On a wind-blasted fold of the North Pennine Moors, not far from a branch of the Priory, the refuge for troubled celebrities, is a place where dogs go to be rehabilitated. Bleakholt Animal Sanctuary serves as a home for 110 unwanted dogs: nine are deemed beyond help, nine are undergoing rehab, the other 92 have been passed as safe to return to human society.

Each week Suzanne Holding, a pet behaviourist, tests the progress of the inmates. Among them are two rottweilers: Sally and Ally, representatives of a breed whose reputation as fearsome creatures has lately been burnished by a series of savage attacks.

The death of 13-month-old Archie-Lee Hirst, killed by the rottweiler his grandparents kept in their yard, was followed by reports of other rottweiler attacks that weekend. Earlier in December a kennelmaid lost her arm in a gruesome mauling by a rottweiler that she was exercising: proof for many that this was an unpredictable breed that could “suddenly turn” on anyone, even people caring for it.

Statistics for dogbites are not broken down by breed in the UK - studies in the US have shown that increases in rottweiler attacks have correlated only with the rising numbers kept as pets. “You see more bites by yellow labradors than any other dog,” says Neil Martin, manager of Bleakholt Animal Sanctuary, “because there are more of them and people treat them as teddy bears.”

Rottweilers have become less popular in recent years: the number registered with the Kennel Club has dropped by more than 2,000 to 4,257 last year. Overall the Pet Foods Manufacturers Association estimates there are 100,000 in the UK. Even if there are proportionally fewer rottweiler bites, the dogs do more damage. They typically weigh between 6st and 8st and “their jaws are phenomenally efficient”, Martin says.

The other problem for the breed, as he sees it, is “the moron brigade”, which buys them for their perceived dangerous qualities. He often rescues rottweilers named Tyson, or Bruno, or Major: dogs with fighting names. “Dogs are faithful animals,” he says.“If their pack leader - their owner - is aggressive, they are going to be aggressive,” he says.

In aroom at the sanctuary, Holding, 48, and fellow pet behaviourist, Jenny Harter, 24, test the temperament of Sally and Ally. Harter rushes at Sally holding a dummy child, arms outstretched; she sits beside the dog holding a small doll, mimicking the sounds of a baby crying; she dresses up in a mackintosh and hat for the “stranger test” and she pulls away a bowl of dog food using a plastic hand. Sally passes all the tests with flying colours and hopeful glances at the high shelf to which the bowl of food was removed.

Ally appears fine until the plastic hand taps his bowl. He lurches and clamps his jaws around it, shaking it and growling. “He has ‘food aggression' issues”, Martin says. Holding is reluctant to attempt the baby-doll test as she fears he will interpret the sound of crying as “prey” and try to eat it.

Such “issues” are not specific to his breed, however. After the two rottweilers we meet Harry, an English cocker spaniel. “We all thought Harry was good as gold,” says Martin. Harry had ignored the food, but at the sight of the hand he explodes with rage, leaping forward, knocking over the bowl to shake and bite the plastic flesh. His former owner was an elderly lady who is now in care. It was a loving relationship, but Harry felt that he was in charge when it came to meals.

Ally the rottweiler and Harry the fearsome cocker spaniel are in rehab: their trainer feeds them a spoonful at a time, teaching them not to bite the hand that feeds them. Martin is looking for a suitable home for Sally. Though she will make an excellent family pet, Martin will insist that the new owners have experience with dogs. “I wouldn't let them have a rottweiler if they had never had a dog before,” he says.

The dog had its jaws around my grandson's head

It was the first time Gwen Lawrence had brought her two-year-old grandson Harvey back to her house in West Sussex and before she got him out of the car she looked around for Tyler. Her partner had bought the rottweiler six months earlier. “He was quite boisterous and strong,” she says. He lived in the garden on a long lead and in the breakfast room.

When she got home he would come bounding to the door, but there was no sign of him this time. “As I was getting Harvey out of the car I saw him. He was sitting quietly on his lead in the garden. With Harvey behind me I walked over and stroked Tyler's head. In one second he had his jaws round Harvey's face. I screamed and pulled his jaws apart, Harvey fell down on the floor. I had the dog by the collar but he was too strong. I threw myself over Harvey. The dog went underneath me, trying to pull him out. He never touched me. I thought if I could force my fingers into his mouth he couldn't bite the child again, but the strength of him was too much for me.

“I was screaming for help. A neighbour came with a hammer and hit the dog on the head and it went off. I was exhausted. Harvey was covered in blood. I went inside and made the worst phone call in my life.”

Her son Mark, Harvey's father, arrived at A&E to find his son in surgery. “His face was ripped open, his chin was hanging down. The dog had knocked away one of his teeth as he bit his jaw. The surgeon said there were two circular holes in the skull. They couldn't find the bits and they were worried the dog's spit had got in...He was in surgery for six hours. He had 300 stitches.”

After the attack Gwen spoke to a doghandler. “He said this happens with grandmothers. The dog was jealous. When you go through something like this you realise how many of these incidents there are.”

