German rules for German Shepherds - Page 5

Susie,

so you have traveled to the United States for decades and watched but have ever been in the situation to actually title a dog in the United States?

I grew up with the German Shepherd breed in Germany. My family has successfully bred WORKING German Shepherds. Where I'm from, there are 20 + Clubs that offer IPO within ONE hour.

I live in the United States for three years now. Have phenomenal dogs and can't even put an IPO 1 on them because we don't have the resources. Our City is pretty bad when it comes to working dogs in public due to ONE incident where a bulldog mauled a little kid. So I was forbidden by the city manager herself to work my dogs off leash, do any kind or form of Area Search OR TRACKING! (so no tracking land!) since I had challenged the new law. People in this City are not fond of dogs. They are scared of them! Especially the city council because they had to settle.

Good helpers are far and few between. I had to travel THREE hours one way to get to a great helper. Just the gas money itself was over a 100 dollars, that doesn't include food, coffe, or club fees.

Club Fees: 400-600 dollars PER YEAR!!!! On top of that you may have to pay  a helper fee if the club doesn't have a helper and brings them in.
Obedience lessons with a good obedience trainer: 80 dollars per hour and a two hour ride.

Within two years I've put over 10 000 dollars into my Search and Rescue Dog and she's still not operational and certified. As a matter of fact I had to retire her due to perinal fistula.

The sport of Schutzhund is CRAZY expensive in the United States and depending where you live, your resources are VERY limited!

In our town, we do not even have an AKC club that offers year round obedience or agility classes. Our AKC club only offers classes from spring until september and those classes are a joke!
We don't have Nosework, Dock Jumping, Dog Dancing or Nosework classes where I live. Where I live it's very rural and you just do not have those resources to put an IPO I on the dog within a year.

I'm always discussing with people why that is, because I do not get it either. It shouldn't take OVER A DAMN YEAR to title a dog, period! But that is the way it is and why it is!

In Germany, you have the resources, you've got clubs on every corner. Doesn't mean they are good clubs, but the clubs are there. Especially where I'm from, where all the good people are, within an hour, it's easy to title a dog. It's easy to get in contact with farmers and to get tracking land. Out here, you can't even walk your dogs off leash, even though we live as rural as it gets. There are no "Feldwege" ... it's all private property and if they only see a "stray" dog on their land your dog most likely will be shot!
I have to drive one and a half hours to get to a place where I can LEGALLY take my dog off leash for an off leash hike!

You simply cannot compare the USA to Germany!

And for the record, you think Backyard Breeders don't exist in Germany?

They are not called Backyard Breders. We call them "Vermehrer" and they do exist just as much as the Backyard Breeders in the US.

We also have puppy mills but they are legal breeding operations. HUGE Showline kennels pumping out hundreds and hundreds of puppies per year.... they might have a great paintjob due to their status as showline kennel but they are still puppy mills.

Not everything is so golden and great in Germany. Let's not speak of all the damn corruption and why there is a need for the "Initiativgruppe" and why more and more people actually leave the SV.
 

Wow, thank you, Baeranfang's Erbe, for pointing out the very real, very legitimate differences and challenges even highly motivated people face when titling in the US as opposed to Germany. 2 excellent posts!

Oh, I've got even more. 

Let's say you have a club within an hour and you've got three or four dogs of your own that you wish to title. Most club will only allow ONE dog per Handler because they only have one helper, IF they have a helper at all. If a club has more than one helper... that is rare. I know of one club with up to 5 helpers but that one is in Canada.. Most clubs, from the research I did. Do not want to have large member numbers because of the limited resources they have. They rather stay exclusive with a small number of people and put you through hoops to actually get in. They expect you do to things that a German club would never do. 

In Germany you simply drive to the next club, show up for the training hours and sit in the beer garden. Over here, none of the clubs has a club house, let alone a beer garden. It's all either private land or state land. The training is closed from the public and you cannot just show up so you have to get in contact with them first. 

