How to Find a Good German Shepherd

With the proven record of the German Shepherd Dog in the Seeing Eye, herding, police work, and as family guard and companion, most of us realize that a good shepherd is the best dog we could ever imagine. But how do you go about finding a good one among the sea of poorly bred ones that are so common?

Something I have learned about selecting a dog: you must have documentation. Many people will tell you how wonderful their dogs are and then introduce you to puppies too cute to resist. But that is not enough, even assuming they are sincere, there is something called kennel blindness where people tend to see their own dogs through rose colored glasses. Documentation of health by OFA hip and elbow certification and documentation of temperament by real life work and working titles increase

your odds of getting the type of dog you desire. Such documentation verifies the inherited traits of your pup. To assure that his temperament will match that of his parents, you must be certain that the breeder will assure the best environment for his early development, which includes puppy enrichment. Having been assured of health, temperament, and puppy enrichment, the rest is up to you in how you raise your pup to become the stable, healthy partner you desire.

DOCUMENTATION OF HEALTH: OFA (Orthopedic Foundation for Animals http://www.offa.org/ ) is a certification wherein hip x-rays are taken of the dog at age two, at which time growth is more or less complete. The x-rays are sent out to a panel of veterinarians and rated on a scale: excellent, good, and fair, all being breeding ratings. I've known some breeders who get upset as the verdicts at times appear arbitrary and there are stories where a dog with a " fair" rating received an "excellent" when the same x-rays were sent in another time. HOWEVER, I have never heard anyone complain that a dog with hip dysplasia received an OFA certification or a dog with good hips did not. In other words, though the difference between OFA good and OFA excellent and fair may be marginal, the difference between getting the certification or not is clear. A dog without an OFA certification or equivalent should not be bred.

It is important to realize that there are some breeders who do not OFA. Being frustrated with what they deem to be an arbitrary system, they have

developed their own standard by which they feel comfortable. If you trust that person's evaluation or that of their vet, so long as you realize that their dogs are being rated according to a different standard than those with OFA certifications, you may accept their evaluation at your discretion.

The Europeans have a system similar to our OFA certification which is called the “A” stamp. Unlike the OFA which is done at age two, with the A Stamp, hips are checked when the dog is one year old. When looking at pedigrees, be aware that the European dogs must receive an "A" stamp prior to being bred. You can safely assume that any dog bred in Germany, E. Germany, or Czechoslovakia listed on a German Shepherd's pedigree has the “A” stamp certification.

DOCUMENTATION OF TEMPERAMENT: You also need to look for documentation on temperament. Working titles (the titles after the name) on a pedigree verify good temperament as does verifiable work in Search and Rescue, the Seeing Eye, or other fields.

It is worth being aware that dogs with the temperament to do police work or achieve their Schutzhund I, II, or III must have a quality called “fight drive”. Though the SV has the BH temperament test as a prerequisite to weed out faulty temperament, many (not all) of the schutzhund working dogs have a bit more aggression than most of us are comfortable with. In order to do the attack work in which the dog must leave the handler and travel across a field to hold a confident aggressor who is attacking, the dog must have "fight drive". This is different than protection instinct. For normal protection of handler and home, a dog does not need fight drive--that extra drive is

needed only to attack away from the pack support of handler and home. In the ideal world, the schutzhund test is designed to pick out police dog qualities, which are balanced with proper nerve and therefore not unnecessarily aggressive. When you see high ratings such as the SCH III, realize that these would be difficult for an unbalanced dog to achieve. But check with the breeder as some schutzhund dogs are far from huggable.

For documentation of temperament it is important to know what the abbreviations on the pedigree mean.