East, West German Dog Breeders Divided | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited
One thing nobody denies is that in the more than four decades of Germany’s division, the dogs did develop different looks: Eastern shepherds are mostly dark gray or black, while the Western dogs have the better-known yellow-and-black appearance.
Schultze, 46, has been breeding shepherds on the eastern outskirts of Berlin for more than 20 years and is convinced that the East German bloodlines are better than those of the West.“Our dogs are healthier and have a better personality,” she said. “Those overbred shepherds in the West are merely about good looks.”
Heiko Grube, a west German shepherd aficionado and the spokesman of the national German Shepherd’s Club, strongly disagrees.“It is absolutely not true that the bloodlines of the East are better,” he said. “After all it was the East Germans who weren’t allowed to leave their country while in the West we had an open market for the fresh blood that’s needed for successful breeding.’
East German breeders get particularly upset when confronted with the widespread assumption that most of their dogs were used at the border to keep citizens from fleeing to the West. “The army and the police only got the scum – the best ones went to dog lovers,” said Werner Dalm, the former government official for shepherd dog breeding in communist East Germany. However, he acknowledged that the East German army asked particularly for those “that could really bite well.”