German Shepherds and Children Part 4 - Prince II

Years ago, I read an article about German Shepherds that claimed while they were good with their own family's children, they tended to be less so with the children of other people.  In my own personal experience, there is no better example of this than Prince II...the first dog we owned after Prince William.

Prince of Holland was a beautiful sable German Shepherd that was bred by a work associate of my father. When this man told my father about the puppies, my father decided to go ahead and get one for us.  This time, it was my younger sister who was allowed the privilege of picking out our next dog, who, unfortunately, turned out to be a colossal mistake.

In retrospect, we should have known from the start that Prince II was not the best bred German Shepherd, because when my father and sister went to pick him out, his mother had to be confined so that she wouldn't attack them.  I've heard it said that it's always best to meet a puppy's parents before you take it home, and it certainly would have applied in Prince's case.

From the start, Prince had problems.  He was extraordinarily difficult to housebreak and inordinately submissive.  Any time an adult man would try to grab him or even pet him, he would urinate and sometimes even scream.  He was destructive, as well...any time he was left alone for an extended period of time, he would tear apart everything from furniture to books to toys.  My father immediately pronounced him to be a fear biter...a badly bred dog that, according to him, should have been destroyed, and would have been if he had been bred for the military.  His remedy for this was to punish him by hitting him with a rolled up newspaper, which was traumatic both for Prince and for us.  Every time Prince had an accident, I would cringe in my room and cover my ears, not wanting to hear the noise of his being punished, because I loved Prince.

All three of us (my sisters and I) adored him.  This was in spite of the fact that he was extraordinarily "nippy" and would frequently nip us by accident, usually drawing blood.  We always forgave him because when we cried, he would cry with us...sitting right up against us and howling until we stopped crying in order to comfort him.  We called him Princee, and in our eyes, he could do no wrong.

When Prince tore things up, we picked up the pieces and hid them so nobody would know.  When he nipped us by accident, we pretended something else had happened.  When he had an accident, we cleaned it up.  When our next door neighbor bent over to work in her garden by our fence, and Prince nipped her hair through the links, we defended him and said she had been yelling at him first.  And Prince adored us all in return.  He always wanted to be with us, was always delighted to play with us and was always there to comfort us when we were sad.

One day, my younger sister invited a friend over, and when the friend ran across our back yard, Prince ran after her and grabbed her by the arm.  In spite of the fact that the little girl was unperturbed by his actions, and he didn't even bruise her, my father decided it was the end of the road for Prince.  The next day when we came home from school, Prince was gone.

Initially, my father told us he had given him away to a policeman.  Later, he admitted he had had Prince destroyed, because he was convinced Prince would end up hurting somebody.  At the time, I wondered why my father, who had trained dogs in the military, didn't take the time to train Prince better, but when I asked him this, he said it would have been impossible.

Oddly enough, of all the dogs we had during my childhood, I loved Prince II the most.  I think it was because he loved us so very much.  He might not have been good with other people's children, and he wasn't exactly the best with us, but I still miss him, and he is the dog I named my Prince Black Star for.