ALL ABOUT LIVING WITH ROTTWEILER DOGS
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– [Narrator] Dogumentary TV,
producing the best breed
documentaries on YouTube.
(dog barking)
(light music)
– My name’s Loren Chiever.
I live in Colton, California.
I’ve had Rottweilers for 32 years.
I’ve been involved in
conformation, Schutzhund,
obedience, tracking,
just general things to do
with the dogs.
Over the 32 years, we’ve
raised 15 Rottweilers
from puppies to adulthood,
and they lived their whole life here.
The end kennel, that’s our tomato garden.
We build a kennel so we can
keep tomatoes in the garden,
to keep the dogs out of them.
Nitro, you’re okay.
They’re a strong breed.
They’re easy to live with at home.
When I first got involved with them,
there weren’t very many,
so it was a rare breed.
It took us six months
from the time we decided
we wanted a Rottweiler until
we found the first litter
of puppies that we could look at,
and they were just an
attractive, different breed.
And that’s what attracted us to them.
1984 was when we got our first dog.
The biggest thing I love about the dogs
is they’re independent,
but they’re trainable.
They have a different personality
than a lot of dogs.
They can be left alone,
and they can be a pest and
be right beside you too.
They’re just a good all round family dog
as well as a dog that you
can do any sport you want to
with them, and you can
participate in conformation shows
all with the same dog.
Their original purpose,
they were a herding dog
that the ranchers used to
herd cattle to the market.
And then they were a protection dog
that they put the bag of
money around the dog’s neck
and went back home with the
dog protecting the money.
That was their main purpose.
Their use now, some are
mostly used for family dogs.
They can be used as a guard dog.
A few police departments use them,
but they’re a little too hard, too tough
for most police departments,
but they’re just a good all round dog.
People herd with them still.
My pets are basically house pets.
They go for a walk, not often.
I’m getting too old to
go walking everyday,
but we do walk with them.
We take them to dog shows.
We do conformation, and
they’re just a good,
easy to live with house pet.
My first thing that I did
with my dogs was Schutzhund,
which is the basic training
that police dogs get.
They do tracking, obedience,
and protection work,
and it’s a competition.
The Schutzhund dogs do it for sport.
It’s not to make them vicious dogs,
but it’s a competition
where you’re competing
with your training.
You’re not competing against another dog.
You’re competing against your own training
and against a score.
And it’s a time consuming sport.
You have to go tracking
a couple of days a week.
Get up in the morning and
go out while it’s cool.
You do obedience four or five days a week,
and you train with a club
a couple of days a week
to do protection work.
I’ve also done AKC obedience,
where it’s mostly training.
Something you do 15, 20 minutes a day
of training with the dogs.
Conformation, after they’ve once learned
how to do it, you can go to a dog show,
and they remember.
You don’t have to train as hard,
and it’s just a fun competition
and to get a champion is
a prestige for the owner.
It doesn’t mean anything to the dog,
but it does to us.
We had three litters in the early ’90s,
and we had hard times
finding good homes for them,
and the biggest thing
when we sold a puppy,
we were responsible for it
for the rest of its life.
And nothing was more
depressing than a good home
that we thought deserved
a nice Rottweiler puppy,
and due to a divorce,
they brought a puppy back to
us when it was 18 months old,
a male, he weighed less than 50 pounds,
had sores all over him,
and to think that we had produced that,
and we chose the home, and
for him to suffer like that
just made us decide it wasn’t
worth it to breed again.
I wouldn’t recommend a Rottweiler
to a senior citizen, particularly
not as their first dog.
If you’ve grown up with them
and have adapted to them,
then you’re ready for it.
But the cute little 20 pound
puppy that you bring home,
they gain two pounds a week,
and in a year, they’re
104 pound male Rottweiler,
and it’s an awful lot for a senior citizen
that’s not experienced
with dogs to handle.
(toy squeaking)
When we first started in the dogs,
we were both in our early 40s,
and it was fun to do all
the things that we did.
