Black Showline Dogs - Page 2

wazzup, any attempt to restore blacks to the conformation ring must first start with working lines.

As you know, there are quite a few examples of black w/l dogs with V rated conformation. This is of course the starting point for anyone serious enough to invest the finances that would be required to return the "black" to VA status.

My hope is that they succeed. But it will not happen overnight. A black can contribute many things to a breeding program. Breeding to one can repair "open" saddles in the first generation. The "bitch stripe" is also seldom seen in bitches from blacks.

Anyway, there is a very great divide between a black that has a few S/L in the ancestry and a true VA rated black. I don't think there has been one for many, many years. And for those serious breeders, think of the fresh working ability that could come to S/L from these efforts.

Rik

 Rik .There is no over night fix . How ever I believe their is a fix . We need to drop the color ,,Black / red   Bias from the equation . Then we will see change as to who takes the ribbons. we also need to educate the public as to all the many colors a GSD  . John Q public thinks only saddle backs are pure GSD's.  Small minds  small world .  

As I've posted before, the one quickest way to get serious working ability back into the GSD breed is to eliminate the color bias in the SV show ring. The golden age of the GSD was in the sixties and early 70s when dogs like the Lierbergs and Marko Cellerland did well in the Sieger Show. Back then, the current colour bias to Red/Black was not in existence, even though sable GSDs even then were discriminated. Completely eliminate ANY color bias in the SV show ring right now and in two generations, you will start seeeing many of the same dogs competing in both the Sieger show and BSP.

There are no black showline dogs, period! Anybody who claims different might not be completely familiar with lines. If there is a black dog with some showlines, I guarantee that there is a mix somewhere.
To produce a black dog, you need the recessive gene from both parents. Breeding with a soldi black dog will give 100% carriers of this recessive gene in the offspring. But if one parent does not possess it, all offspring will be either black and tan or sable (depending on the color of the other parent).
Haughmill, I believe you are in the U.K.? I guess your breeding system (similar as the U.S.) allows you to breed with dogs which are not in the standard (blues in your case). To each their own, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But I can assure you that nobody in Germany or the rest of the world who adheres to the SV system would ever touch dogs like that or their offspring. Therefore, continuing with your goal is for naught when it comes to the show ring (unless you meant a different ring?).
Again, even though it would be easy to just breed here in the U.S., I am a person who follows SV regulations. In my breeding program, we only use titled, breed surveyed and V-rated dogs. Admittedly, it is very time consuming and costly. But it is a hobby. With that being said, as Rik mentioned we are intrigued with sables and blacks. Not because of the color, but because of the rarity. We do not discriminate against any color, as long as the pigment is rich and the markings are plenty (black is not pigment, the tan or red is, and the markings are the amount of black in a sable or black and tan).
Mixing lines without rhyme and reason is foolish. It does not serve justice to either the showlines or the workinglines. I am an advocate of (carefully) mixing if and only if you know what both parents consistenly produce. While phenotype is a guideline, it is the genotype which is the important tool.
Bringing the black "variety" (technically, black is a non-color and a masking gene) into the SV show ring will definitely take some careful planning over several generations. We had some success with our sables (internationally too), but that is relatively easy, since you only need one top producing sable.
This brings me to my last litter out of VA-Arko vom Butjenter Land and Chuckie, our V-rated black female. Believe it or not, but this was one of the most uniform litters I have ever bred. All 6 girls looked so much alike that we still had trouble keeping them apart when they were tattooed at 8 weeks of age (well, except for the two long stockcoats, or course, but they looked like twins as well). They are healthy, robust and very lively. The girls have nice bone and pigment, all have very dark eyes - just like their parents. The three I kept  are now getting a nice red-tan on their legs. They have intense black markings, which is not necessarily visible in the pictures as it is hard to capture. Of course, all of them are capable of producing black offspring, since they received this gene from their mother.

 There is a question of definition here.  All GSDs go back to the same dogs.  So if you go back 100 years, there is only one "line."  But most people mean something else by a line -- but everyone means something slightly different.

Nothing conclusive can really be said about "blacks in showlines" unless we agree on the definition of a line.  Some people mean all showline dogs descend from a cluster of German show breeders.  Others mean dogs whose pedigrees are predominantly V and VA.  Very different resutls!

When I planned that litter, I looked at many aspects, but will only discuss the pigment and color part here, as the rest is off topic.
Chuckie, our female only had offspring with one dog in Germany before we acquired her, and that was Karn vom Fegelhof. Two of her sons are well known as BSP participants and Vice Universal Sieger. Both have nice pigment and more importantly, dark eyes and dark toes/nails and gums (that is what  I look for). My all black litter with Paska also brought deep black dogs with no white anywhere and coal black eyes. Her next litter with V-Alex vom Eisenhaus also had dark eyes and nails, just a little bit of white hair on the chest in a couple of dogs, but Alex had that as well as a black and tan. When we decided to take this risk and go for a "mixed breeding", we wanted to make sure that the breeding partner was capable of producing a lot of markings and mask, as we could not judge how much of that Chuckie was capable of producing (remember that black is a masking gene and therefore, every black dog can or canot produce washed out dogs). Arko fit that criteria (besides others), and I really loved his progeny group at the past two Sieger Shows. We are so thrilled with the outcome that we are trying to decide what we are going to do with Chuckie's last litter. She is going to be 7 years old this coming December and our plans are to take her to Germany one more time and then retire her and get her spayed. So, we are going back and forth about either breeding her to a nice V-rated Paska-son to continue our success with our O-litter or to be very outrageous with another top producing showline.  I have one in mind which a SV conformation judge had suggested to me for Chuckie two years ago. Back then, he was teasing me but I am kind of contemplating it. We have to see!
Here are a couple of photos of two of my girls (Taiga and Tanja) from last weekend at 18 weeks of age. The third one, Trixi stayed home as she does not get along with her two sisters and is kept separate at all times.

 

Some nice looking pups!

silbersee nice looking pups .             I guess this is one topic that not everyone will agree on . Where did the showlines come from ? working lines ? So then I am to think showlines are a fancy color working line ?