Home » Plants & Animals » Rottweiler Dogs » My Love is Like a Red, Red ... Rottie?

My Love is Like a Red, Red ... Rottie?

© Wendy Smith

People love to draw attention to themselves. They want to stand out in a crowd. And unfortunately, there are members of our species that are not above using their very pets to help them stand out. For example, look at the "rare" types of Rottweilers. Why should you have a Rottweiler that is just the common black and tan, when you have a chance to own one of these eye-catching, valuable, "rare" beauties?

The answer is that more than likely the only reason that dog is considered "valuable" or "rare" is because someone calling themselves a "breeder" sees a way to make a lot of money off of the public's ignorance.

Case in point for this month, the infamous Red Rottweiler. They are out there, and people who want to buy one can certainly expect to pay a pretty penny for one. But what are they? And are they really worth all that money?

Let's start this article off with another short look at the past shall we? As I stated last month, when this breed first was being developed, color didn't matter, working ability did. In those early days, color variations did exist. The black and tan coloring is genetically dominant; so most dogs probably were black and tan. However, there were dogs called Rottweilers who were brindle, wolf color (an old photo of one of these can be found at http://home.sol.no/~molossus/rottweiler/... ), and were red, to name a few colors.

So what happened? Why do today's Rottweiler standards call for a dog that is black and tan ONLY?

Let's move our little time machine a few years forward to Germany in the year 1921. In the decade before this year, two Rottweiler breed clubs existed in Germany, the German Rottweiler Club (DRK) and the International Rottweiler club (IRK). The standard of one of these clubs, DRK, I believe, did not allow any color variations from the black and tan. However, the other did allow odd colors.

Then in the summer of 1921, these two clubs merged and became the General German Rottweiler Club (Allgemeiner Deutscher Rottweiler Club or ADRK), which is still the official breed club in Germany today. Shortly thereafter, the standard adopted by the ADRK disqualified any dog that did not have the black and tan coloring. It seems that the ADRK had a few questions about the purity of the lines that were producing these off-color dogs. There were suspicions of some of the dogs were actually crossbreeds.