Showlines and Workinglines are Genetically Different - Interesting Study - Page 3

I guess a lot of people don't need to read to vote, live, and decide about anything.  I am a biologist by training and spent 21 years in the field as a researcher.  I did need to read and I did.  If you want to be simple minded we are all different genetically.  That is why brothers that are identical twins are never really identical.  Actually I do get dogs with showline characteristics in my working line dogs (Czech, DDR, and Dutch with some present day German) when I have a litter.  I have had showline dogs that were tough determined protectors and had a Schutzhund III.  The jest of the paper was that black men are better basketball players because they are genetically different from white men.  Black men who can play NBA basketball are no more different genetically from white men that are lousy basketball players than from black men that are lousy basketball players.

Please don't ever take the working line shepherd away from the general breed recognition or we will completely loose any breed credibility we have.
Dogs with purpose or couch potatoes no contest. sorry don't mean to offend fellow show dog people. John

The Norwich and the Norfolk also share characteristics, as do German shorthairs and German wires. But they still are separate breeds, according to registries. Separate breeds are developed by not intermingling bloodlines of two distinct varieties within a breed. And none of them play basketball, nor can they juggle. :)

If you listened to Walter Martin's talk, he said that the German show lines were basically descended from only TWO GSDs. So, OF COURSE they differ genetically from the working line dogs!

Doesn't mean they're a different breed, though!  They are just two different populations of the same breed, like, for instance, the giraffes in east Africa and those in south Africa.

If one's goal is to breed and produce a VA Sieger dog, they probably would not start with a Czech PZ pair, even though the pups would share characteristics of GSL litter. They are not the same even though they eat, crap, and lap water and have genetics of a dog, they don't look the same. Some people like steak, while others like hamburger......they have the same origin, share characteristics, but they're different.

SS, using your analogy of the giraffes, then zebras are all the same, and so there are no different breeds of dogs, only dogs.

Individuals with the same chromosomes (dogs) and number of genes can have different genes switched on or off on different chromosomes.  Dogs have roughly 19,000 genes on 78 chromosome (39 pairs).  Genes can have block inheritance and genes on one chromosome can affect expression on another.  The same gene can be switched on in one tissue group and switched off in another.  There is so much as yet unknown about inheritance and gene expression it is breathtaking.  Environmental factorsof both the parent and grandparents can alter gene expression of the following generations.  As far as I could tell from reading what appears to be a graduate student's unpublished paper probably for a doctoral they picked a few dogs from a skewed population based on arbitrary selection criteria, did a bunch of genetic tests and found some differences.  Damn .. that is just Nobel prize material!!

It doesn't take a geneticist to see differences in dogs or giraffes.

But it does to see genetic differences between closely allied dog breeds and certainly it does to prove differences in an entire breed based on a handful of dogs from a small subset of the breed using some questionable methods.  Despite all the chest thumping about the origins of the GSD the founders did just what the AKC allows new breeds to do today.  A small group of people interbreed and inbreed a small group of dogs until they get something that kind of breeds true more or less.  Then they close the breed registry to new bloodlines outside their own and try to cash in.  The GSD founders did the exact same thing.  WWI and WWII and the starvation associated with these conflicts had a huge bottleneck effect on the GSD and those that survived WWII were used to reinvent the breed to satisfy the Americans desire to own Rin Tin Tin.  As far as I can tell the show lines were a marketing decision but very much in the dog world is.  Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.

I don't mean to minimize some of the polarization in our lines today but I also don't think our breed should be defined (or separated) based on the most extreme examples.  Joanro says, "If one's goal is to breed and produce a VA Sieger dog, they probably would not start with a Czech PZ pair, even though the pups would share characteristics of GSL litter."  I don't disagree but I find someone who is breeding for the VA1 Sieger dog to be a pretty exreme/polarized example of GSD ownership.  A lot of us folks who own many GSDs and train and title them in many venues are not as obsessed with extreme type.  I am planning a mixed line litter (*gasp*) and have big plans for my puppy.  I have owned working line and show line and ALL of them did conformation, Schutzhund, agility, etc, etc.  The GSD that I like does well in all of these venues.  I had no trouble getting two SG ratings on my last working line dog at 13 and 18 months, both from German judges.  My now deceased WL female earned her UKC championship a lot faster than my show line did and had legs towards her Grand before she was altered (and then participated in the Altered Best In Show when the UKC added an altered class).  My show line male works his ass off no different than how I train and what I expect from my working line dogs. Lately I see a lot of WL moving more towards the more moderate SL type.  Of course there are extremes at any end and people will always breed for those extremes but I don't think they are the majority.  You cannot ignore the differences in lines and what they bring but personally I examine the actual pedigrees and not try to lump my dogs into a category or make assumptions based on what other people are doing.  I know what I want and what *I'm* doing and haven't had much trouble finding nice dogs from both lines that can do all of it.