"APERSPECTIV FROM THE DISTANCE"

BY J. KOEFOED (RYNBERG ROTTWEILERS)

I have been fortunate for so many reasons to have been born in a small yet vast distant country, but this distance although giving one a great overview of what the rest of the world is doing has its drawbacks when trying to access and breed quality Rottweilers. This distance has probably made Australian breeders think longer and harder about their choices before they import semen or dogs because of the inflated costs and quarantine issues involved. But the advantages are that we have this great overview of our breed like standing on a mountain and looking down at the view.

I live in Western Australia which is in itself rather distant in relation to the east coast and the larger Rottweiler breeding and exhibiting states. I have personally been breeding Rottweilers for about 37 years now spending many years traveling to the other side of the country to exhibit my dogs. I set out very early in my breeding endeavour’s to import and promote the German bloodlines and have continued to specialize in this area always striving to produce the very best specimen I could in relation to the FCI Standard. When we imported the first Rottweiler to Australia with a tail we made a conscious decision to never dock another pup, and yes it was a hard road to travel with the very harsh reception a Rottweiler with a tail received, but I wished to remain true to the German Standard.

It has never been as obvious as it has in the past few years, watching the Eastern European countries take a totally different direction to the rest of the world in the style of Rottweiler they desire the look of, this in itself isn’t a bad thing if it is truly what they want. What is wrong is that they are trying to force this style of Rottweiler on the rest of the world, even on the country of Origin Germany.

This brings us to the FCI Standard, these dog standards are developed for a very simple reason to standardise the look of EVERY dog in this breed, and not to be ignored for the sake of fashion and personal desire.

Like what has happened with other breeds the time I feel is drawing near when we will have no choice but to initiate a DIVORCE within our breed before it destroys the breed as we know it. This doesn’t need to necessarily be a bad thing, in Australia we have Staffordshire Terriers & the newer American Staffordshire a much larger some would say overdone version of the original, standard & Giant versions of the same breed just to use some examples.

So what would we call this new variation of our breed we could start by I suppose referring to the Original breed we all love as the ‘German Rottweiler’ and this new enhanced version simply a Rottweiler and lump everything that doesn’t conform to the FCI standard into that same group. If the Eastern European countrys got together they could register a new breed named in another countrys name possibly the ‘Serbian Rottweiler’ for an example.

Either way we simply can’t continue on the way we are going with our heads in the sand and hope this new fashion will go away, because it looks more like gaining momentum that fading away any time soon, and we are fooling ourselves if we think the breeders breeding these dogs and the Judges putting them up are going anywhere in a hurry. It has taken on a life of its own and morphed in to a need to produce the toughest meanest looking Rottweiler not the most correct looking specimen.

Like a marriage that has run its course and a couple who have grown irreparably apart one can only hope this new fashion is divorced from the beloved breed as we know it as quickly and with as little long term damage done as possible.