Why is there no unity and cooperative effort in the bandog community?

Q9. Why is there no unity and cooperative effort in the bandog community?

Ancient GR: A9. LOL ...I see tremendous unity in the GSD community worldwide.

DanUK: Again, see question three for clarification as to the ethos of many Bandogge breeders; it is very much a personal endeavour to meet personal needs. Conversely, there are two other elements; firstly the public face of bandog breeders which tend to be modeled around the Swinford Myth popularised by Carl Semenic. The majority of these individuals are involved in breeding in what can only be deemed as a commercial context, irrespective of whether or not this eventually leads them to a profit financially speaking, or simply provides enough funds to subsidise their hobby/program and in progress gain the public exposure many of them seek. There are plenty of examples and they don't need to be flagged in this discussion. Needless to say, many do attempt to work their dogs, often claiming to do operational style defense work, but instead employ modified sport techniques which only serve to impress nobody; for sport the work is weak/poor and in the operational context, the work is not viewed as being any better because there is simply too little understanding of the requirements for this work and as such the dogs are presented with a lot of work that actually does stimulate prey drive, make use of equipment as a stimuli and very animated, sport-derived work as pertains to the body language helper. This shouldn't be viewed as entirely their fault or reason for them to be condemned, because many government organisations also fail in this area and attempt to operationally train dogs with sport techniques, often just outside of the usual sport scenarios. On the other side of the coin, you have the serious breeders who do not have a public face or seek exposure. There are groups of breeders of working bull-mastiff breeds that do work and correspond together to assess programs. In some cases, these breeder networks may not directly utilise one another's stock (regularly) but do encompass programs from different countries within Europe and North America. These parties may not all focus upon the same methods of training or have completely shared objectives, but they do realise the value of comparisons / benchmarking and so employ the same commercial trainers to appraise their stock in operational contexts and provide feedback that can allow for example, a Neo-APBT centric program to be compared to another that utilises Neo-Rotti, or purebred Corso's or Presa's to various Bandogge programs. Many of these breeders would give dogs to sport homes if they thought it was a viable prospect that the home would: understand what they were getting, be flexible enough to train it in the most appropriate fashion and would gain value from the experience. However, there are very few sport participants willing to deviate from their own breed even to another related breed (e.g. Mal to GSD, Terv to Mal etc.) let alone take on a breed that they know in advance will require a different approach, will mature more slowly and which ultimately will never be a high scoring points dog, if indeed it can even progress to a higher level. Where you do find such people like; Paul Cipparone, Dominic Donovan, Norman Epstein, Tony McCallum (real work with cattle etc. rather than sport), Lucillano Olivia, Tom Ritchie, Al Banuelos and for those that know them, folks like Eric Wright (UK - GSD's, Mal's, Rott's, Boxer's and AB's), Chiva's (AB, AmStaff etc.), Chestnut's (AB), Torsten Sonn (titled a female AB (Mourquise's Emmylou) to BH, VPG1, VPG2, AD, FH1, FH2) and became the youngest female to pass the VPG3 in Germany) etc. it is clear that it is not just the traditional breeds that can prove successful.

Katrina Hartwell AU: People have very different goals. There are some people breeding for cash rather than better dogs and are at odds with those there for the long haul. There is the same thing in most other breed groups though.

MaTi US: Bandogs are rare.