The documents worth reading

Every figure, every grade and every article number printed in this magazine traces back to a document, and the list of documents is short on purpose. The two official standards describe the breed. The screening requirements of the parent club and the publications of the orthopedic registry describe what can be measured on a dog. Three statutes of North Carolina describe what the state imposes. Three open access studies describe what has actually been measured in Rottweilers. The table holds all fourteen of them, with the publisher behind each one, the question it settles, the question it leaves open, and the date it was last read. The sections after the table take the four families one at a time, because a reader with a question in hand usually needs only one of them and is better served by knowing which.

The two breed standards

The Fédération Cynologique Internationale publishes the breed as standard number 147, and the version in force is a translation dated 2018 of a text validated the same year. It measures in centimetres, it sets males at 61 to 68 cm and females at 56 to 63 cm, it attaches weights of 50 kg and about 42 kg, and it places the breed in group 2, the molossoid section, with a working trial attached. Its history section runs from the dogs of the Roman legions to the butcher’s dog of Rottweil, and records recognition as a police dog in Germany in 1910. On the point that changes most for an American reader, it describes the tail in its natural condition.

The American Kennel Club standard describes the same animal in inches: 24 to 27 for males, 22 to 25 for females, the middle of the range preferred, and no weight at all. Its proportions match the continental text almost clause for clause, height to length as 9 is to 10, depth of chest about half the height, skull to muzzle as 3 is to 2, and a full complement of 42 teeth. Its disqualifications list entropion, ectropion, an undershot bite and cryptorchidism, and on the tail it states that the set matters more than the length, describing both the docked and the natural one. Where the two texts meet and part, point by point, is the argument of the standards comparison, and the two documents are the reason any claim about size in this magazine names its unit.

Screening and the orthopedic registry

The parent club’s mandatory practices, as most recently published (2019 version consulted in 2026), are the document that turns screening from a vocabulary into a calendar. They require a CHIC number with results published, hip radiographs at 24 months or older graded into the passing band of Excellent, Good or Fair, elbow results at the same age published whatever they say, a cardiac clearance at two years or older with an evaluation by a board certified cardiologist strongly recommended, an eye certification valid three years, and the JLPP DNA test on every breeding dog with two carriers never bred together. They also require the dog to carry permanent identification at the time of the examination, which is the detail that keeps a result attached to the right animal.

The orthopedic registry publishes the reading rules behind those requirements, and three of its pages carry the weight. The hip documentation defines the seven grades from Excellent to Severe and fixes definitive certification at 24 months, with each radiograph read by three reviewing radiologists. The international ratings matrix lines the American grades up against the A to E letters, which is the page an owner of an imported dog needs before trusting any conversion offered at a dinner table; the reading of those documents is developed in hip and elbow grading. And the program pages carry the requirements and the live statistics, where the registry keeps the figures that move. This magazine sends readers there rather than printing a percentage, because a number that is recalculated continuously belongs beside its own generation date.

North Carolina statutes

Chapter 67 of the General Statutes is the state’s dog law, and its article 1A is the part that decides how a designation proceeds: 67-4.1 carries the definitions, 67-4.2 the precautions an owner then owes and the class of misdemeanor for ignoring them, 67-4.3 the consequence of an attack whose medical care exceeds 100 dollars, and 67-4.4 the strict civil liability that follows a designated dog. Nothing in the article names a breed, which is the fact that organizes the whole legal picture of the state. The summary of that machinery, with the article numbers attached to each step, is North Carolina dog law.

Two other chapters sit beside it in this magazine’s footnotes. Chapter 130A carries the rabies provisions, and this list records only the fact a reader can act on without an article number: the state requires vaccination, and the current details belong to the veterinarian who examines the dog. Chapter 19A is where shelters and placement organizations register, which is the frame behind any explanation of how a breed rescue is built. Both are public texts, cited by chapter here because the magazine has read them at that depth and by article only where it has read further.

Open access research on the breed

Three studies do most of the breed specific work. The 2020 cohort from the University of California, Davis, published in an open access veterinary journal, follows 854 Rottweilers in its breed section and reports joint disorders in 8 percent of its 315 intact males and 16 percent of its 143 intact females, alongside guidance on the age of alteration given sex by sex. The 2002 bone sarcoma cohort, published in a cancer epidemiology journal, followed 683 North American Rottweilers and reported roughly a one in four lifetime risk in dogs of both sexes gonadectomized before their first year, with risk falling as lifetime hormone exposure lengthened. The 2019 multi shelter study measured what one or two nights in a foster home change for a dog leaving a shelter, and found the longest uninterrupted rest of its whole observation period during those nights.

Each of the three is cited with its year every time it appears, and the reasons are stated on the pages that use them. The 2020 study reports its subgroups exactly as published and they are quoted without addition. The 2002 cohort is the only study of its size covering the breed alone, and its age is part of what it says. The 2019 study measured shelter dogs rather than adopted Rottweilers, which is a narrower claim than the folklore built on it, and the checklist of the arrival month keeps to the measured thing.

What is deliberately absent from this list

A short list is made of refusals as well as of choices, and the refusals have reasons. Advocacy sites that compile bite incidents are absent because their framing is the argument rather than the evidence, and a compilation built to prove a point is a lead to an official text, never the text itself. Aggregated content pages without an identifiable author are absent because a figure nobody signs is a figure nobody can correct. The organizations of this region that place dogs are absent entirely, unjudged and unnamed, because this magazine explains the machinery of placement and holds no opinion about who runs it well. The breed’s own clubs appear only as publishers of documents, never as recommendations. And the archive that once lived at this address is absent by design: its pages carried personal names, email addresses and third party texts, they served as framing material while this magazine was built, and none of it moves into the open pages.

A few working references stand outside the table for the same reason. A state statute that bars insurers from refusing a household on breed alone is read as an example of drafting, with the reminder that the list of such states moves and that each one must be read in its own code. A library of municipal codes is the tool for checking an ordinance before repeating a claim about it. The state’s public veterinary college is named once, as an institution with oncology and orthopedics services, for the reader mapping a specialty referral. And the vocabulary every one of these documents uses, from withers to strict liability, is defined once in the glossary. The rules that govern how these sources are chosen, dated and corrected are written out in editorial standards.