need handles he cannot nudge, and he will try the handles, because he is tall enough to see how they work.

Puppies are the dangerous stage, oddly, not the adults. A growing Dane is putting on bone at a speed that makes his joints fragile, and the standard advice from decent breeders is to keep exercise short and controlled until the growth plates close, which can be eighteen months. No stairs where you can avoid them. No long runs. No jumping off furniture. Ellen carried hers up and down the front step until he was too heavy to lift, then she built a ramp, and the vet told her that was worth more than any supplement she could buy.

Food is a real budget line. A grown Dane eats what two labradors eat, and it needs to be a diet balanced for large-breed growth while he is young, because too much calcium in a puppy this size does genuine damage to developing joints. That is one of the few places where the bag actually matters. Adults are calmer eaters, though the bowl should be measured, because an overweight Dane is a dog whose hips will fail years sooner than they had to.

Bloat is the shadow over the breed and nobody who owns one should be vague about it. That deep chest can twist, and when it does you have hours, not days. The signs are a swollen, hard belly, retching that brings nothing up, restlessness, and pale gums. Some owners elect a preventive gastropexy at the same time as neutering, tacking the stomach so it cannot rotate, and among Dane people that operation is discussed less as an option and more as insurance. Ask your vet early, not after a scare.

Hearts are the other worry. Dilated cardiomyopathy runs in the breed, and a Dane can look magnificent right up until the day he does not. Good breeders scan the parents. Ask to see it. If the answer is vague or offended, leave.

Temperament, when it goes right, is the whole reason people put up with all of this. They are quiet dogs indoors, ridiculously affectionate, and often better with children than a lot of small breeds, because they have no interest in being defensive. Ellen's dog sleeps eighteen hours a day and treats the sofa as a shared resource he generously permits her to use. He barks maybe twice a month, and when he does the sound stops conversation two streets away.

They do need socialising properly and early, because a nervous 60-kilo dog is not a manageable animal, no matter how sweet his intentions. A Dane who has met traffic, children, vets, other dogs, and the sound of a wheelie bin before six months is a Dane you can take anywhere. One who has not is a dog you end up walking at five in the morning to avoid the world, and I have met a few of those.

The part nobody says out loud is the lifespan. Eight years is good. Seven is common. Ten is a story people tell. You get the dog for a shorter time than you get a terrier, and you spend more on him, and he takes up half your living room while he is here. Ellen knows this. She said it to me over the fence last summer, watching him flop into the shade with a sigh you could hear from the house, and then she said she would do it again.

If you are considering one, sit on the floor next to an adult first. Not a puppy. An adult, in someone's home, doing nothing. That is the dog you are signing up for, and either the scale of him is delightful or it is alarming. There is not much middle ground, and knowing which camp you are in beforehand saves everyone, including the dog, a great deal of trouble.