Schipperke
A small black Belgian dog bred to kill rats and guard workshops and canal barges. Compact enough for a flat, but sharp, opinionated, vocal, and a genuine escape artist.
- Weight
- 4–7 kg
- Lifespan
- 12–16 years
Weight and lifespan are reference ranges from the breed guide. They vary by sex, lineage and individual dog and do not predict your dog’s ideal weight or lifespan. Read the care descriptions alongside the individual dog’s history.
Background and characteristics
The Schipperke comes from the workshops and canal boats of Flanders, where a small, tough black dog earned its keep by killing vermin and announcing anyone who came near the cargo. The FCI files it with the sheepdogs, which hints at a herding-type ancestor behind the modern breed. All of that history is still visible in the dog on your sofa.
It weighs around eleven to fifteen pounds and behaves like a much larger working dog: patrolling the house, investigating every noise from the street, and inventing projects when nobody gives it one.
Exercise and play
Plan on two walks a day of roughly half an hour with plenty of sniffing time, plus ten or fifteen minutes of deliberate thinking work. Scent games, short trick sessions, and food puzzles all do the job. Physical exercise alone does not settle this breed; a Schipperke who is tired but bored still barks and still chews.
If you have a yard, walk the fence line before the dog arrives. They dig, they squeeze through gaps, and they climb better than their build suggests. Off-leash recall in an unfenced area is a bad bet with a dog that was selected to chase small moving things.
Coat and everyday care
Grooming is easy by small-dog standards. The harsh outer coat and dense undercoat need brushing about once a week, with no clipping or professional trimming, but once or twice a year the undercoat lets go all at once and you will be brushing daily for two or three weeks. Resist the urge to shave a shedding Schipperke; the coat rarely comes back the way it went.
Home environment and care planning
The things new owners underestimate are noise and stubbornness. Alarm barking was the job, so it needs to be shaped from day one rather than corrected later, which matters a great deal in an apartment or a terraced house with shared walls. Health-wise, ask a breeder about patellar luxation, hypothyroidism, progressive retinal atrophy, Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease, and MPS IIIB, an inherited storage disorder known in this breed for which a DNA test exists.
Confirming the parents were tested is the single most useful question you can ask.