I am looking to buy a male pup down fron Don

Originally posted by BILL MULLEADY:
I am looking to buy a male pup down fron Don You're about a decade behind the curve in getting a Don pup.
His ONLY positive traits were huge heads and good pigment.
I saw many many of his progeny and a few were good. But the real reason he was popular was those sought after big heads not his working attributes. You can find him through a handful of DDR lines but a pup! Not unless someone saved his semen.

wow thats funny...because I owned a son of his that was a 99 pt tracking and a 99 and 100 pt protection dog. Maybe i had the fluke

Bill, check your private messages for pups......

Bill - I also owned a Don son - Charley Trafalga. He was an excellent tracker - he had a huge head, good hips - and super faulty temperament.

I saw Don in East Germany - he came the the states and went sterile. He did have a big head - he never produced a dog worth talking about.

There was an edge to the nerves on his dogs - mine was a little crazy and he was not that tough - in fact he was not tough. He could have scored well in Schutzhund but he was not a tough dog - Scoring well in Schutzhund has nothing to do with being a tough dog - nothing at all to do with being a tough dog.

I had a 73 year old man that worked for me - he had fed Charley for 18 months - he took a new employee into his dog yard just to show him how to handle the feeding - when he stepped infront of Charley to blcok him from the new employee he got a full mouth stomach bite - totally uncalled for (I got rid of the dog)

You only add Don to a pedigree for pigment and heads - not for working ability. But like kevin said - that was more than 10 years ago not today.

Bill, they bred the dickens out of Don. Big bones and heads and dark pigment were all the rage at the time and lacking in a lot of dogs.
Of course some were nice. You cannot breed that much and not get something nice. Where you will see a lot of dogs with him in them is the Trafalga dogs, a DDR show kennel really.
I don't want to sound like I think your dog wasn't a fine animal, I saw a few pretty nice dogs from Don, but, many more dogs that weren't so nice. Add that to the pretty well known questionable heritage and his contribution to a breeding program is well, questionable.
I'm sure you dog was all that you say, but I have also seen one hell of an outstanding dog with the Wildsteigerland kennel name as a police dog too. No way would I add him to a breeding looking for working qualities though.

Originally posted by BILL MULLEADY:
wow thats funny...because I owned a son of his that was a 99 pt tracking and a 99 and 100 pt protection dog. Maybe i had the fluke

Charlie?......Charlie?...you bought him from Bob Emery in New England right? Mark Reed imported him..as he did all Don dogs in the 80,s Is this the dog you are talking about? If so, I worked that dog also...I worked for Mark back then. This dog wasn't worth feeding...I agree, unstable and worked like shit, why do you think Bob Emery sold him...he couldn't get him to pass a SCH1. I hope we are talking about the same dog..matter of fact I KNOW we are talking about the same dog...he was Charlie von Trafalga. This dog wasn't worth a $30 bag of dog food. Ed...you know my dog...because you sold him to a Colarado Police Dept. and as you told me a month after selling him...he had 3 live bites in his first two weeks and was an incredible street dog. My point is this, yes Don was bred out the ass, which good dog wasn't, but Kevin, just as you say u are bound to get a few good, doesn't it depend on the quaility of bitxhes he was bred to also. I'm sure they weren't turning down many stud fees in East Germany, knowing full well that Mark was buying dogs for short money and lots of Levi jeans, Nike and Reebok sneakers. I'm sure you are aware of this Ed. I don't think Don's best stuff ever left East Germany, maybe the crap that was brought in once Don got here is another story...but what do you think caused the big Don craze in the first place, someone who knew something about dogs obviously liked something they saw in Don's offspring. Just my opinion, I guess.

Bill - check your priovate messages

Bill,
The unfortunate reality is that we did buy all the good stuff from the DDR. Money talks and the people were poor. The country wrecked. That's why the wall came down as well.
I bought a DDr dog back in the 80's and even with the importers cuts on the deal I paid less than 1500 bucks for the dog and I am positive that he didn't pay 500. But 500 was a ton of money to the DDR folks.
Many many dogs made it into the US as police dogs without export stamps back then....smuggled into the hands of West germans then to Americans by the droves.
I for one used a lot of dogs that came through Pushca Haus Himple. great dogs many of them and a means to get back to Bernd Learburg through a different set of parentage than what was popular in then.
Hips were big problems though and I believe that this is why we see less influence from the DDR dogs than we might have if the hips were at least as good as the West German dogs.