If the Capt. was alive today - Page 14

Gustav, I would not group you into the my-dog-is-better-than-your-dog catagory.

It's my understanding that the Capt developed Sch as an alternative to tending as Germany was beginning to evolve into an industrialized country and much of the open land was being lost to "progess". I don't know the rules of the original Sch trials, were they similar to what we do today? Realistically most of us will never have the opportunity to test our dogs in a true tending atmosphere.

Aren't most of the GSD's trained in the US for PD'd WL's from Europe? Isn't it possibly the fault of trainers doing an inadequate job as much as the dogs themselves?

When I attended a tracking seminar run by an RCMP canine officer, he told me all their dogs were obtained from Czecholslovakia. I think he said they paid $5,000 per dog, but if the dog didn't work out, they were entitled to a replacement.

About  About 5 About And no, I don't think it's the trainer's fault:

Friday evening, after the courage test at the “Hauptzuchtschau” in Ulm was over I got an alarmed phone call from a sport friend who was there and told me that many of the SchH 2 and even more of the SchH 3 dogs did not pass protection. Sunday evening I calculated  that 63 males and 49 females failed. Furthermore, we are talking about exclusively KKL 1 dogs here who had received the rating of “TSB pronounced”  in their ZtP/Körung. I doubt that the number of failures had ever been that high. My information showed that protection may have been judged marginally harder but not significantly harder than in years past. I was even told that had the helper work been consistent for all the dogs there would have been even more failures.
 
There were glaring differences between dogs from performance lines and those from show lines. OK, that may not be such a big deal, but it clearly accentuates how big the differences are.
Only a few years ago I myself was a witness to the way protection was handled at the “Hauptzuchtschau”. 

I came to the conclusion that some assessments were at the very bottom of the rating “pronounced”, some even below.  Dogs who came off the sleeve during the attack on handler still got a rating high enough to remain in the competition.
 
Link: http://tiekerhook.com/index.php/news/103-after-us-the-great-flood.html 
 

Gustav: But to ask people to overlook and not criticize dogs bred that do not have utility in them is wrong in so many ways and very selfish in terms of putting personal likes over breed welfare.

The above is exactly what I see some folks doing.  They grow defensive about people pointing out how the utility got bred out of the showlines, by making them structurally and temperamentally unsuitable for utility/work, which was the original (and purportedly even current) intent of the breed.

If/when people fail to speak up, it will result in accelerating the decline of the breed.  I love the breed passionately and it pains me to see these poor representations of the breed, the showlines, becoming "champions" and getting to pass their genes into future generations, than be taken out of the gene-pool entirely.   They should be shutting down the showlines entirely, and replacing them with good quality working line stock, since the current showlines are just not recognizable from the showline/working-line GSDs of just a few decades back.

The SV is not an unthinking animal. They are doing what they are doing currently, since there is demand for the "product" they are peddling.  If enough people start speaking up against the trend they are on, and the demand for what they are peddling starts drying up, they will change tack....especially when things start hitting their pocketbook.  On the contrary, if people continue to praise the ruinous track they are on, by continuing to buy and promote the weak showlines, then there will be no dis-incentive for the SV to deviate from the current path and the breed will just decline into obscurity.

Obviously the breedfounder thougth police and militarywork was work that should fit the GSD, why else did they create SCH over 100 years ago as a test for the breed. Former times herdingdogs are probably most comparable to the multitask policedog with it´s demand on a healthy structure, willignes to ptotect and work with it´s handler, solving long tracks and so on. Herding I guess was on the decline even when the captain was alive, and today it´s almost non existent I suppose, but the need for the dogs nose and sometimes as protector is still wanted. So what the captain wanted is clear, a workingdog the standard describes with the structure more or less identical to the GSD during his time.

When it comes to utility we shouldn´t breed for only one thing, in a litter there always will be dogs used and more suited for different jobs, one may be a sportdog, another a PSD, and some maybe just an active companiondog. Breeding for guidedogs would probably not produce much PSDs, for such jobs you must find a suitable individual and not have as a breedinggoal. Today the biggest market for the working GSD is the police/military/security-industry, the civlian demand is sports that try to mimick these jobs, like tracking/search or some kind of protectionsports. So I guess this is what the GSD should be breed for in most cases. To reduce the work for the GSD as merly a pet and extreme conformation is not  what the breedstandard tells us, and not what the founder wanted. If some wants that type of dog I have no problem with that, but there is no room for that in the standard or the captains vision, or is it? But to satisfy those who like that type the breedclub could be a place for both types but with seperate directions.

Breeding for guidedogs would probably not produce much PSDs, for such jobs you must find a suitable individual and not have as a breeding goal. 



I have to dispute this one. Guide dog organizations are more and more breeding their own animals. Some quote as high as 90% success rates in producing puppies suitable for training. The actual graduation rate isn't as high as this, of course. Some dogs do wash out along the way for one reason or another.


The majority of these dogs are goldens and labs. I think the change reflects the increase in specialization of the GSD. If you breed mainly with schutzhund as your goal, that's what you're going to get, dogs that are mostly suited for sport, with possilbly a few pups that can do PP or K9 duties. The days of the GSD as the dog that was second-best at everything are pretty much gone.

  Th    wor wik

There are such vague similarities between the two lines that they should be two separate breeds. The same thing happened with the Smooth Fox Terrier and the Wire Fox Terrier in1984, they became separate breeds. Although, the Smooth and Wire are still more similar than the GSD W/L and S/L so it is not far fetched to make such a suggestion. It seems wrong to have a breed with such tremendous differences in the LINES that they don't even resemble each other except they both have prick ears. Declaring them two separate breeds would stop all this bickering and arguing about whose dog better represents the GSD. We could have one true GSD and whatever y'all want to call your show lines. A suggestion : the "German Hock Walker", or "The German Speed Trotter".

and whatever y'all want to call your show lines.

how about German Froger? If you ask a kid what a GSD looks like with the over-angulation they have today, they'll say "frog"

Maybe it's just my opinion, but I think others would agree, that there's more similarity between the working line german shepherds and the belgian malinois, than there is between the working line german shepherds and the showline german shepherds.  That, to me, justifies an official breed seperation, regardless of which version is truer to the founder's vision.

Do you really think if the captain was alive he would agree to seperating the breed into two independent breeds ? Is that the solution to better the breed and put it back on track?

Sunsilver, yes there are organizations and private kennels that have guidedogs as a specific goal, probably because the labrador is suited for this. Clearly there are some differences between an ideal guidedog and let´s say a PSD. GSDs and labradors was breed for a long time in sweden by the state, labs for narcotics an of blinddogs, GSDs for police or military. Labs can´t do many jobs the GSD does, because it lacks defencedrive for example. So labs are probably more suited as blinddogs, even if individual GSDs are also used for this. Better to use breeds that are more suited for a specific task if someone wants only guidedogs I suppose.

Breeding only for sport is not ideal, but protectionsports and the work of a PP,PSD or military is obviously not so unrelated, some dogs even do both.