Samba, your last paragraph has a lot of truth in it. I have said a hundred times on this forum, when I started out Show dogs were working dogs were pet dogs in homes!! To me that is what the breed is all about...why would I want to encourage this separation mentality of show lines vs working lines. They are here at present but that does not mean my training regiment or my conformation dog has to conform to these new separations.
The biggest problems with the breed today is nerve strength...as Anne stated most people don't know nerve strength to evaluate it. Conformation dogs and sport dogs don't need nerve strength to be successful anymore. Nerve strength allows the same dog to be able to be a pet, military dog, herding dog, or seeing-eye dog depending on who's hands he went to. Now we have one camp with more drive than nerve, another camp with more pretty than nerve, etc.
I also think that Dainerra wrote a very good post that has a lot of truth in it.
As for oversized German Shepherds, when I was in the military we had 250 dogs at the kennel and some of them were definitely oversized. They were military working dogs and were acceptable to me. Lrt me state MY position on oversized GS. I would breed to an oversized German Shepherd if he possessed the genetics and physical characteristics that I need for my female. I would not breed FOR oversized German Shepherds specifically, not because they are oversized, but because to continually do it would narrow the genepool from a phenotype position and eventually a genotype position. (Pheno being physical expression of dog, and geno being bloodlines of dog) And everyone knows how I feel about narrowing the genepool. JMO
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