Hello everyone, Have been keeping dogs all my life (GSD, Boxer, English Bullterrier) and at present have a pair of Neapolitan Mastiffs which are my pride and joy and my favourite all time pets. Basically, I live with my fiancee in my own property now and protecting her and our possessions has become more of an issue. We live in a fairly rough area in South London and I have to work away sometimes. Both of my dogs (Dog and a bitch) are very guardy and vocal when strangers approach the house and are a very intimidating visual deterrant as you can imagine (the male is almost 140 lbs in weight). Both dogs have good basic obedience which I am happy with, I would never expect to achieve anything like some of the GSD and Mali owners on the forum, partly because of my lack of experience in this area, but also the differences in the herding breeds and the molosser types. What I want to find out (and perhaps try and breed for in the future), is if my Neapolitan Mastiffs will not only bark and warn a would be "bad guy", but will actually engage a person when the chips are down, be it an intruder or an attacker or whatever. There seems to be a lot of dogs that are bred purely for form and not function these days and as a consequence, many of the mastiff type breeds are nothing like their more than able predecessors. Any advice/recommended reading would be greatly appreciated. I am not after qualifications or titles or anything, merely wanted to test my dogs and see if they are up to the task in a "real life" situation. A couple of sites I had seen abroad literally had "strangers" (trained decoy's) jump out on the dog owners/pretending to attack them and gauged the dogs that way - not sure how scientific/accurate this would be. Any thoughts/ideas would be most welcome. Thanks guys, James