Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfpup
We live in a time where dogs like pointers no longer point, retrievers no longer retrieve nor swim, and shepherd dogs are reduced to mere showdogs and robots. These once great working breeds still carry a name to denote their functions that now they no longer deserve
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The case of CzWs looks a little bit different. The breed itself is not degenerated but the dogs are simply not used for the purposes the breed was created for. Since middle 80s till 98-99 there was a big stagnation. CzWs were breed only by private breeders who were not interested in training. However since about 98 or so we observe that more and more people are doing something with their dogs and an overall number of trained CzWs is growing all the time. Still there are only a few people who are professionals and train for a longer time - most people are amateurs and training is just a way of spending their free time. That's why there are not so many professionaly and top trained CzWs. Simply because there is no need for them. But when people want to do something more with them they can achieve a lot.
According to the breed standard CzW should be "versatile in his uses" but it's obvious that none of the breeds is perfect and even CzW has it's good and bad sides. It is generally known that CzWs are best in the tracking work and the obedience or protection is possible however they will never be as good as for example belgian or german shepherds in these trials. So if somebody wants to train with them for "real" then it's better to take advantages of their natural talents as the mentioned tracking abilities than to train for example IPO or Mondioring
And you can already see first positive results: in Italy there are a few CzWs used in SAR (Search and Rescue) groups and are a few more are in phase of training. Of course I'm not saying that CzWs can be only used for tracking work because there are also some CzWs with IPO (even IPO3) or Agility (A3) exams but it's good to know all advantages and disadvantages of the breed to use the breed efficiently.