Which dog breed has originally the fiercest temperament??

[grippingwhiteness]

I'm very interested with this topic since I find very interesting how dog mentality works as a whole, and I find the "gameness" argument also very fascinating because it's crazy how you can actually identify as a dog breed when you've been into boxing and you really had a masochist feeling about it.

I'd generally say that game bred apbts and tosa inus ard unmatchable on that matter with way more frequency than other working molossers. I've seen very gory and disturbing images of pitbulls with their muzzles ripped off or their limbs missing after very gruesome fights, although I haven't seen tosas being nearly as badly injured. Could still ask some here to post of they have some (for curiosity only).

If I can, I'd even add an extinct breed whoose blood lives today in the dogo argentino. The Cordoba fighting dog.

[Hardcastle]

I would just say don't believe everything you read. Its convenient that all these legendarily unmanageably ferocious breeds are extinct, and so the stories can't be checked or tested for veracity. Could be kernels of truth in there, the "preferring to fight instead of mate", that can still be a problem with fighting dogs and game dog breeders often employ "rape racks" -


Female dogs naturally fight off their would-be suitors during courtship, it's part of the natural testing for a high quality mate, and with game dogs this can understandably get a little too intense.

So that factoid about the cordoban is kind of just blown out of proportion and misrepresented, rather than being false.

I think the "hostile even to their owners" is probably false. That's not practical for any dog, but especially not practical for a fighting dog that needs to be regularly handled safely and also actually needs to be bonded very closely to a human to fight to full potential. Maybe there were 2 or 3 known cases in old spain where a cordoban killed its owner or whatever, and that could have generated an escalating hysteria among public perception which lead to the breed developing a reputation which was mostly myth and hype. Not unlike the apbt. Mostly they would have been sweet and subordinate and friendly to their owners, and probably humans in general (like the apbt).

While it is an extinct breed, it is not an extinct animal or a foreign alien. It's just some variant of bullbreed, either a bull dog or bull terrier.
Few dogs from history are totally lost, so if any historical breed is portrayed as something totally unlike the dogs we still have, the testimonials about it are probably more fiction than fact.

Things get a little different when you start talking about "warhounds" only in that they were TRAINED to be man-aggressive. Even they weren't some uniquely alien creature, they were just largish boarhounds or wolfhounds, with the same inherit nature as the ones we still have, BUT they were raised and conditioned and blooded to view humans as prey. Often only a certain type of human. Even those dogs would have just been placid nice dogs when resting at the feet of their masters, they simply could be set on humans like the humans were prey animals and that wasn't out of "ferocity" or savagery but calm natural predation.

"Fierce" and "aggression" and words like that don't really make me think of impressive character traits in a dog, they make me think of a fearful or unstable dog that is employing aggression (maybe complete with painful bites) to deter an attack because it is insecure. A good dog is not fierce or aggressive even while killing something, it is calm and methodical and emotionless. If the cordoban was worth it's salt it was not "fierce", but rather enjoyed a good fight. I doubt they were normally man-aggressive, but I guess it is possible they didn't "penalise" that as much as game dog culture does. Still definitely not intractible with their owner. Just doesn't make sense. I think if you got a pet cordoban puppy today it would just be a normal bullbreed dog.

Another one popularly portrayed as savage and ferocious is the extinct irish wolfhound, aka the "Cú Faoil". Stories abound of them biting the wheels off chariots, biting off peoples heads, continuing to bite after having their own heads cut off, etc etc. Obviously you can't take these stories seriously, they just indicate that the dogs were probably pretty damn capable and difficult to deal with and so these legendary tales were inspired. It seems the cordoban inspired its own little legendary hysteria so it was probably badass but I don't think it was "savage" or wildly "fierce" or anything like that.