In Germany you can build relationships to other clubs and go there as a guest, not even having to pay a dime for the training or very little money for the training. I went to the same club my Dad was in. Club fee 20 Euros a year. If I wanted to do Agility I had to pay 5 bucks, BH group (yeah, we actually have groups for that) another 5 bucks per year. 

Over here, just to get into basic obedience, you pay an arm and a leg. In the US, all of dog training is a business, it's an industry and if you want to learn something with your dog you will have to pay. Heck, for the Club Fees over here, you can buy a used WT Metal Trailer in Germany. Those you get under a 1000 Euros whereas over here, for a used one, you still dish out over 3000 Dollars... 

And let's not get into how much puppies and green dogs cost over here.... 

The differences are mindblowing, however, the greed of German Breeders and the American mind (I want it and I want it now) of dishing out big bucks for the dogs formed the market as it is today. 

Now lets talk trials!

IF you are lucky, there are two trials per year in your region, that's it. And that might be within a 3-5 hour drive. 
That is why so many people train their dogs up all the way to IPO3 

If you want to trial, you need money to travel because you will have to travel all over the country and the US is "sliiightly" bigger than Germany. In Germany, if you want to, you can trial every single weekend. Here, you will have hours upon hours of traveling, sometimes even more than 10 hours or a whole entire day to travel. I know people who flew into the Canadian regionals to trial. 

Again, the resources are not there as they are in Germany. And take one word of advise. Americans do not like to be told what to do, how to do it and when to do it! They loooove their Freedom. ;)

 

don't take this the wrong way.  I think the only way to know your dogs is to work them, title them and test them.  That said, I don't know that it would help the American breeder a lot.  Most of them are buying pedigrees from overseas and breeding them anyway.  Most of them breed for what's good at the moment, they breed names instead of dogs and that is why they never build or sustain a line of dogs.  wouldn't matter if the dog was titled here or there.  To a lot, a name with a schIII is reason enough to breed, even if it has a name 3 generations back it "has a good motherline" so they breed it.  

Actually, the Americans have strong bloodlines because they buy the good dogs and there are breeders that absolutely know what they are doing and where I'd buy a a dog in a heartbeat. Not all American breeders are bad breeders and not all German breeders are good breeders. As a matter of fact, a lot of breeders involved in IPO do MORE health checks than any Germany breeder I know. 

As for breeding dogs and knowing their strenghts, no! You do not have to title the dog to know what the dog is capable off. A trained eye can tell you if the dog has it or doesn't have it from doing simple tests with the dogs. You don't need a trial to put the dog through a real courage test, you can do that on the back of your field. You don't need a trial to find out if the dog has nerves or not. 

The system is a system for accountability. It's supposed to be a test. But if we are honest with ourselves it has long become a sport and is no longer a true test. 

And If I am honest with myself, Americans are super passionate about their dogs. Just "responsible" breeders and their contracts and the hoops they put you through to actually get a puppy out of their breeding and a year long waiting list or sometimes even longer than that... I, as a buyer, would not deal with that. I wouldn't do a limited registration, first right of refusal or give them access to vet records. If I buy a dog, I bought the dog, it's mine and up to me whether or not I stay in contact. 

There are big differences. The US has a lot of issues with GSD's but that is mainly American lines. The German working line (IPO) world actually has a good handle on what they are doing and yeah, America and Canada is where all the good blood went. Heck, most of our dogs went overseas... 

Are there other registries in Gemany that will register GSD's other than the SV?

SV and RSV 2000 are the only two registries there are. :)

That being said, there is a lot of shady stuff going on too. the Broker business is huge. All those wanna be working dog kennels with "police dog training" huge kennels, 50+ more dogs that are living in poor conditons.... that's where the big swamp is. But the small/medium IPO Kennel, with one or two litters a year, competing and titling their dogs, health testing out the wazoo, can nowhere nearly be compared to that.