Old German Shepherd Dog

Old German shepherd dogs, or old German herding dogs, are a group of traditional working dogs from Germany. They are not one formal breed but a set of landraces, regional working strains bred for what they can do and not for how they look. Some of them are the types from which the modern German Shepherd was developed.

History

These dogs probably go back to the early Middle Ages. As herding developed, shepherds in each community chose and bred dogs that could move sheep, pigs and cattle and guard them from predators. The results worked well but differed greatly from one district to the next, in looks and in ability.

Before the 1890s, any dog that herded and guarded sheep in Germany was called a German shepherd dog. In 1899 Max von Stephanitz, a former cavalry captain, bought a dog at a show, renamed him Horand von Grafrath and founded the Society for German Shepherd Dogs; Horand was declared the first German Shepherd Dog. Many herdsmen went on breeding for work and ignored the new standard, and their dogs came to be called Altdeutsche Schäferhunde, old German shepherd dogs.

Later the owners of these threatened landraces took up the wider name Altdeutsche Hütehunde, old German herding dogs. That term also covers old cattle-herding types that are not ancestors of the German Shepherd. In 2008 the German society for old and endangered livestock breeds listed the varieties as extremely vulnerable to extinction.

Appearance

Today’s dogs differ little from the landraces of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Where standards exist, they require that a dog can herd sheep or cattle and seldom say what it should look like, though crossing with other breeds is not allowed.

The named landraces are grouped first by the stock they work, then by region and coat. The cow dogs include the Westerwälder and the Siegerländer. The sheepdogs come in south German and in east and central German types, among them the Gelbbacke (“yellow-cheek”, black and tan), the Schwarzer (black), the Fuchs (fox-red, including the Harzer Fuchs of the Harz mountains) and the merle-coated Tiger, which is most common in the south. There are also shaggy, rough-coated dogs like an Old English Sheepdog or a Briard: the Strobel in the south and the Schafpudel, or “sheep poodle”, in the north and center.

More landraces existed in the 19th century. Some were absorbed into the German Shepherd, and others died out, among them the Pomeranian sheepdog and the mostly white, medium-sized herding spitz, both of which disappeared in the second half of the 20th century.

Facts on this page were checked against Wikipedia and may have changed since.