How Deep Is Your Love? It’s All in the Ribcage, Baby!

It’s one of those cliches of dog-show judging: Oftentimes, the odd man out in the ring is in fact the correct one.

Said another way: If it looks like nothing else, it’s probably the one to point at.

Mastiffs are a perfect example of this.

One of the stories I’m proudest of having reported and written was an exhaustive profile of Mastiff breeder Tobin Jackson and his Deer Run kennel, which you can read here. It is not an exaggeration to say that 99 percent of the world’s Mastiffs carry Deer Run blood.

By all accounts, when Tobin began breeding Mastiffs, they had exquisite heads and pathetically unsound bodies. You know — hammock-like toplines, popped elbows, wobbly hocks, stick-straight rears, and on and on.

It has long been held in the breed that in order to restore soundness, Tobin introduced Great Dane blood. If true, it was an inspired choice: Medieval Mastiffs were periodically crossed with Greyhounds to give them soundness and endurance. And a Great Dane is nothing more than a Mastiff crossed to a Sighthound. (Specifically, the giant Sloughi, the rarest of the desert hounds, bred to hunt large antelope as well as ostrich. To avoid the lethal claws of the latter, these huge hounds jumped on their backs, but that’s a story for another day …)

Back to the modern-day Mastiff: With the infusion of this Dane blood came a return to soundness — along with, frustratingly, a lack of bone and head type. Again, breed lore tells us that the next cross that was made was to the Saint Bernard, which restored the glorious massive heads that had gone by the wayside with the initial Dane detour.

In the Mastiff, what is desired is legs that are not longer than the depth of chest. (Pictured: Danish Ch. Wileyways Conrad, whelped in 1999.)

But along with soundness and mass, respectively, both the Great Dane and Saint Bernard contributed the same unwanted trait to the Mastiff, one that is quite persistent and arguably even predominates in the breed today.

I’m talking about length of leg.

A Leg Up (and Up, and Up …)

Though many people do not realize it, Saint Bernards are supposed to have good length of leg under them: “Think horse, not cow,” my mentor Betty-Anne Stenmark drilled into me.

The Saint’s AKC standard says this in the very first sentence when it asks for a “proportionately tall figure,” noting later on that the chest should not reach below the elbows. That’s in contrast to most Molosser breeds, which usually ask for the chest to reach to at least the elbow. The Saint Bernard standard also notes that the minimum height for a male is 27½ inches, implying that most are taller.

"Think horse, not cow." Saint Bernards should have some leg under them, as this female pulling her trio of youngsters in the Swiss Alps plainly demonstrates.

The taller a dog becomes, the more its long bones tend to lengthen and narrow. Think of stretching out a ball of dough or clay into linear segments. According to the AKC standard, a male Great Dane should be 32 or more inches at the shoulder, and anything under 30 inches is to be disqualified. A 32-inch Dane often does not have equal measurements from the withers to the elbow and the elbow to the ground; the latter measurement is usually a bit longer, as any photograph of a typey Dane will show.

The Sighthound influence is plainly evident in this beachgoing veteran fawn Great Dane bitch.

A Tall Order

What about the Mastiff, then?

Its AKC standard is ready with a crystal-clear answer:

“The height of the dog should come from depth of body rather than from length of leg.”

If that doesn’t drive the point home, there’s this: “Great depth and breadth desirable.”

And then: “Chest wide, deep … extending at least to the elbow” — the words “at least” indicating that the chest can extend lower than the elbow.

In other words, the direct opposite of the Saint Bernard.

Another example of correct proportions in a Mastiff: American Ch. Eastwinds Ivory Touche, whelped 2010.

The challenge with the Mastiff is that its AKC standard asks for males to be, at minimum, 30 inches at the shoulder, and females, 27½ inches. That kind of height — and certainly anything taller — opens the door to the tendency to have a longer leg. That’s not to say that a 30-inch Mastiff can’t be deep. It can. But it’s a challenge. And the taller the dog, the more difficult it is to achieve. Otherwise, we’d see more of them.

Historically Speaking

The late author and dog man Colonel David Hancock was quite vocal in his belief that the true mastiff — with a small “M” — was a broad-mouthed hunting hound that came by that length of leg honestly: It was needed for the pursuit of big game, including bringing these large animals down before the advent of firearms.

This was apparently the thinking in the late 19th Century when the breed was being standardized. Mastiff breeder H.D. Kingdon opined in the 1883 book “Dogs”: “‘We do not believe in the purity of mastiffs over thirty inches ...’ I support that; the universal mastiff type is between 24" and 28" at the shoulder; the flock guarding breeds are bigger and I suspect it is their blood, i.e. that of the smooth Saint Bernard and the Tibetan Mastiff, which have produced this size increase in the Mastiff.”

Breeder-judge Marie Moore awarding Best of Breed at the Beverly Hills Kennel Club in 1970 to Mex/Am Ch. Jim Mar Gee's Lord. The proportions of the depth of ribbing to the length of leg are the inverse of what is desired.

For his part, celebrated Victorian dog writer James Watson penned these words, proving that Tobin Jackson was hardly the first to think of using Dane and Saint blood to set the Mastiff back on track:

“ … we owe our mastiff to a few obscurely picked up dogs of unknown origin and from others that were either half-bred Great Danes or dogs known as Alpine Mastiffs” — that is, Saint Bernards.

So in the Mastiff ring, I am always looking for that ever-important depth. Sometimes it’s not there, and I am left to sort out dogs with a bit more leg than I ideally want. But when it is there, I know to recognize it. And maybe now you will, too.