She wrote to her MP, asking him to back a campaign for dog licensing. “He said it would be too expensive. In the year and a half since, Harvey has made a full recovery, though he still bears the scars. “Every time I see them it takes me back,” Gwen says.

This dog will protect you to the death

James Kaye is a slight, neat young man who guards Russian billionaires and company headquarters and occasionally breaks up nightclub fights between dozens of men. That is the power afforded by a well-trained working rottweiler. Should anyone challenge his authority, he will take a pace backwards and, like a minder stepping in to head off trouble, his rottweiler, Soul, will interpose himself. Should anyone attempt to incapacitate Kaye, Soul will incapacitate them. “He is trained on a bite to the arm, between shoulder and elbow,” he says. His firm, Canine Security, has always used rottweilers. “They are big dogs, they have good deterrent value, they are courageous.”

It is clear why these dogs appeal to less scrupulous handlers. After a series of rottweiler attacks in Scotland in the late 1980s, inquiries by the Scottish Rottweiler Club suggested that the dogs were being used by criminals to attend drug deals.

Kaye thinks that there should be licensing for rottweilers - “to stop people who don't have any experience or time with dogs from owning them; to protect the dogs.”

Soul is a two-year-old rescue dog, lean and muscular. “He is trained so that you can switch him on and off,” Kaye says. The training, all done through play, established Kaye as “the pack leader”, arbiter of when to sit, when to lie down, when to eat. He doesn't make any decisions, he always takes the lead from the pack leader,” Kaye says. “A member of the pack will defend to the death the pack leader. That's where the guarding quality comes from. When you've got a public-order incident you don't know what you might be confronted with.The dog will protect you.”

When rottweilers attack children in back gardens, “it is because the dog is the pack leader”, and it can panic. It is not responsible for its actions, he says. “The dog is like a two-year-old child. It is not a good decision maker.”

Other dogs come out only when he goes in

On a damp night last week in South London, Kain was standing on his hind legs, paws resting on a third-floor balcony, giving his customary address to the estate. “He's a very noisy dog,” says Rooney Reed, 28, friend of Fred Bernard, 27, nightclub promoter and owner of Kain. “He wants you to know where he is. The whole estate, it echoes.”

Kain has a sort of fame in the area. Each evening Bernard takes him for a walk. “As soon as he's gone in everyone else brings their dogs out,” Reed says. His friend had never had a dog before, but seven years ago he picked up a copy of Loot and saw a picture of a rottweiler puppy for sale in Tottenham. “I thought they looked cute,” he said. “My friend had a rottweiler, I saw his as a puppy. I always wanted one.”

Reed recalled picking up the dog at 2am. “He came over and sat on my lap,” he says. “Apart from Fred, I'm the only one he really accepts. He doesn't like anyone else for some reason.”

Bernard adds: “He's cool with people he knows, but other people that he doesn't know, he's playful.” Those people include Bernard's cousins, who refuse to go near him. Bernard says that he wouldn't trust Kain with children, “but then, I wouldn't trust a labrador either”.

“My dad and my brother took him to obedience classes,” he says. “Not that it helped.” Still he feels Kain suffers from being misunderstood. “Two weeks ago I was walking my dog down there and the kids all screamed...They all know about him. One kid comes up and says that his mum said my dog bit a kid. His image has been tarnished and he hasn't bitten anyone in his life.”

On our way to meet Kain a neighbour said that he hoped we would survive. We waited outside the flat while Bernard escorted the dog to the balcony. “People are scared of rottweilers,” he says. “The dog gets stereotyped.”

He brings Kain in, the dog swivels on his leash with excitement, chewing playfully at Bernard's hand. “Just chill,” he says. “Stop being such a jar...right, you're going back out.”

Later he takes Kain for a walk, the enormous animal straining on the leash. He seems friendly enough. “Don't get too close,” Bernard says.

I wanted a labrador, he wanted a rottweiler

When Steve Mayall's marriage broke down he bought a rottweiler. The family home is on an estate beside the Thames, and when he moved out he wanted a guard dog to look after his ex-wife Joanne and their two children, Harry, then 3, and Jack, 9. “He didn't like the idea of me being on my own,” Joanne says. “I wanted a labrador, he wanted a rottweiler, but I am convinced that as long as you are careful dogs are all right. I knew once I got it home it would be a family pet. I wasn't going to shut it outside.”

She named it Kaiser - “after the Kaiser Chiefs”. They had owned a Staffordshire bull terrier, but had to get rid of it when it bit Harry on the nose. When Kaiser arrived she read the books of César Millán, the famed Mexican “dog whisperer”, and Victoria Stillwell, the leather-clad hound-tamer of British TV.

Joanne cleared out a cupboard beneath the stairs and laid out a bed for him, to which he is dispatched whenever he plays up. “It was a different story before we got that,” she says. He pops up in front of her whenever she answers the door, front paws on the gate. Jack says that each time Kaiser completes his toilet in the back garden, “he runs inside and runs up and down the stairs until we tell him to lie down. It's like he's celebrating.”

