Named after the Shiloh Kennels in New York, where it was created, this variant on the German Shepherd Dog has been created specifically as a companion dog.
The recently developed Shiloh Shepherd is a large, good-natured, straight-backed version of the German Shepherd Dog an attempt to return to the early form of that breed. It has been developed at the Shiloh Kennels in New York in a carefully monitored breeding programme that began in. 1962.
American dog-breeder Tina Barber was born and raised in Germany and vividly recalled from her childhood the ‘big, strong, easy to train… mountain. herding dogs that stole everyone’s heart’. These were the old-fashioned German Shepherd Dogs, and when she looked at their modern equivalents she was horrified to see what had happened to them. Their bodies were longer and thinner, their bones were finer, their overall size was reduced and, in temperament, they had become what she called `spooky-shy’, or `fear-biters’. Calm, stable intelligence had been sacrificed to create a flashy show dog. She resolved to do something about this and set about reinventing the original dog, as she had known it when she was young.
When the breeding programme started in 1962, Tina Barber’s kennel name was Konigin . After 12 years of struggling to breed the perfect dog, with ’super intelligence, huge size and great hips’, she despaired of ever being able to combine all three qualities. Then in 1974 she changed her kennel name to Shiloh and continued with renewed energy. By the 1990s, over 30 years after she first began, she had succeeded in achieving her goal and the Shiloh Shepherd was, at last, the animal she had dreamed of Many other German Shepherd devotees, also longing to return to the original type, acquired puppies from her kennels, spreading the success of the Shiloh across North America.
Most of her breeding work was done with carefully selected German Shepherd Dogs, always aiming to intensify the breed’s original features, but in 1989, she did introduce one additional element a cross with an unusually large Malamute, to give the new breed better hips and increased size.
Although Tina Barber’s programme has been laudable in every way and has created a magnificent dog, her choice of name for the reconstituted breed is unfortunate. The Biblical town of Shiloh was an ancient settlement located 17 miles (27 km) north of Jerusalem, and implies a Middle Eastern connection for this dog which is misleading. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, when German Shepherd Dogs conformed to the original type that Barber is honouring, they were referred to in Britain as Alsatians (because of anti-German feelings stemming from World War I). So perhaps the name Alsatian Shepherd Dog would have been more appropriate for the new breed.
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