Susan Orlean: Why German Shepherds Have Had Their Day

Susan Orlean is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend.”

Los Angeles

SUCCESS can be a drag. You yearn for it, strive for it, and then, when it finally arrives, it sets off repercussions you never anticipated that sometimes undo that success.

Take the German shepherd. Originally bred to the exacting standards of a German cavalry officer, it became one of the 20th century’s most popular working breeds. But in recent years that popularity, and the overbreeding that came with it, has driven the German shepherd into eclipse: even the police in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, who had relied on the dogs for years, recently announced they were replacing them with Belgian Malinois, because the less-popular Malinois were hardier and more reliable.

But there is good news about this bad news, if you are a lover of the breed, because less visibility, especially in inspiring roles as public servants, is likely to mean less demand for the dogs. That means less reason to produce too many puppies, which is the best thing that can happen to any purebred dogs.

German shepherds have existed for only a little more than 100 years. The breed was developed in the late 1800s by Max von Stephanitz, who dreamed of standardizing the motley array of German farm dogs into a single model that would be sturdy, smart and companionable....