Male vs Female Boerboel: Which Should You Get?

On average, yes, but less than most buyers expect. Males tend to be more territorial, more physical in how they engage, and pushier through their long adolescence. Females often mature faster mentally, focus earlier in training, and are more selective about what deserves a reaction. Both sexes are equally devoted to their families and equally serious guardians when it counts.

Here is the honest part: the variation between individual dogs within each sex is larger than the average difference between the sexes. We have raised soft, easygoing males and hard, pushy females. Large-scale behavior research points the same direction: a 2022 study by Morrill and colleagues in the journal Science, covering surveys on more than 18,000 dogs, found that breed explains only a small fraction of the behavioral differences between individual dogs, and that sex is a similarly weak predictor of an individual dog's personality. Averages are real, but they tell you little about the specific puppy in front of you.

That is why we tell buyers to hold their sex preference loosely and weight the individual puppy's evaluated temperament heavily. For the breed's baseline disposition, sourced against the parent club's own guidance, read our Boerboel temperament guide.

For a giant breed like the Boerboel, current veterinary guidance favors waiting until the growth plates close, roughly 18-24 months, before spaying or neutering. Altering a giant-breed puppy early removes the hormones that regulate skeletal growth, and research on large breeds has linked early spay and neuter to higher rates of joint disorders. Make the final call with your own veterinarian.

The best-known research here is the UC Davis work by Hart and colleagues, which examined joint disorders and certain cancers by neuter age across 35 breeds and found that many large breeds altered before a year of age had significantly higher rates of problems like cranial cruciate ligament tears and hip dysplasia. The Boerboel was not one of the breeds studied, so we do not pretend there is Boerboel-specific data; the giant-breed pattern is simply the sensible guide until there is.

Waiting does carry management duties: an intact female cycles roughly twice a year and needs secure separation from intact males during heats, and an intact adolescent male needs an owner who stays ahead of his testing phase. Those are solvable problems for a prepared home. For the full picture on joint health, testing, and what we guarantee, read our Boerboel health and lifespan guide.

We spend the litter's first 8 weeks evaluating every puppy's temperament and structure: how each one recovers from new sounds and surfaces, how it engages with people, where it falls in the litter's pecking order, and how it is put together physically. By go-home time we know which puppies are the confident, forward ones and which are the softer, more handler-focused ones, and that evaluation matters more to your success than whether the puppy is male or female.

During the pick process we share what we have seen and help match each family to the puppy that fits their home, not just the sex or color they came in wanting. Tell us what your household looks like and what job the dog will have, and we will tell you which puppies in the litter we would take home in your shoes. See who is here now on our Available Puppies page, or start a puppy application and we will go from there.