Talk:Guard dog

"Ancient" Irish Wolf Hound and Irish Elk

This is absolutely ridiculous, in Europe the Irish Elk got extinct 10,300 years ago. The idea of tracing back the Irish Wolf Hound to that time is mad. The breed, as it is today, is a 19th century creation using some native Irish sighthounds, Borzoi, Great Dane, Scottish Deerhound and English Mastiff. There is no way to firmly connect today's dogs to Iron Age dogs of the Celtic world, let alone to anything from 8 000 BC.

Probably a dogman legend based on both of the animals having "Irish" in their name.

Merge: Attack Dogs vs. Guard Dogs

The difference is merely semantical. The two articles should be merged. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.34.68.186 (talk) 04:58, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Is breed specific legislation paragraph objective enought?

If not perhapse I should remove the animal racism sentence...Mymazdatribute 01:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Legality of training dogs to attack humans

Since when is having a guard dog trained to attack intruders illegal? Seems unlikely that that's the case.

Good question. Person who added it was generally reliable, in my experience, but doesn't seem to have been on wikipedia much since september. I changed the text to "maybe" language & I'll leave a question on user's talk page anyway. Elf | Talk 05:48, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

User's response (from my talk page):

No, I don't have any sources or anything for saying that training a dog to attack people is illegal, but it seems like it is. If a dog attacks a person, the owner of the dog can have files charged against them, so... I dunno. If you think that line should be taken out, go right ahead. Lachatdelarue (talk) 00:04, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

I've never heard of the practice of training a dog to attack humans being illegal. However, it is certainly true that there are many instances where owners have been held responsible when their dogs have attacked people. The distinction is significant, I think. --Hux 12:40, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know the training (In the USA) is not illegal as there are trainers in every state who do so for a fee. Many of the trainers also train police dogs and will train bite work on personal dogs as well. However specific breeds may be illegle in some areas, see Breed specific Legislation page here on wiki.Mymazdatribute 01:48, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

The mere act of training a dog (or any other animal) to attack is not inherently illegal- However, a trained attack dog is like any other tool (in this case a weapon), and may only be used to meet an equal amount of force. Since the dog is ussually defined as a deadly weapon when used in this fashion, it can only be used to meet lethal force (the force in which a person uses for the purpose of causing, or that a person knows or should know would create a substantial risk of causing, death or serious bodily harm; source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_force).

Furthermore, “it seems like it is” is a cop-out of an answer. If that’s the best one can come up with, then leave legal matters to experts. [Avoid Weasel Words] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.102.28.105 (talk) 06:22, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Assessment

Sorry for the delay. Article is generally well constructed, and the references section is definitely welcome. However, I would perhaps change the "References" heading to something else and/or create a different "Bibliography" section to mention all the details about the books referred to. Badbilltucker 18:27, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

will change Mymazdatribute 04:15, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Start class. New information is certainly welcome, but still falls a bit short of B article. Also, the word "interesting" might not be the best choice, as it could be taken as being a bit POV. Badbilltucker 17:35, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Added small commentary on pit bull as guard dog: my reasoning for adding "not always a good choice" is because compared to the others on the list they are less wary of strangers. (Even a doberman or rottie not bred as a guard dog will take time to warm up to you.) Second, the breed was never bred to be a guard and many examples of this breed that I have met would more likely only go batsh@# if an intruder decided to clobber Aunt Edna rather than steal Aunt Edna's stereo.

The article contains a plethora of unverified and uncited statements, which must be provided before any merging; to merge the two would be unwise due to the present articles condition. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eppspartans (talk • contribs) 23:32, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Watchdog vs. Gurad Dog

I think two seperate articles should be devoted to the two seperate concepts. Watchdogs (dogs that simply bark or "alert") and guard dogs differ in their roles, characteristics, breeds and so on. Why not have a different article for each of them? A little about the Watchdog vs. Gurad Dog debate can be found here: http://www.homesecurityguru.com/recommended-watchdog-breeds Dvirgassner 07:11, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps a distinction between trained guard dogs and simply mean-spirited dogs should be made as well. My personal experience in French-speaking countries is of a lot of "chien mechant" (mean dog) signs posted on people's gates. Beyond these gates are often scared and desocialized dogs waiting to snap at anything that comes close. (I'm not saying this is typical of French-speaking countries, I'm merely using the wording on the signs as an example) My impression is that a real guard dog would have to be trained to be confident and good at independently judging situations, not just being blindly aggressive. This is my 2¢, I'd like to find some sources to back this up first... --GSchjetne (talk) 22:05, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

It's a sematical diffrence. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.34.68.186 (talk) 05:08, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Attack Dog

Someone has proposed a merge with Attack dog. There is some discussion in the Dogs wikiproject. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:00, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

That discussion about the merge has been archived, but the consensus seemed to be against a merge, in part due to the poor state of both articles. I have removed the merge tags on both articles. In my opinion, the merge proposal has been rejected. If you disagree, please speak up. -- Kjkolb (talk) 23:02, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Guard dog/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Per the request for assessment here I've looked over the article again and feel that it's start classs. One thing is that the "pitbull" isn't actually a breed but rather a term that encompasses the Pit Bull Terrier, American Pit Bull Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier and American Staffordshire Terrier. I would say that all of the Belgian Shepherds have above-average guardian instinct (all of them succesfully compete in schutzhund), not just the mal. I would say the pug is definitely not a guard dog, watch dog perhaps. The Rhodesian Ridgeback probably wasn't developed for guardian use. --Pharaoh Hound (talk) 14:02, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 14:02, 16 February 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 16:49, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Clearer Differentiation from Livestock guardian dog?

Is there a way in which we can in the introduction of the page make it clear that this is referring to a distinctly different concept than a Livestock guardian dog? We could include a disambiguation via hatnote in the beginning of the page (not ideal, considering how cluttered the top of the article already is, but maybe there is a more specific term than guard dog we could use for this specific role (property guard dog)? Wcconey (talk) 12:26, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

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