people with knowledge of Gento - Page 3

thanks for comments, breeders change to meet demand of customers. i suspect the biggest demand is pet and sport which presumably would impact on selection for breeding and the entire breed. have been told to leave those old dogs in the past and get with the new stuff but still...

I met a couple of Gento sons--very hard, dominant dogs--some concerns of handler aggression. I did not notice overly fine bone, but rather solidly built dogs with medium bone, I seem to remember concerns about missing teeth and testicles in his progeny. When you look at his progeny, you see dogs like the KNPV dog, Racker, and Nessel vh Antverpa. I bred to a Nessel son and really liked what that brought to the puppies. Orry vh Antverpa has been a more popular line back to Robby V Glockeneck--but it's valuable to keep both lines alive as they both have good things (and bad) to contribute to the breed.

Christine

i have heard about the occcurrence of missing teeth/testicles, would be interested to know the frequency of that in general gsd breed and see if can be written off as just something that happens.

vk4gsd, the incidence of these faults is sufficiently low enough in the breed to warrant the repeated occurence of such in multiple litters from one particular stud [or bitch] becomes noted.  Doesn't mean a stud or bitch shouldn't be used--just that it needs to be used intelligently. 

JOANRO:  thanks a lot.


vk4gsd:  Free advice is seldom taken !   you're right -- you're not a breeder -- and  with your attitude you're not likely to be anytime soon.
 

pineridge - eh? i don't get yr comment. not being a breeder excludes me from trying to get the dog i want or learning more about the breed? i should just trust what the "real" breeders tell me, cos they have all done such a stellar job?

hexe this is a general statement or you have actual data on the stud in question?

There was an addendum to my post above which did not go thru --

to begin with:
I was sufficiently inflamed by this statement: 

  breeders change to meet demand of customers.

how in the world did you come to this conclusion?  I am totally baffled.  I had my first litter in 1982 and put out over 100 puppies before I stopped some 15 years later--  I did not have any "customers" - I had loving, caring families who wanted a companion - and I had public service (police) and private business people who needed service dogs -- If people didn't  like what I had they were told to move along-- I had plenty of others who were willing to wait two years for a puppy 

that being said -- there is  a huge and valuable resource of "breeders"and others here who know  soo much -- and so you ask questions and they freely and willingly give of their time - and do a brain dump to help you understand the breed - and "get the dog you want" -- yet you seem so skeptical as to challenge nearly everything put in front of you.  the good folks offeing information here have  nothing to gain-- okay - maybe

a handfull might want to sell you a puppy some day - but that's not necessarily why they want to contribute to threads here.  They love the breed -- plain and simple.

More often than not - you seem like a "dog with a bone: -- youre not about to let go of your view of things -  no matter how many people tell you it may not be so -- so it is your closed-mindedness that will prevent you from "getting the right dog" -- not any lack of information provided to you.    

and yes - many breeders, here and abroad, have done  setllar job in preserving the integrity of the breed.  and yes - you need to figure out who they are and trust their collective years of experience and maybe not be so fixated on a dog of nearly 20 years ago.


And while I'm at it - I'm proud of my 3 State Police Dogs, 1 Border Patrol Dog, and 1 Scent Detection Dog (who found a lost child in the woods) and my donated puppy to a guide school..  Proud german shepherds doing the work they were bred to do.  to say nothing of the nearly 100 others who made a lot of kids happy - and maybe hooked them on the breed for life -- They lived good healthy long lives themselves and I never replaced a puppy for bad hips or elbows and I never changed my phiosophy or ethics for the sake of "customer demand".

//end rant//

vk4gsd, if you're asking if I can tell you the number, or even the percentage, of Gento progeny that had retained testicles and/or missing teeth, no, I can't tell you that--and best of luck to you in finding that data.

As for the incidence of retained testicles in GSDs in general, it's no more than what's considered average among dog breeds, which varies somewhat. I refer you to the following citations:

"Decision analysis tree for deciding whether to remove an undescended testis from a young dog",  M. A. J. Peters, F. J. van Sluijs, The Veterinary Record, March 30, 2002

Excerpt:

The reported prevalence of cryptorchidism in dogs ranges from 0·8 per cent (Priester and others 1970) to 9·7 per cent (Reif and Brodey 1969) depending on the population studied, and the condition is an important risk factor for the development of testicular tumours.

Some breeds have an inherent higher incidence of the fault than others, such as Toy Fox Terriers, but GSDs are not counted among that group. 

I can't give you a similar citation for missing teeth, and frankly, if you want to know that, do some research on your own. I'm sure you can find that averages for the breed overall somewhere.

Suffice it to say that if within the progeny of a stud dog, more than 10% of those offspring have retained testicles or missing teeth, regardless of the lines in the females who gave birth to those puppies, it strongly suggests that that stud dog is carrying the genetics for the faults, and therefore he would NOT be the best choice of a mate for a bitch who had a sibling that had a retained testicle [either in the same litter or a repeat breeding sibling].  It's a matter of being intelligent as to how a dog is used, and being observant as to what a dog is producing in its offspring, and of remembering this information so you can apply it several generations later, because the genetics for the trait can still be a factor.


You mentioned the following earlier in this thread:

..."the cop may not have a clue about the dogs ped, i hear a lot don't. could be the dam best dog on the planet, only person that really knows would be the handler who is not a trial competitor or a breeder and just knows the dog is doing his job."

Sorry if this disillusions you, but the majority of police K9 handlers haven't a CLUE about their dogs, aside from whether the dog performs as needed when needed.  There certainly are exceptions to this--Slamdunc, alboe2009 on this forum immediately come to mind, and I know there are others as well--K9 handlers who actually are DOG people as well as law enforcement personnel, but most K9 handlers 'operate' their dogs the same way they 'operate' their patrol vehicle... They know how to use it, they know how to recognize something's not working right, but they're hardly likely to know the history behind the design, how it was 'made', how to fix it by themselves and how to 'make' a new one.  

One thing you can be damn sure of--the vendors who obtain the green dogs as K9 prospects aren't generally buying dogs with unknown backgrounds...they not only want to see the prospect in action, they want to know there's the substance behind that prospect genetically, so they have at least SOME working knowledge of which stud dogs to look for to help tip the odds that the prospects will make the grade, and maybe more importantly, which studs don't seem to be able to produce many pups that turn out to be well-suited for actual law enforcement work as opposed to sport 'work'.

In the end, it doesn't much matter what anyone tells you about Gento Haus Larwin...either you like the dog you have, or you don't, so I don't really understand why you seem to want to argue as to whether Gento threw missing teeth or retained testicles or not, or whether he gave fine bone versus heavy bone, or was nervy versus suspicious.  If your dog has both testicles down, and all his teeth, great for you; if he doesn't, you can't change it anyway. And if you're thinking about using him for stud, and just trying to find a way to justify it without having titled him, breed surveyed him, etc., well, he's your dog, and you can do as you please.  Doesn't mean you won't get any shade from people who think there should be more of a criteria than fertility, but I doubt you'd care about that anyway.

It is common knowledge among breeders of his time that with Gento you had to be careful of teeth, testicles, too much hardness for the dam often resulting in reactive sharp progeny that could be viewed as nervy. All depended on who he was bred to....great dog, but like all great dogs he produced great progeny when bred to the right dam.