We were involved in clubs,
and as you get older, you slow down,
and the dogs don’t slow down.
They still have the same energy,
but you adapt your way of life
to what the dogs are.
Now our dogs are companions
that sit on the couch with us
and watch TV.
They’re in the house eating with us,
being general pets
instead of being trained.
And the biggest problem with a Rottweiler
is their energy level
sometimes doesn’t work
with older people.
They dart out the door.
They can knock your
legs out from under you.
And you have to be careful,
and that’s why you have
to adapt your way of life
to what the dogs are.
Okay, that’s enough.
Come on, you idiot.
Come on, it’s time to go.
Let’s go.
Out.
– Yeah, that’s right.
– Come on.
– [Boy] They had at this.
– Thank you.
This is Marley.
She’s a four year old female.
Her parents are from Serbia.
She was born here in the United States,
so she has a docked tail.
If she had been born in Serbia,
she would’ve had a natural tail.
She’s an AKC champion.
She won both shows last weekend.
The biggest thing that we’ve done
is we’ve got gates in the house
to keep the dogs in an
area when we have company.
We adapt to make sure that
we’re touching the wall
or have balance so they
don’t knock your legs
out from under you.
They’re a big dog.
My males weigh 100 pounds
to 115, maybe 120 pounds.
The females weigh about 80, 85 pounds.
And if they hit you in
the back of the knees,
they can knock you down.
And as you get older, you
don’t have the balance
that you had when you’re younger,
so you just adapt and make sure
that you have something to hold on to
when the dogs are around.
This is Sam.
He’s a six year old male.
He weighs about 100 pounds.
He’s an AKC champion also.
This one is very dark in the face.
It’s incorrect as far as show dogs.
As he gets older, his
markings are going away.
Sam, look.
He has correct eyes and the rest,
but the dark markings go
against him in the shows.
We don’t go on vacation
because we have too many dogs,
and it costs too much money to put them
in a boarding kennel,
so if they can’t go with us,
we don’t go.
That’s why we have a van,
and it also makes it where if we have to,
for some reason if we had an emergency
and had to leave, we’re set up
where we can take the dogs
and leave the property
and have the dogs in our car with us.
I have the van set up
with crates in the back
for two dogs that are there.
And we can put two in the other seats,
or actually we have a
Staffordshire bull terrier too,
and he’d be riding in the
front seat in our lap,
but we just keep, there’s water in the van
at all times, there’s
food, and it’s ready to go
in case we have an emergency.
I live in a middle class neighborhood.
Everybody has a dog.
Most of the people have
their front yard fenced
with wrought iron fences,
but a good many of the
dogs in the neighborhood
are small terriers and
particularly chihuahuas,
and they get out, they
come through the fence.
There’s dogs getting run
over in the neighborhood
because people are not responsible
for taking care of their dogs.
That’s why we have set up where our dogs
can’t get out on the street.
We don’t want them to get run over,
and we don’t want a quarantine sign
in front of our house
where it’s bit somebody.
We have a pit bull down the street
that the people, their front yard fence
is not tall enough.
The dog jumped over the fence
and bit a lady here just
a couple of weeks ago.
Their dog is quarantined
because they don’t take the
steps to keep their dog safe.
That’s why we’ve spent
over $20,000 on fence
around my property to make
sure my dogs stay safe
and that people that walk down the street
are safe also.
We feel it’s our responsibility
to protect our dogs from anything
that can come into their
property and bother them,
and to also protect anybody
walking down the street
so that my dogs don’t interfere
with what they’re doing.
So we have a wrought iron
fence around the front yard
that we had the slats put closer together
so that dogs can’t come into the yard
and have a problem.
We have, in the side yard,
we have separate fence
where our gas meter is.
The gas company has a key
that they can come in the gate,
and they can read the meter,
but it keeps them safe when
they have to read the meter.
