Information about the Old German Shepherd Dog - Page 2

Browser, there are many breeders out there that claim to breed the old fashioned, straight-backed dog, but mostly that's a load of bull. Most of these 'old fashioned' dogs are oversized, long-coated and untitled. I f anything, I think the early GSDs were smaller than the dogs of today, and most of them were stock-coated, not long-coated.

They can't get conformation titles for these dogs, because they don't meet the breed standard, and most of the breeders don't bother to title them in performance events, either.  Some of the kennels brag about their dogs weighing as much as 150 lbs, and THAT was certainly not the case with the 'old' bloodlines. If you look at pictures of these dogs, you will see they are actually overweight. A friend of mine has a long-coated male shiloh, who stands about 30" at the shoulder, and even HE only weighs about 125 lbs!

Maybe I'm missing something here - but what exactly is the interest / point of researching the old types of German herding dogs which predated the breeding of German Shepherd Dogs ???
It is reasonably well documented that a variety of varieties of sheep-working dogs of various sizes, coat types, colours, ear-sets etc, from Thuringia and Bavaria and elsewhere were amalgamated by breeding - even before Phylax, let alone Horand and V Stephanitz's kennel.
And maybe some remnants exist among unregistered and unregulated old lines of dogs owned and bred by working shepherds and farmers even today.
But so what ?
These dogs are dead now, folks.  Any  degree of influence they have on the modern dogs is
negligible, even where occasionally you get throwbacks where the right 'old' genes combine to allow e.g. the production of Panda Shepherds - IF that is all there is to those, and no outcrossing influences to another breed ? - so what value is there in digging them up ?
BTW re that link to the "Altdeutsch" dogs that is just an advert from a breeder of long-coats:
ascribing blanket personality traits such as "all long hairs have wonderful soft temperaments" is just as much a crock as "all whites are aggressive". 

I enjoy researching (reverse really), it is fun, and interesting.  I find it odd that you perceive the beginning as irrelevent, actually. When I want to learn something, I like to go back to the beginning. Kind of like a good Michener book.

Yea, but Bee, here we are talking not The Beginning ...  but pre the beginning.
Dont see any value in it.
Whatever use would it be to the OP ?  Surely there comes a point when "interesting" just becomes a complete time-waster ?

Besides which, there won't be a paper trail;  in the main, we are talking about a situation without any written pedigree records to refer to, its all before the GSD studbook was created.  What's to research ?

Oh, I see, I misunderstood. I wasn't going that far back!

Then, of course, there are those who feel that if it doesn't have papers, it ain't worth crap!

Hmmm...seem to remember there was another thread on this board like that! 

Some breeders in the past kept their own breeding records, as there were very few breed clubs back then. Since these people would be long dead, it would be hard to find this sort of info, though.

Sunsilver
Yes but the emphasis being on "some" - actually very few, and most would have been in their own 'shorthand'/systems and quite difficult to relate to anybody elses records of the same period.   We Brits are fiends for doing this sort of research where we can, so someone would have turned up the information had it been accessible.  Even the late, great Isobel Donkin who used to be our treasured source of early pedigree info. had to draw the line somewhere.

We see exactly the same thing with the historical side of the Border Collie - even before the ISDS
(International Sheep Dog Society), let alone the more recent Kennel Club acceptance for registration, there was a limit to what early records could be got from odd individuals who bothered to record the breeding histories of their own lines of dogs, Border Collies or Working Sheepdogs.  A majority just got on with their work and producing enough suitable dogs to help them, and didn't have time to bother keeping notes.

There are people like that still today:
For every one who keeps meticulous records of which dog was put to which bitch and what
the progeny turned out like in (unregistered) variants like the Welsh Sheepdog, there will be at least three more doing the same breeding of stock, to work with and sell locally as pets or for others to work, but not bothering to write it down.

One of the best references out there is probably Max's book. I just had a look at it to see if I could find the source of an old picture of pre-SV dogs, and he put some VERY serious research into cataloguing all the different kinds of sheepdogs in Europe and even Asia and the Mediterranean. It's a gold mine of information!

There you go then, Beetree and Browser, all the stuff available on the old German 'pot' of herding dogs behind the creation of the German Shepherd is in "The German Shepherd Dog in Word and Picture" - but I'm not sure you'll find the kind of details you were interested in Bee, as von Stephanitz was mainly researching this to prove the wolf connection - or not. And this certainly won't help Browser very much if you read back to the original question posted.  And those dogs are STILL all dead.