The German Shepherd Dog

And now for something completely different - my newfound obsession with the German Shepherd Dog.

The German Shepherd Dog's history began in 1899 with the vision of a man named Max von Stephanitz. His goal for the breed was a working dog whose appearance would be secondary to his or her ability. The dog should be intelligent, reliable, firm of nerve, and above all must be able to WORK!

This work can include herding, tracking, aiding in law enforcement, and personal protection. The dogs must have the body and the temperament needed to get the job done without being skittish or overly aggressive. Many German Shepherd Dogs today can be expected to excel in obedience, agility, tracking, search and rescue, and protection - this last includes bitework that comes with an unquestionable expectation for the dog to release a bite on command. Also desirable in today's world is a reliable "off-switch," enabling the dog to make full use of his or her drive when at work, but then "turn it off" and be a conscientious companion in the home.

Over time there came to be a discrepancy between working line German Shepherds and show line German Shepherds; the latter were bred for a specific look favored in the show ring, such as a sloping topline and severe rear angulation, physical characteristics that may negatively affect a dog's ability to work. This is often the case with today's American show line German Shepherds; along with the above-mentioned characteristics, they tend to be lighter and narrower, and have a wider gait than their European counterparts. These are beautiful dogs that still share many of the features of their working line brethren, but not likely to have the same level of working ability.

American show line German Shepherd

West German show line German Shepherds have been tailored for a specific look to a certain degree, too, BUT they are also required to pass at least the first level of working trials before being registered and allowed to breed. This proof of the ability to work usually comes through obtaining a title in Schutzhund, a three-part program that tests the dog's abilities in obedience, tracking and protection work. These dogs must also pass an endurance test that requires him or her to trot for 20km. Lastly, they have to pass testing of the hips to ensure they won't pass on genes for hip dysplasia. Only then is a dog or bitch allowed to breed.

West German show line German Shepherd

American show line German Shepherds are also expected to have their hips and elbows certified before being bred, which is accomplished with x-rays of the joints after the animal has reached 2 years of age. One way to help distinguish between a "backyard breeder" from a reputable one is whether or not the sires and dams have had their joints certified by the OFA (Orthopedic Foundation for Animals.)

These show line dogs bred in the U.S. won't usually have working titles, but conformation showing titles (championship, etc) are a good thing to obtain before breeding an animal. This is a form of proof that the parents have desirable conformation and temperament to pass on to offspring, keeping to the breed standard.

Working line dogs differ from show dogs in that their ability to work has been kept the main focus of their breeding, rather than an emphasis on appearance. Breeders of these dogs work with them to obtain working titles through programs such as Schutzhund or IPO (which is very similar but uses international standards). These titles prove the dog's ability to work (by way of their stamina, endurance, nerves, and drives) before allowing them to contribute to another generation of German Shepherd Dogs.

Seeing titles in a puppy's pedigree is all well and good, but a breeder of working line German Shepherds who does not title their own sires and dams is missing a rather important piece of the picture.

A working line German Shepherd Dog

Working line German Shepherds Dogs mostly trace their lineage to DDR (East German), Czech, or West German origins. They tend to come in a wider array of colors. In addition to the black and tan and black and red common in American and West German show lines, you'll often see solid black, bicolor, and a variety of sable German Shepherds in the working lines.

Black sable coloring

Bicolor

Reputable breeders of the German Shepherd Dog should be aiming to better the breed by adhering to the standards set by the breed club. The wording differs somewhat in the standards set forth by the American Kennel Club and its European counterparts.

AKC German Shepherd Dog Breed Standard:

The first impression of a good German Shepherd Dog is that of a strong, agile, well muscled animal, alert and full of life. It is well balanced, with harmonious development of the forequarter and hindquarter. The dog is longer than tall, deep-bodied, and presents an outline of smooth curves rather than angles. It looks substantial and not spindly, giving the impression, both at rest and in motion, of muscular fitness and nimbleness without any look of clumsiness or soft living. The ideal dog is stamped with a look of quality and nobility - difficult to define, but unmistakable when present. Secondary sex characteristics are strongly marked, and every animal gives a definite impression of masculinity or femininity, according to its sex.

Temperament - the German Shepherd is fearless but not hostile. He exudes self-confidence and a certain aloofness. He will stand his ground when strangers approach and accept kind overtures, although he is not overeager to make friends with new people. A shy, anxious, or aggressive dog is to be penalized. The character must be incorruptible. (Kennel Club standard uses the terms steady of nerve, loyal, and tractable.)