In the other part of the backyard,
we have a separate area
where our air conditioner
is fenced off separate
because Rottweilers chew,
and we’ve had them in the
past chew up the wires
and the copper tubing
on the air conditioner,
so we’ve got fence around
that to protect them
from the air conditioner
and so that we can stay cool.
Then the backyard, we have a
six foot block wall around it.
One of my male Rottweilers jumps up on it
and hooks his elbows over it,
and he surveys the neighborhood.
So to keep him from going over it,
we’ve got 18 inches more wrought iron
on top of the fence
to make it safe for him
and to make it safe for my
neighbors and their kids also.
Rottweilers don’t do
very well in the heat.
They have a dog room when they’re loose,
and it has an access to the backyard,
so they can take care of their business,
but basically, they’re in the house.
Everybody wants 13 acres of property
so the dogs can run,
but we just need a bigger house
because they live in the house.
We feed premium dog
food and raw meat also.
They get two cups of kibble a day,
two eight ounce measuring cups,
not coffee cups, and one cup of raw meat.
We feed beef, pork, chicken,
anything that we can find
cheap at the market and grind.
I have a grinder, and we
grind it for the dogs.
Rottweilers are terrible at overeating.
They can get fat.
That’s why you hear the stories
of the 200 pound Rottweiler.
He’s not a healthy Rottweiler.
He just has been fed everything he wants,
and he weighs 200 pounds.
To maintain the weight on my dogs,
they eat two cups of kibble
and one cup of meat a day,
and they’re fed one time a day.
They’re fed at night because
if I feed them in the morning,
we do most of our dog showing
and our exercise stuff
early in the morning,
and I don’t want the dogs doing that
on a full stomach because of bloat.
And bloat happens from
overeating and exercising
after eating along with
other genetic problems
that cause it too, but by
feeding our dogs in the evening,
they eat and then they’re read
to go to bed shortly after,
and we’ve had them for 30 years
and never had a bloat
problem by doing it that way.
We not only feed our dogs a
grain free premium dog food
and raw meat, but for our treats,
we use Evolve.
It’s a grain free, corn free, soy free,
with the number one
ingredient real chicken.
We use it for treats when we’re training
and for rewards when they do
what we want them to do.
(rooster crowing)
Usually they get up around
seven in the morning,
and 10, 10:30 at night is bedtime.
And they all have a separate
crate, their separate area.
And they’re crated at night
to keep them from getting in trouble
and to protect them from
chewing up stuff in the house.
With big dogs, you have
to make accommodations
for them in the house.
We don’t have a coffee table
because if anything gets
set on the coffee table,
it gets knocked off.
Lamps, we don’t have expensive lamps
because they bump the table,
and everything crashes.
The TV’s bolted down because
if they run into the table,
they knock the TV off.
You make accommodations for it.
We have a dog room.
The only thing that’s in it is the freezer
that we keep their meat in,
and there’s no furniture in there
because they do eat furniture.
They do tear up the pads.
We’ve had them break the
backs off of the couch
running and jumping on it.
When you have a big dog
and have them in the house,
they do damage.
They’ve eaten holes in the wall,
pulled the insulation out.
They can be destructive.
It’s a breed that’s not for everybody.
It’s for somebody that
wants to take responsibility
for their dogs, that is
prepared to handle a big dog
that is a bit intimidating,
and you have to be responsible
for taking care of your dog
and protecting your dog from itself.
I appreciate the opportunity
to talk about Rottweilers.
They’ve been my passion for 32 years.
I love the breed.
I think they’re a great family pet.
My grandkids play with them.
I have a 10 year old granddaughter
that when she comes down,
she takes my dogs out in the yard
and does obedience with them,
and she teaches my dogs more than I do.
They’re a great family pet
if you take care of them.
You have to be responsible
to own the breed,
and I just think that
they’re misunderstood.
They have a lot of bad reputation,
but I think a lot of it is bad owners
that don’t take responsibility
for what they have.
(soft piano music)
