[blackviolet]

Besides being out of breed standard, why is it so bad for them to be over-sized, as long as they have good health and temperaments? If they have good hips and elbows, they're lean and kept in shape, and their musculature suits their size, what's so bad about it?

I mean, I can totally see why people would want one, and I don't blame them. I love the temperament of GSD's, but I also love larger dogs. If I could have a healthy extra large GSD, why not? I'm sure a larger dog wouldn't be as agile, but would it be that huge of a difference?

I'm sure that most people breeding or advertising "XL GSD's" aren't breeding for health and temperament, so I get that. And that if they aren't trying to better the breed or suit the breed standard, then they aren't all that reputable. But then again, look what the American showlines have done to dogs and still suits the breed standard. The extreme angulation seems to me to be a much worse offense than breeding them to be larger. Isn't that how mastiffs got to be so large, by intentionally breeding them to be?

When I first started thinking about getting a puppy, I emailed a breeder like that. She seemed pretty well-known for those types of dogs, not just a regular old backyard breeder... I thought.

After researching some more, and getting some good advice from you guys, I realized that that's not really what I was looking for, and the email she sent me was god-awful. Horrendous punctuation, spelling and grammatical errors aside, the info she gave was completely false and ignorant. It was terrible.