About the Great Dane.

The breed at a glance

The Great Dane is one of the tallest dog breeds in the world and one of the shortest-lived. Both of those facts should shape your decision. An adult male stands eye to eye with a seated adult, weighs about as much as one, eats accordingly, and will probably be gone by his tenth birthday.

What you get in exchange is a dog of genuinely unusual temperament — calm, soft, deeply attached to its people, and content to do very little as long as it is doing it next to you. People who have lived with one rarely go back to anything else.

History and origin

Despite the name, the Great Dane is German. The breed was standardised in Germany in the late nineteenth century, where it is still called the Deutsche Dogge, and its ancestors were the heavy boarhounds kept by German nobility from the sixteenth century onward — dogs bred to hold wild boar, which tells you something about the bone and the courage underneath the soft modern temperament.

Those boarhounds were probably a cross of English Mastiff with Irish Wolfhound stock, giving the breed both its mass and its height. By the 1800s the dogs had shifted from hunting to estate guarding and companionship, and German breeders deliberately selected the aggression out of them. The name "Great Dane" comes from a French naturalist's misattribution in the 1700s and has stubbornly outlived every attempt to correct it.

The AKC recognised the breed in 1887. The modern Great Dane is a companion dog that happens to be enormous, and the breed standard explicitly calls for a dog that is "friendly, dependable and never timid or aggressive."

Size — the honest numbers

People consistently underestimate this. A Great Dane is not a big dog. It is a different category of animal, and almost every practical difficulty of ownership follows from size.

• Males: 30–34 inches at the shoulder, 140–185 lb. Standing on his hind legs, a male is comfortably over six feet.
• Females: 28–32 inches, 110–145 lb.
• Head height: an adult's head is at kitchen-counter level, permanently. Nothing edible can be left out, ever.
• Growth: from about 2 lb at birth to over 100 lb by six months. That is roughly 50 times its birth weight in half a year, and it is why the first year matters so much.

See the month-by-month growth chart for what to expect and what is too fast.

Temperament

The standard asks for a "spirited, courageous, always friendly and dependable" dog, and a well-bred, well-raised Dane is exactly that. They are famously tolerant of children, generally good with other dogs and cats when raised alongside them, and almost comically devoted to their own family.

What they are not is a guard dog in any practical sense. A Dane's size deters people and that is the whole of its security value. Most of ours would show a burglar where the silverware is and then lean on him.

They are also not a dog that copes with being alone. Separation distress is the most common behavioural problem in the breed, and it is largely a function of how attached they get. If your household is empty from eight until six, this is the wrong breed.

Health and lifespan

This is the hard part. Great Danes live eight to ten years. Giant breeds age faster at a cellular level, and no amount of careful breeding changes the fundamental arithmetic — though it does change how good those years are.

The conditions that matter in this breed:

• Bloat / GDV — the leading cause of sudden death. Roughly one in four Great Danes will experience it at some point. It is an emergency measured in minutes. Read this page before anything else.
• Dilated cardiomyopathy — the heart enlarges and weakens. Screened for by annual echocardiogram, which is why we do it on every adult.
• Hip and elbow dysplasia — partly hereditary, partly caused by growing a puppy too fast. Both parents should be OFA cleared.
• Wobbler syndrome — cervical vertebral instability causing an unsteady gait, more common in this breed than almost any other.
• Osteosarcoma — bone cancer, disproportionately common in giant breeds.
• Hypothyroidism — common, heritable and easily screened.
• Congenital deafness in merle and harlequin lines, which is why we BAER test and never breed merle to merle.

Lean growth in the first year, a correct large-breed diet, annual cardiac screening and a prophylactic gastropexy are the four things most within your control. Together they make a real difference.

Is a Great Dane for you?

A Great Dane probably suits you if:

• Somebody is home most of the day, most days.
• You have floor space for a very large animal to stretch out, and you do not mind a dog on the furniture, because he will be.
• You can absorb $200–$350 a month in food, insurance and preventatives, plus a real emergency fund.
• You want a calm companion rather than a running partner or a working dog.
• You can be consistent about manners while he is small enough to manage.
• You have made peace with eight to ten years.

A Great Dane is probably wrong for you if:

• The house is empty for a full working day.
• You want a jogging companion — they should not run distances, ever.
• A tight budget would make an $4,000 emergency surgery impossible.
• You are houseproud about drool, shedding and mud at hip height.
• You are buying mainly for the look of the dog.