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Since the dog wasn’t a puppy rather a full grown dog and looking at the breeders page they are all from strong working lines not show lines and the older dogs they list shown recently are mostly SCH3. The price would lead me to believe it’s also a Shutzhund trained GSD. That’s a dog that’s NOT going to behave like a typical household pet and if the owner was not ready to own one and didn’t really understand what they were getting they were going to be very surprised.

I don’t buy the story the owner is telling especially in the way he responded and set the dog back. MY BS meter is really going off. I think the owners were very inexperienced owners and maybe this was the very first dog they’d owned and certainly the first dog of this nature (not a GSD but one who is a trained guard dog or a Shutzhund trained dog)

Any dog will try to become the leader of the pack (family) if the parent’s/owner doesn’t step up and become leader in the dogs eyes. They are still pack animals and packs need leaders. Some dogs are more dominant and assertive and take a stronger owner, That’s especially true of dogs trained as real protection dogs or Schutzhund trained dog. They have to be aggressive (not vicious), assertive, smart and have a lot of drive or they won’t be successful The owner has to recognize that and be the leader of the pack (as do all the humans in the family) and see that the dog gets work to do. If you aren’t capable of that your going to be a very unhappy owner and the dog is going to be unhappy and a wreck also.

Remember the guy who owned and wrote a book about a Lab named Marley (Marley and Me). All the problems with that dogs behavior were really the owners problems of a lack of pack leadership. When Marley passed away and the book was a runaway best seller his wife went out and bought a new Lab puppy. She wanted the best one that money could buy. So she went out and bought the puppy from a breeder who specialized in top hunting/working labs. This puppy gave them all kinds of problems including killing another of the families pets (a chicken, but I won’t hold that against the dog since both my Airedale and Cairn would do that in a heat beat). The problems were getting worse and more severe than the ones they had with Marley. They had to call in Ceaser Milan to straighten out the situation with the dog and them. Again the problem was them and their failure of leadership coupled with a dog with high drives that weren’t being met. Milan had to train the real problem in this mix and the problems went away.

Did you ever hit the nail on the head! That book made me so mad . . . and then they went and made the SAME mistake all over again. A high drive field Lab is not a suitable family pet, unless you have some experience with that type. My middle girl (aka Psycho Ruby) is Marley squared, on steroids. She is a completely awesome field dog - marks like a machine, handles like a Ferrari - but she is always on the ragged edge and is only now starting to perform up to her potential at 5. Marley’s owners would have dumped her by the side of the road.