Size - For males, the height measured from the ground the to highest point of the shoulder blade should be between 24 and 26 inches. For females, 22 to 24 inches. Weight for males should fall between 66 to 88 lbs, and for the female, 49 to 71 lbs. NOTE: A breeder who markets their dogs by advertising that the sire weighs in at 130lbs is NOT ADHERING to the breed standard!

Color - Strong, rich colors are preferred. Pale, washed-out colors and blues or livers are serious faults. White dogs are disqualified in AKC conformation showing. (Admirers of white German Shepherd Dogs started their own club that allows showing of these dogs).

The head is noble, cleanly chiseled, strong without coarseness, but above all not fine, and in proportion to the body. The head of the male is distinctly masculine, and that of the bitch distinctly feminine. The expression keen, intelligent and composed. Eyes of medium size, almond shaped, set a little obliquely and not protruding. The color is as dark as possible. Ears are moderately pointed, in proportion to the skull, open toward the front, and carried erect when at attention, the ideal carriage being one in which the center lines of the ears, viewed from the front, are parallel to each other and perpendicular to the ground. 

The neck is strong and muscular, clean-cut and relatively long, proportionate in size to the head and without loose folds of skin. When the dog is at attention or excited, the head is raised and the neck carried high; otherwise typical carriage of the head is forward rather than up and but little higher than the top of the shoulders, particularly in motion. Topline- The withers are higher than and sloping into the level back. The back is straight, very strongly developed without sag or roach, and relatively short. The whole structure of the body gives an impression of depth and solidity without bulkiness.

The shoulder blades are long and obliquely angled, laid on flat and not placed forward. The upper arm joins the shoulder blade at about a right angle. Both the upper arm and the shoulder blade are well muscled. The forelegs, viewed from all sides, are straight and the bone oval rather than round.

The ideal dog has a double coat of medium length. The outer coat should be as dense as possible, hair straight, harsh and lying close to the body. A slightly wavy outer coat, often of wiry texture, is permissible. The head, including the inner ear and foreface, and the legs and paws are covered with short hair, and the neck with longer and thicker hair. The rear of the forelegs and hind legs has somewhat longer hair extending to the pastern and hock, respectively.

The whole assembly of the thigh, viewed from the side, is broad, with both upper and lower thigh well muscled, forming as nearly as possible a right angle. The upper thigh bone parallels the shoulder blade while the lower thigh bone parallels the upper arm. The metatarsus (the unit between the hock joint and the foot) is short, strong and tightly articulated.


To be continued...

Bittersweet Dreams Are Made of This

My sister was my very best friend. She passed away 4 years ago and even now it seems I dream about her every night.

It may just be that I am more likely to notice and remember the nights I dream of her, but even if that's the case, I sure do dream about her an awful lot.

Sometimes this is a joyous thing. It's like having the opportunity to hang out with her again, even if we now spend our time together protecting giant (and I mean GIANT) spiders from mall cops with dubious intentions.

Every now and again my sleeping mind recognizes that she is dead and it's as if she is communicating with me in light of that fact, commiserating with me about how sad it is to be separated, or showing me glimpses of some fantastical afterlife and assuring me I'll join her there some day, but that the time for that has not yet come (a belief to which, sadly, in the waking world I do not subscribe.)

More often though, the dreams that acknowledge she has died are chilling. These I wake from unnerved, but also enormously saddened.

She spent 26 days in the ICU before succumbing to what ailed her. As her condition worsened, we faced new steps in attempting to manage the illness and treat her, and I remember when she first died the initial feeling was that this was just a new obstacle to overcome. Okay, now what are the treatment options for her death? How can we overcome this next hurdle? It took some time for the constant panicky adrenaline rush of her decline to wear off and to realize there was nothing more to be done. It was over.

Some of my dreams are fueled by this idea. She is dead, so now what's our next step to help her get better?

Many times her "death" is represented in my sleeping mind as her being in bed, back in her old bedroom in our childhood home. The room is always dark, we have to be ever so cautious and quiet around her so as not to disturb her. Sometimes her body only appears there at nighttime. Sometimes I crawl into her bed at night, anxious, knowing that after I drift off to sleep I will wake with a start in the dark of night to find her in the room with me. This can be a happy thing, but also frightening because she is not always the only thing to break through the veil between worlds at that hour.

