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Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the October 1983 Review; reprint permission granted January 2009.

 

Not all breedings were a success

The other three bitches from Langenau’s starting point in 1967/68 do not figure in their present breeding animals. Cain was bred to the import, King v. Starrenburg, and to Lance; neither litter was a success. Nora of Arbywood was bred to Visco of Frohlich (inbred Elsa son), and to Judd, again nothing noteworthy. Very Special of Frohlich was bred to Lance, to Mike, to Shiloh, and to Paladen. Her Lance litter produced Langenau’s Holly, who won her Maturity class. Holly bred to Wyatt produced a champion daughter, Circle High’s Faith of Langenau. Also, the Paladen breeding produced Extra Special, who did some winning, but never finished.

 

The first breeding of a bitch does not always tell the story. For example, before Etude was bred to Mannix (resulting in Tango), she was bred to Lance, but there was nothing approaching Tango. In addition, Etude was bred to Joey of Fran-Jo and to Valtara’s Uri of Vanderworth.

 

Quessa was also bred to Joey of Fran-Jo, producing Ch. Langenau’s Meghan of Mardean. Meghan was bred to GV Ch. Caesar v. Carahaus, producing Dylan, grandsire of Promise (whose other grandfather is Watson). Quessa was herself bred to Caesar, to her son, Watson, and to Hawkeye, but no champions have resulted from any of those breedings so far.

 

A reasonable prediction is that Minx (Reno-Tango) will be the next Langenau Register of Merit since she is already the dam of Ch. L’Erin, by Hammer, and of Ch. Langenau’s Libra of Jeanden, by Ch. Jahn-D’s Excalibur, a Watson son out of Circle High’s Emminence, from Judd and Ricella’s Fancy Quinlan.

 

Most of Dave and Martha’s other breedings, some successful and some not, come from less well-known dogs of their own breeding, or from leasing bitches appropriate for Watson, including some from previous successful breedings, like the dam of Select Ch. Centennial’s Dirty Sally.

 

Dave and Martha themselves summarize their 16 years of breeding in two sentences: “We have been involved for the most part in a line of dogs that combines the ‘F’ litter Arbywood, mainly through Lance, with the Bernd background dogs. This has been a successful combination in that the two types are complementary and there are many dogs available possessing virtues of each extreme that fall within the framework of our breeding program.” GV Ch. Yoncalla’s Mike ROM was a Bernd grandson whom the Rinkes tried to incorporate without success by going directly to him, although they did breed Quessa ROM (and this Watson) by going to Mike’s son, GV Ch. Hollamor’s Judd. Dave feels that “Mike is the dog nearest the standard I’ve ever seen, a super representative, unfortunately not a prepotent sire, for us.” In contrast, Dave feels that Lance was the most prepotent dog of our time, who stamped his own type on his progeny, from the great majority of bitches bred to him.

 

Ideas on Breeding the German Shepherd

Dave and Martha are very articulate and very willing to share their ideas on the breeding the of the German Shepherd. They believe that the breeder must have a strong desire to be successful, must know why he is in Shepherds, and must know what he wants to accomplish, what kind of a Shepherd he wants to produce. Dave points out the statistics involved – that if one considers the futurity nominated litters as being those bred by breeders who are seriously interested in producing quality Shepherds, these litters produce about 6-7 thousand puppies per year, with about 120 champions finishing each year. The odds of breeding a champion don’t sound too good, but Dave believes that these odds can be cut by educating yourself, developing a plan, and taking action. The German Shepherd standard is one of the best and clearest of any breed, and any prospective breeder should know it thoroughly. Be determined about your goal; read, go to dog shows, speeches and seminars. When you’re ready to begin, start with the finest bitch you can find. Anything less is a waste of time. Breeding requires a continuous process of selection, and you must learn to be objective. Expect failures, but with fewer and fewer of them between occasional successes.

 

 

 

Make your own decisions. Most ringside advice is free, but much of it is also worthless, including a lot of the advice on breeding from handlers. How many handlers are also breeders of note? Ask yourself: where is the best dog in the country for my bitch, and forget about the personality of the owner. At dog shows, look at the dogs. Try to determine which will be the stars of the future.

 

Don’t Wait for Everyone Else

Be a student of other people’s breeding programs. But, if you see a young dog you like, don’t sit and wait until everybody else has bred to him to see what he produces. “Martha and I breed to what we like. We’re not interested in being a duplicator.”

 

Some breeders use a “shotgun approach.” They bed their bitches to whatever “hot” stud dog (the one everybody else is using) appears, without any preconceived long-range plan, hoping one of the matings will be a successful “click.”

