What did your pup weight at seven months and what do they weigh now? Just wondering how big my pup may get. He's almost seven months now and 58 lbs. All my shepherds have filled out until 2-3 y/o. I've fed him adult food since 4 m/o.
Also, my dog is a rescue and was neutered at 3 m/o. I am spending hours on this site reading the articles and found the correlation b/t early neutering and health problems. Great. However, is there a noticeably reduction in dominance if a male is neutered early?
Thanks.
I hope this isn't the wrong place to put this question and I don't come off as too much of a dope.

Its a good question, but that answer is not easy or pat. I believe in the long run it may help reduce sexual aggression, but that is probably about it.

Here is a quote from a study a few years back "With various types of aggressive behavior, including aggression toward human family members, castration may be effective in decreasing aggression in some dogs, but fewer than a third can be expected to have marked improvement. Age of the dog or duration of the problem behavior does not have value in predicting whether castration will have a beneficial effect"

source

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9227747

Thanks Thomas. I'm not worried about aggression right now, and if it rears its ugly head my trainer and I will be on top of it.
I'm more concerned with the puppy dominating my older dog, who is only 55 lbs. He's starting to feel his oats a little..........she corrects him but that's a whole other post..........
Thanks again.
Mary

I remember a vet giving me a formula that seems to work for "estimating" adult weight. Basically you take the weight at 4 months old, double it, and add 10%. So for example my dog was 40 lbs. at 4 months old, so his estimated adult weight was 88 lbs. This month he turned 1 and is a lean 80 lbs. I imagine by the time he continues filling out he will be 85 to 90 lbs. which is pretty close to what my vet said.

Hi Mary, just to be clear dominance is a form of aggression. From what you describe, it may be sexual behaviors, and interestingly enough those have been known to increase in neuters.

From http://www.gsdhelpline.com/weight.htm as far as weights go (I can't fix the format, easier to read on website, 1st # is month for age, then male weight and then female) :

The German Shepherd Dog Weights
AGE MALES FEMALES
MONTHS WEIGHT WEIGHT
lb.s lb.s
1 9.2 7.2
2 19.9 16.6
3 31.3 26.7
4 41.8 36.2
5 50.6 44.0
6 57.4 50.1
7 62.6 54.4
8 66.4 57.5
9 69.4 59.7
10 72.0 61.5
11 74.3 63.1
12 76.0 64.2


Weight chart is not to be followed EXACTLY, for each dog is different in size. So please
check with your vet for your dogs individual needs. This chart is ONLY to give you a
general idea where your puppy's weight should be.

I realize how confusing all the similar sounding terms can be, so I am going to define some.

Sexual aggression= 2 or males fighting it out to see who gets to mate the bitch. (neutering may help here)

Sexual behaviors= mounting, humping etc (neutering may make things worse here)


Dominance= drive to be higher in the pack, a complex behavior that has sexual aggression as a variable (because of the complexity it is hard to predict how much affect neutering will have)

Thank you both for the help. Much appreciated. We're going to training (more like boot camp) this morning and will discuss with my trainer.
I had an aggressive dog for 14.5 years and I'm willing to do everything to avoid that again.
Right now I'm not converned with the pup being aggressive with people (like my other dog was).......could change...........more that my dogs get along in the long run.
Again, thanks so much. I am probably going to be fired from my job b/c I sit and read the articles all day at work. Eh, more time with my dogs then!
Get a real kick out of Ed! He reminds me of my trainer. No nonsense.