Other times the dreamtime logic insists that she lives again only when I sleep, and so it's a happy and exciting occasion to bring her back in my dreams, although bittersweet in the knowledge that as soon as I wake, she will be gone again.

One of the scariest scenarios for me is the one where she has come back to life, in a manner, but is changed. She knows her family but feels nothing for us, she seems an entirely different person. Even then we are very protective of her in her "condition" (aka dead, returned to us on loan, a fleeting opportunity to be with her again even if she is not the same as she was in life.) Those dreams, when she no longer cares for me, are heartbreaking.

For some reason I have many, many dreams in which the house my sister lived in at the time of her death is a sprawling mansion filled with magic but also haunted by some great evil. I go there to try to encounter her again, but the horrible presence lurks there as well, and my sister's spirit fears it as much as I do.

Just today I experienced sleep paralysis. You know, when you're aware that you are half-asleep but can make no move, nor bring yourself fully awake? But my mutinous mind was convinced that my sister had returned as some malevolent spirit and was possessing me, not allowing me any control over my own body, bringing me to insanity. I worried for all my loved ones, who would not know why I would rise from bed as a completely changed, deranged person.

I don't know why I dream of her returning with a totally different personality or as some dark presence. But whether it's one of those dreams, or one where I get to briefly spend time with her as sisters or continue the never ending struggle to "cure" her from her death, to this day I still wake up crying. Four and a half years later.

I hope tonight will be one of the nights where we just hang out and do nonsensical dream things. That would be nice, spiders and all.

My sister in the year before her death. She went to the Otasaga Resort Hotel in Cooperstown, NY for a weekend-long event with the folks from the SyFy show Ghosthunters. She won the chance to have this light-painted photo (of ghosts attempting to communicate) done with two of the shows regulars, Amy and Britt of TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society)

Death by Lethal Injection

Executions by lethal injection are currently on hold as the Supreme Court reviews the current process to assess whether it is constitutional, or f it might be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Lethal injection in the United States has historically involved using a cocktail of three drugs. First a sedative is administered, followed by a paralytic, and then the potassium chloride that will stop the heart.

The idea is that the person to be executed would first be rendered unconscious (by a drug which in a large enough dose could also completely stop any breathing, causing death by itself), then paralyzed before their heart is stopped. Concerns have risen, however, that the very short-acting anesthesia might very well wear off while the person is still alive, leaving them aware of everything happening but unable to express any suffering. They cannot take a breath while paralyzed, and the potassium chloride causes a severe burning sensation when it goes into the veins.

The process may have other bumps along the way. After taking the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, doctors cannot actively participate in an execution other than to pronounce the person dead afterwards. The people actually performing the acts involved in lethal injection, and those planning it, do not necessarily have the experience necessary to understand how it all works and make sure it goes off without a hitch. Apparently the same dose of medications are always used, regardless of the weight of the person to be executed, and just last year there was a case where the IV was not correctly inserted into the vein, but entered the tissue instead. This led to a death row inmate groaning and writhing on the gurney for 43 minutes before finally dying of a heart attack.

If the Supreme Court decides this process is unconstitutional, it does not mean the death penalty itself will be outlawed. Another way would simply have to be found to go about it. As it is, there is a single drug method of lethal injection that would avoid some of the problems of the three drug option. Then of course there is the electric chair, which is still an option for the implementation of the death penalty in many states. Some states have even discussed the possibility of bringing back firing squads.

If the death penalty itself is still deemed constitutional, the Supreme Court will not disallow it, only insist there be further efforts to find the most humane method possible. In my personal opinion, this would mean by lethal injection of a single drug. A large dose of one barbiturate, such as veterinarians use to euthanize family pets, would render the person unconscious (without question - no paralytic to mask awareness) before causing respiratory arrest and suppressing cardiac activity. Alternatively, a large dose of narcotic would prevent discomfort while stopping the person's respiratory drive.

An unpleasant topic, for sure, but an important one. There are currently more than 3,000 people on death row in the U.S. Death itself is the punishment the courts have found appropriate for these people, and causing them unnecessary suffering during the process is not the aim.

Death Penalty

There are things that have me doing a lot of thinking lately. I've had the urge to put my thoughts down in some format, put them out there for discussion. So I said to myself, "Self, what about addressing them in that blog where you used to post about random subjects that fascinate you, the one you haven't done anything with in a very long time?" To which I responded, "That's not a bad idea, Self."

