Let's talk Great Danes

All you need to know about the breed

Great Danes are quite simply huge: a sweet, friendly, and affectionate character wrapped in over-sized packaging.

They have maintained the stature and strength needed for their original mission — hunting wild boar — but over the centuries, aggressiveness has been bred out of them, giving way to gentleness. Great Danes are handsome hounds, with a majestic demeanour, alert expression, and dense glossy coat in one of three evocative colour combinations: fawn and brindle, black and harlequin, or blue.

Once trained — and this should be relatively straightforward — Great Danes get on well with children and can make lovely family pets, with the caveat that they do require a level of commitment that’s a notch above a smaller dog. If you’re pushed for space or a collector of valuable china ornaments — one swipe of that solid Great Dane tail at tabletop height can have devastating consequences — you may want to reconsider.

Great Danes require a decent amount of exercise, although despite their size they are not the most energetic breed around. Once fully grown they enjoy a variety of exercise — walks, runs, and the chance to potter around in an enclosed space (luckily they can’t jump so you won’t need to raise your fence). One thing to bear in mind is that because of their enormous size, Great Danes’ average lifespan is short.

On a day-to-day basis, the only real downside to having a Great Dane as a pet is the slobber. Great Danes drool a considerable amount. But these affable, larger-than-life characters more than make up for that in the pleasure they bring their human companions.

For a breed with such a long history, it’s not surprising that the Great Dane’s origins are not always clear. Images from Egyptian tombs suggest they may have existed for thousands of years. Mastiff- and greyhound-like breeds, as well as an extinct German hunting dog (the Bullenbeisser), are thought to feature in Great Danes’ ancestry.

What is certain is that the precursors to modern Great Danes were prized as wild boar hunters, as well as guard dogs in medieval Germany. When the breed first came to the United Kingdom, the dogs were known as German boarhounds.

In the 19th century several similar varieties were classified together under a new name — Deutsche Dogge. How that became Great Dane in English is not clear, but to complicate matters further it may have been via the translation of a French name given to the breed: Le Grand Danois.