Seriesly, dudes. When you have a big party, lock the dog in a back bedroom.
A dog that is perfectly fine the other 364 days of the year will have a very hard time dealing with all of the strange people and things he will see at a big party. The risk of having him act out agressively is way, way up on these days.
Your guests will thank you.
We always put the dogs in the basement whenever we have company over.
What people fail to realize is that Mastiffs and Ridgebacks were bred for a specific purpose(as were all purebred dogs).
Mastiffs date back to Roman times. They were working dogs bred to be used in battle. Ridgebacks are hounds bred to hunt lions in southern Africa. It is hard to take thousansds of years of breeding and change it into a housepet. Some dogs breeds in particular are not meant to be trusted , especially around small children.
It would be like taking a Jack Russel Terrier and having him watch your kids Hampster.
A while back, friends of ours invited us over for dinner. They locked their pair of pit bulls in the back yard behind the patio door. So we sat down to dinner right next to the patio door, and BOOM... One of the pit bulls slammed into the patio door glass snarling and scared the crap out of me. Rick says relax, he does that a lot but can't come thru the glass. A couple weeks later we visited again, and the patio door was boarded up. Rick laughed, yeah the dog crashed through the window!