One of the topics that has been on my mind is the death penalty. My general feeling has always been that I was okay with the worst of the worst being sentenced to death, and I never had much reason to consider the subject any further. However, with recent events in the news, I've examined my feelings more closely. I wanted to try to unravel exactly why I feel the death penalty is appropriate in some situations and not in others. I'll attempt to articulate my thoughts here.

The crime in question would have to be an atrocious one if the death penalty is on the table in the first place. Why do I feel that the perpetrators of some heinous crimes should be put to death, while others shouldn't? The best way I can think of explaining it has to do with the person's true nature, what really resides in their heart of hearts.

For example, consider someone who wields a blade in his or her own hand and inflicts brutal and stomach-turning damage to another human being. This person shows no misgivings about his or her actions, and in fact probably revels in the savagery, either because he or she believes it to be justified, or because there is something just plain wrong in this person's brain chemistry that allows them to delight in cruelty.

In my personal opinion, I am okay with such a person receiving the death penalty. There is something fundamentally wrong with this person. They need to experience the consequences of their actions through punishment, and they need to be kept away from the rest of society to protect others from them. This could be achieved through imprisonment alone, but if the convicted person was sentenced to death, I would not find myself overly troubled by this. I would think the world might be better off without their influence on it, or in it.

On the other hand, I believe it is possible that an essentially good person can be swayed by corrupt and vile ideology. A decent person can become indoctrinated by malicious credo; this is especially likely to happen when one's religion is involved. Most of what people understand about their religion, if they have one, is taught to them by other people-humans with human failings. These others may include their own interpretations when they preach, putting a spin on the information they impart. But part of being faithful might mean not questioning the 'truths' as they are told to you. The most convincing arguments are those that threaten eternal damnation should you not wholeheartedly submit to them.

So say a more or less good person absorbs the rhetoric they hear, even though it may include the hateful and the ignorant. A person born amidst such a mindset, surrounded by it in day to to day life, living among a society in which a good chunk of people take it to heart, will likely internalize these teachings and may never be able or willing to separate themselves from it. But if the indoctrination happens later in life, the mindful, those able to reason with themselves, maintain the potential for realizing where their line of thought went wrong and to reject the ideology they once embraced.

The indoctrination often includes dehumanizing some group of people, even if it's as broad as anyone who believes differently. It teaches its disciples to think in terms of US versus THEM. THEY are now, inherently and without conscious thought, seen as less than human. This makes it easier to commit acts of atrocity against them. Someone might consider him or herself a good person who would never knowingly hurt someone-but when it comes to them, well they don't really count, do they?

Think of Nazi Germany. Was everyone involved a psychopath? Or were they just taken in by one, exposed to his poisonous rhetoric?

Our decent person who has assimilated the hateful dogma now commits a crime against other living beings. Instead of thrusting a blade into another person's chest, however, they transport a weapon to a scene and leave it there, initiating the attack itself from some distance away. The crime is just as heinous, the results as tragic. However, the human mind may have allowed this person to distance him or herself from the crime emotionally as well as physically, letting them continue on living unperturbed, feeling as though they were not as involved in the atrocity as our other criminal. The one who committed the act with their own hands at their victim's throats.

Both crimes are equally reprehensible, and both perpetrators need to face the consequences of their actions, but to my mind the person who was able to plunge the blade in with their own hand and feel nothing but justification, reveling in the barbarism, is a more fundamentally screwed up individual. Get that person out of here!

The other attacker. He needs to be punished for his crimes as well. However...

If he had internalized a philosophy that convinced him utterly that his actions were justified

and these teachings had turned his victims from human beings into something other, into simply a message or a cause

and he committed the act in such a way that allowed his mind to construct a barrier separating him emotionally from his actions and the damage he inflicted

and the fact that he had not been exposed to, or had not adopted, the depraved ideology until a time later in life after he had already demonstrated himself to otherwise be a good and decent person, allowing for the definite possibility for him to realize his error and honestly feel REMORSE for his actions...

I think it fitting for that person to receive a sentence of life in prison. I can believe that a fundamentally good person can take the wrong path and commit a heinous crime. I think that person needs to be punished. But if there is hope that he or she could shed the corrupting influence, reject it and feel true remorse, then spending a lifetime in prison allows them that opportunity. One of the objectives of prison is rehabilitation; in this case, not so that the prisoner can fit back in as a valuable and productive member of society after being released from prison, but to give them the chance to have that change of heart. If that change happens, think of the moral suffering that would engulf that person. Staying in prison and a lifetime of regret are punishment, and in this case, perhaps more appropriate than death.