In-breeding can be successful if done in volume with extensive selection. But who today can keep enough dogs to be able to do this? Dave doubts if anyone currently has dogs good enough to withstand continuous in-breeding. However, incestuous breeding can be valuable for the breeder’s own education.

 

Dave and Martha believe that the most successful results come from breeding specimen to specimen, animals sharing good points and not sharing the same faults. Paper breeding, breeding pedigree to pedigree, is always very tempting, but too often the partners don’t look like the great dogs in the pedigree that one is trying to reproduce. Dogs tend to throw what they are more than what one might hope to get from their family.

 

Is Luck a Factor?

For those who think luck is a factor, Dave defines luck as “preparation meeting opportunity. The harder you work, the more luck you have.” He warns against fads. Be aware of and avoid them. When asked how you can tell what is a fad and what is a permanent change or evolution in the breed, he answered: “Breed to the standard with the best of the dogs available at the time. If the breed is evolving, your dogs will change accordingly.”

 

When picking puppies, Dave and Martha advise: Look and look and look, both at your own litters and at others in your area, every chance you get. Judge your puppies (and adults) by looking at the whole animal. Be a total concept judge rather than a fault judge. But temperament and movement are the main qualities that can be evaluated in young puppies.

 

Breed Problems

Every breeder must constantly be aware of the problems in the breed. The “visible problems” (the problems most often seen in the ring) are: lack of suspension in movement, need for better shoulders, and need for stronger secondary sex characteristics. The most serious “invisible problems” (those that prevent dogs from even getting to the show ring) are monorchidism, panosteoitis, dysplasia, and poor temperament.

 

Lack of longevity and fertility are becoming serious breed problems. Dave feels that dogs are finishing too young. It might be better of German Shepherds couldn’t be awarded points until they are at least two years old. Here the German system is better with the young dog classes and the open class for mature dogs, without the different ages competing against each other.

 

Within their own breeding program, Dave and Martha feel that they have been learning more and more about the German Shepherd; each breeding provides a learning experience and in each successive generation, one knows more about the dogs with which he is dealing. When they select breeding partners, they look for compensating faults, of course, but always consider “movement to movement” to be the final weight in any decision. The more knowledge one has of the pair’s ancestry, actually knowing the entire family from which an individual has been derived, is the most valuable asset a breeder can have, one which comes with time and objective observation. The second advantage to a breeder is the opportunity to watch a puppy from the moment of birth, to evaluate critically almost every move the puppy makes in relation to a set of criteria in one’s own mind.

 

Evaluating Puppies

They comment on puppy evaluation: “By the time a litter is eight-ten weeks old, most major decisions about a puppy’s potential can be made, a long as we are working with the dogs from the family with which we are familiar. From that point on, a puppy can go through awkward stages, but as long as the reassurance of movement is still present, we try to look the other way until perhaps after a year of age when the pup is beginning to pull himself together. The hardest part of the evaluation is personal involvement; it steals objectivity and leaves one with mediocre animals.”

 

Dave and Martha also emphasize that once you’ve succeeded in breeding a quality animal, then you must make the most of it by proper care, conditioning, and training.

 

Langenau puppies are whelped on the Rinke’s enclosed front porch, “handy to the TV set” while waiting for the action to start! They make sure someone is there as each puppy is born, to help if necessary, get the puppy started breathing, to make sure each puppy gets proper start. However, Dave no longer believes in trying to save a clearly weak puppy, one that the mother keeps pushing away. In such a case, it is probably better for the puppy to die than to possibly grow up and be a sickly dog or be bred and pass on the tendency to weakness. When the puppies are old enough to go outside, they are moved to a 12’ x 20’ pen in the barn, with shavings on the floor and a straw area for a bed. They also spend a great deal of their time romping and playing in a 50’ x 100’ grass paddock during the day, if the weather is nice. Their puppies are wormed at 2 weeks, 4 weeks and 6 weeks.

 

Training the Puppy

The puppies’ training consists of plenty of socialization . . . taking them out whenever there are visitors, encouraging them to play with children. They initially pick their show prospect puppies at seven-eight weeks, and evaluate them basically on temperament, looking for a showy animated puppy with lots of self-confidence, and on movement. They feel most of their puppies go through awkward stages, and that a breeder needs to develop the confidence in the early signs of potential in the puppy, and not to give up when the puppy is going through its bad stages.

 

Dave and Martha take a show prospect puppy to their Shepherd Club, let it be around the other dogs, encourage it to follow an older dog around the ring a little bit, but basically concentrate on making sure the puppy has a good time and learns to relax and enjoy itself when out in public. They might show a puppy at one or two matches. The puppy can do no wrong and learns self-confidence. Martha does not believe in pressuring the puppy at all – for example, by making it hold a show pose. Make sure the puppy is having fun!

