Recently I have been looking at the GSD for my next dog, first working dog. However, I feel it is very hard to get an overview of the bloodlines that exist in the breed, the differences between the lines and such. Is there anyone that could help me with advises on where to start my research of the bloodlines? Is there a book, website or something that explain the best known bloodlines?

Or maybe someone could suggest some lines to look into based on what I want in a dog? I am familiar with the breed, although mostly from showbred individuals. I want a dog that first and foremost will be an active family dog, but I will also train/compete in IPO with him. I would like a high prey dog, but with a good dose of defense too. If possible, I would prefer a small dog, but size is not an important factor. I am used to dogs that is slow to mature, so wether the dog is slow to mature or not is not important. Based on these few sentences, are there specific lines that could be interesting, or does this apply to all good working lines? I live in Europe, so European lines is prefered.

Thank you in advance for all help!

Regards,
Richard Lind

Ed, here, has posted quite an extensive list of breeding dogs he's used.

If you take a gander at that, you'll see lots of the same kennel names over and over again...apparently for a very good reason. You'll see a tendency towards the West German working lines.

http://leerburg.com/leer-dog.htm

Now take a look at the pedigrees of some dogs used across the ocean:

http://www.k9gardefense.com/german.html

Remarkably similar.

Goes to show how few-and-far between the correct German Shepherd is if dozens of kennels, hundreds (if not thousands) of miles away from eachother are all linebreeding on the same handful of dogs.

Though "correct" is somewhat subjective, if you look at who needs objective performance in traditional disciplines and what they're using when all is said and done, you gotta figure the odds start dwindling when you start looking in relatively oddball places.