How to Care for a Chinese Shar-Pei

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Nancy Frensley, and I'm the training manager at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society. We're going to talk about how to care for your Chinese shar-pei. The shar-pei has a very sort of colorful past. I think they've been used everything from fighting dogs to home companions to guard dogs, and in general they're a lot like your chow-chow. They have a tendency to bond very closely with just one or two family members, and really don't care, for the most part, to be friendly or to be touched by other people or people that they don't know. It's something to keep in mind if you have a life that's really busy, and your household's really busy with a lot of strangers your shar-pei is not going to be very happy with that. They're going to do best in a home with a couple or a quiet family and that doesn't have a lot of visitors. The Chinese shar-pei; in terms of caring for them they have a lot of folds in the skin. That's one of the things that makes them so cute when they're puppies is they've got this little folded skin. But that skin is prone to having a lot of skin problems, because all those folds no air gets in, so they have a tendency to get skin infections and funguses and parasites in there, so they're going to need a lot of veterinary care, and they need a lot of socialization with people at a very early age."