 

Conditioning the Show Dog

When a dog is ready for serious showing, Dave and Martha may have it do some limited road work, either with a bicycle or beside the car, up to one and a half miles at the most, with the dog moving at an easy trot. The major conditioning program, however, is just free exercise in the several 50’ x 100’ grass paddocks.

 

Most of the Langenau dogs are on a self-feeding program where they eat when they choose. The Rinkes feed a good dry dog food with a moderate protein level like Kennel Biscuit, Bench & Field, ANF “M,” Purina Puppy Chow. They don’t feed any of the super-high protein food. They give multiple vitamin supplements to pregnant bitches, and feed a meat scrap mixture which  includes some liver, that they get from a local locker plant, as a supplement to dogs that may need a little extra protein, including puppies.

 

Avoid the Health Fads

They try to avoid some of the fads regarding dog health, such as the ascorbate/vitamin C supplements that were supposed to prevent any and all health problems. When palpation was being promoted as the answer to determine which, if any, puppies would ultimately develop hip dysplasia, Dave & Martha had four litters (back when they were first getting started) palpated by the best known practitioner of palpation. They feel that this was a big mistake on their part and they put down puppies which were otherwise very promising. They found palpation to be very unreliable as a prediction of hip dysplasia, despite using the most noted “expert.” The lesson learned was to be very cautious about any unproven technique which might turn out to be a fad.

 

Right now, they are taking a “wait and see” attitude toward the vaccination for Toxic Gut Syndrome. They have vaccinated four of their dogs that they felt might be of higher risk for TGS.

 

One health practice that seems a nit controversial is their policy regarding caracide preventative for heartworm. They do not use this drug at all, but they do have all of their dogs checked for heartworm twice a year, and they spray regularly for flies and mosquitos [sic].

 

Dave and Martha have converted a former machine shed into a kennel building. They have two large runs, 10’ x 20’ and twelve smaller ones, 4’ x 16’, all with gravel surface. The inside pens contain partitioned alcoves filled with straw in the winter for warm sleeping beds.

 

 

Success of Co-Ownerships

They try to keep no more than half a dozen adults dogs, including their two famous house dogs, Tango and Watson. They have found that co-ownerships of breeding bitches works very well for them, and they sometimes lease a bitch for co-breeding. They caution that one must be very sure about being able to get along with the co-owners; both parties have to be flexible. They don’t have written contracts with their co-owners, as they take pains to be sure of the reliability of the co-owner before they agree to the arrangement; they have been extremely fortunate in having very satisfactory co-owners thus far. They mentioned particularly their first co-ownership with Etude, whose co-owner, Joyce Krause, was also very interested in obedience and attained the CDX degree on Etude who was also high-scoring champion in obedience at the National Specialty one year.

 

Dave in the Obedience Ring

Dave approves totally of obedience training for Shepherds, but said he himself does not enjoy obedience competition. This is based on his one-and-only time in the obedience ring where his dog, Alex, earned a score of 194, but Dave got so tired of waiting for the long-sits-and-downs that Alex never made it to another obedience trial!

 

The Langenau criteria for keeping a young male requires a positive answer to the question: “Is he a dog we would want to use ourselves on our own bitches?” Apparently, they have very tough standards in arriving at a “yes” answer to that question as over the years, Watson is the only male they have kept on a permanent basis (other than Alex who was Dave’s pet).

 

Watson

The story of how Dave and Martha happened to keep Watson when he was a very young puppy is very interesting, and reinforces the fact that accurate evaluation of young puppies is not an easy task. Following is an excerpt from the section on Watson, written by Dave and Martha, in the 1977 “Red Book.”

 

“The story of how we happen to have Watson with us is not unique among dog breeders, but is perhaps reflective of some decisions which dog breeders face. We would like to tell you that we spotted Watson as a newborn and could tell when he was still wet that everything was going to mesh into a great dog. What really happened is this:

“We were visited by a family which was desperate to have a puppy – it had to be a male – to replace the one they had just lost. At that time, we had a litter that was six weeks old which had six males in it and, though we’d been watching and liking them for some time, we were certain that at least one of the males was going to fall below our standards for a show dog and be a fine pet.

When the day came for these people to take their puppy home, we evaluated the male pups one more time and narrowed it down to two; we eventually decided the black puppy had a firmer middle piece and used his fore-assembly better, so the red puppy was selected to lie with this young family. The red puppy is still a pet and the black one grew up to be GV Ch. Langenau’s Watson. It is humbling to remember how close we thought the decision to be.”

 

Will Langenau dogs be among those whose bloodlines will carry on for many generations? Again, TIME will give us the answer.

 

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