http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/german_shepherd_dog/dog.html?id=612256-can-ch-tattoo-vom-team-zellwaldrand

HAVE 4 MALE 3 WEEK OLD PUPPIES BY THIS SIRE.

What do you's think and know about this dog?

  John {gouda}

I don't know anything about the sire from a historical or bloodline viewpoint .. I have a female with some of his breeding on her maternal side.  I like him .. I am a black dog breeder but the sire you linked to seems to me better than many of his peers.  However momma is doing the heavy lifting in producing the pups (60% is my rule of thumb) so if momma is a looker and a do'er then the pups should be too!!  When I look at a pedigree I look at the maternal side first .. if momma is a disappointment dad will not be able to make up for her shortcomings no matter who he is.

Why do you say the dam contributes 60% to the puppies? Because she whelps and raises them? A sire lacking in merit will be just as detrimental to the puppies as would a lackluster dam. Each contribute 50% of their genes, don't they?

Blitzen, I wouldn't agree with anyone trying to put an actual percentage on it, but the female does contribute more due to the potential for epigenetic changes in the womb and also after birth, situations in which the sire no longer has any influence. These changes CAN be passed on through multiple generations....so I think there is definitely something to the idea that the bitch contributes more.

Where can I read the proof of that? I have never been able to find that is more than a theory .

As far as I can tell the 50/50 contribution sire/dam is a theory as well with no proof .. it has been assumed but not proven for many centuries.  Puppies learn from their mother and their litter mates .. they would learn from adult and adolescent males if they had exposure.  My dogs get exposure to their litter mates and mother into the 6-8 months of age range if not sold.  Yesterday a group of three month olds had a class on climbing steps and playing on a wooden deck they had never seen before led by a 5 month old puppy and a 10 month old adolescent female .. they had a blast and I watched and kept order.  I have a 5 year old male who is one of my studs and a tough police dog type but he holds classes and baby sits my puppies (not his own necessarily) all the time.  My toughest males will tolerate and school young males as old as 8-10 months without aggression unless they initiate the fight and even then they will just slaps them around until they have had enough.  It takes a pack to raise a puppy I guess.

This is just a basic Pubmed search, I didn't work out a real search string for you so modify as you like: Pubmed. There are some really great articles in Nature but I don't know if you have access to those.

There's actually quite a lot out there. In my understanding, both parents can contribute to transgenerational epigenetic changes, but the sire of a litter is (generally...) not going to be able to have much of an effect past the epigenetic changes he might contribute at conception, whereas the bitch continues to have an influence. This is obviously different from humans. The nature vs. nurture debate is really a false dichotomy, you can't easily separate them in most cases.

maybe read some Mendel, geneticly each half of the pups genes comes from one parent

 problem is when you have a soso female you need a 150% top male to make up for the shortcomings of the female so in that perspective better look at the female/mother of your pups first , the match with the male second, and the fame of the male is mostly good to market the pups

Mendel's Law of Segregation is more than a theory .

Of course puppies learn by imitation and environment plays a big role. However , IMO their genome is half the sire, half the dam, a random pairing,  and no 2 littermates will have an identical genome unless they are identifical twins.  I've never seen any proof otherwise. The are several discussion boards dedicated to this very subject and they are no closer to agreeing than we are. Since this breed is in no emminent danger of extinction and hundreds of GSD's are euthanisized every year because they are unwanted, it's best for a real breeder to err on the side of caution and pick the best sire to breed to the best dam. I think we can all agree on that, not?  It''s kind of a no brainer.

What is a 150% top male?