Harry has alopecia and likes to run up to Kaiser, bent double. “Lick my head!” he shouts. “Lick my head!”

Later, Steve Mayall, 34, a van driver, drops round with his new partner and baby. Although Kaiser has not turned out quite as he had thought, he seems satisfied. “I wanted Jo to train him as a guard dog, but he's good as gold,” he says. “Once, when a stranger was asking the kids for directions, he came out barking. He does what I got him for.”

For her part, Joanne, 32, continues to follow all the principles of proper dog management, but one. “He does sit on the furniture,” she says. “I know it's bad, but when you are the only adult in the house you sit there on the sofa talking to the dog. You like the company.”

You need to have them trained

“Licensing would be a start,” says Kimberly MacDonald, 43, a rottweiler breeder from Wiltshire. “People think they can bring these dogs up leaving them in the back garden. It doesn't work. They have to be used to people, you have to take them to training clubs and out in public from an early age.”

Walking into MacDonald's living room for the first time can be alarming: she has four rottweilers (one has died since), the product of four generations of breeding. Her son Alex, 6, walks among them like a farmer in a field of bullocks. A Great Swiss mountain dog was in the kitchen. “It's the cat you have to watch out for,” she says.

A rottweiler raised without rules, left alone to guard a yard, might become aggressive, but a dog is also born with a certain character. “You shouldn't be breeding if you haven't got the right temperament,” she says. She has seen problems even at the top level. “I saw a dog belonging to a top breeder. His whole body language was telling me something wasn't right. He bit a small child at a show about a year ago. The mother was persuaded not to go to court. It later bit a judge.” She says that there have been other instances of judges being attacked, that even when a character test is imposed some breeders know how to get around it. Meanwhile, “in the past ten years we have seen a lot of new people in the breed”, she says. That is not counting “the people who breed hundreds of puppies to sell for £250 a time.

“The majority of these attacks you don't know where the dog came from, or they got them from someone in Loot, or from a puppy farm.” As well as licensing, she would like to see more council dog wardens, checking where and how dogs are kept and mandatory training classes for working breeds: rottweilers, German shepherds, dobermans. “The Kennel Club can do more,” she says. “Ask relevant questions, stop accepting registrations from people who don't character-test and demand health screening. If this does not stop every single rottweiler attack, it will be a start.”

Women do very well with the rottweiler males

Mary Macphail is a retired civil servant and life-long rottweiler addict. In her youth she had other dogs, for a while she owned a Doberman, but in 1958 she was given a rottweiler as a present and she has never looked back. She wrote All About the Rottweiler, for the enlightenment of fellow enthusiasts.

“Their ancestors are supposed to have crossed the mountains in Roman times,” she says. “Mixed with other breeds in the German valleys. They drove cattle before the coming of the railways.”

Thelma Gray, the dog breeder who provided the Queen with her first corgi, brought rottweilers to England in 1936, but the war halted any attempt at breeding them here until 1953 when a veterinary surgeon, Captain F. Roy-Smith, noticed them while serving in Germany and brought three back with him. Roy-Smith gave Macphail her first rottweiler.

“The appeal was the character and the appearance,” she says. “I wanted something sturdier, but also the fat faces; they look like teddy bears. There's a theory that, basically, women are psychologically attracted to fatter faces.”

You might imagine the typical rottweiler owner to be a thrusting gent who sees in his courageous beast the perfect mirror of his own soul, but venture into the British rottweiler-owning establishment and you find that it is mostly women. “Women do very well with the rottweiler males,” Macphail says.

Her latest dog is called Dyl. “You could describe him as a gentleman type of dog,” she says. “He is extremely well bred.”

After a walk she takes him to a dog-obedience class in a village hall near Bracknell, Berkshire, with five other ladies and five other dogs. There is a clear chain of command: the dogs have moments of uncertainty and insubordination, but obey their owners; their owners display exemplary obedience towards their formidable trainer, Gail Ward. “Middle pace with your dogs!” Ward bellows. “Forward about turn! Fast pace!”

Macphail thinks that all owners should take their dogs to classes that help to socialise the animals and establish rules. “Dogs can do only what they are trained to do,” she says. She gives Dyl a cuddle. “You're a good dog,” she says. “You're going to have a choccy drop and some cheese.”

What to do and what not to do

You should have experience keeping other dogs before buying a rottweiler puppy or adopting a grown rottweiler from a rescue centre. Some rescue centres will insist that you have previous experience with larger breeds.

If you are adopting a dog from a rescue centre, ask to see its behaviour profile, or speak to the centre's pet behaviourist. Arrange not to leave the dog home alone all day: it will not deal well with separation.

If you are buying a puppy, always ask to see the mother and, wherever possible, the father. Check its health profile and make sure you have instructions on feeding, including just what the maximum amounts the dog should be fed in the first seven months.

Puppy training classes are essential to “socialise” the dog.

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