Just read this:
Apparently it caused enough of an uproar that the dog show has changed their rules. But why does it take a written rule to prevent it?
Because it's exactly as it said in the article...it's considered "fashionable". It takes a ruling body to step in and enforce it rather than the breeders who are winning competitions with these types of dogs. Why would the breeder making thousands of dollars off of these "banana backs" want to willingly stop breeding them?
None of my dogs have that "banana back". There is a woman on another SAR team here that has one of those. I don't even know how that dog can walk let alone do SAR work. He's about two years older than my dog and I can pretty much guarantee he won't be in the field for long. I don't know how someone can put all that time, effort, and money into a dog that they can only work with for two to three years, max. And she wants to breed him!
I am part of a German Shepherd forum as well, and you will find that the good majority of us do not support that back. It is more the "show" breeders that do. The AKC recently implemented a new rule as well where if the back hips dip below a certain degree of angle the dog will be disqualified from the breed shows. I don't know why it has taken years for them to realize their mistake in supporting this. The German Shepherd is a working dog and they cannot work with hips and a back like that.
Of course, none of these rules will stop people from breeding these dogs and it will take decades before we begin to see any major changes. But there ARE German Shepherds out there that are still from working lines that have a straighter back and can actually WORK like they are intended to. These are the dogs you see in Schutzhund, police work, SAR, agility, herding, etc. Apparently the stuff most people don't care about and is never aired on television so the average person who happens to see a German Shepherd on TV win some big competition (as happened recently) will see these "banana backs" and think it is the norm and will go and purchase a "banana back" and not know any better, thus further supporting the "banana back" industry rather than the healthier German Shepherd industry.
I was at a dog park once with one of my straighter backed GSDs and I had a woman approach me and ask if she was purebred because she did not have the slope. I told her yes, she was purebred and they were not supposed to have that degree of slope; it was supposed to be much more subtle. She did not believe me. This same German Shepherd of mine was being groomed once at PetSmart and they have windows where the public can view and whatnot and when I went to pick her up the groomer said some guy had seen her in the window and left his card with his name, number, and offer to purchase her if she was intact (she wasn't). I googled his name and he was some big name German Shepherd breeder of old line German Shepherds. So apparently my GSD WAS a well bred GSD that even caught the attention of a professional, expert breeder. But it just goes to show you that the general public thinks that the "banana backs" are the norm and not the other way around.
That well bred German Shepherd lived to 17 years old. She had no hip or elbow displaysia. She probably would have lived longer but she was killed during a SAR training exercise when she ingested antifreeze while removing a burr from her foot. The cattle ranchers admitted to leaving a bunch of it out in the area to kill a pack of stray dogs that had been bothering their cattle. My male GSD is 6 years old now. No hip problems or elbow problems, either. My little female just turned a year old and apart from being tiny and a hard keeper calorie-wise she's healthy as well. The show-line GSD on our SAR team is 10 months old and already has elbow displaysia and his OFA came back as "Poor" for his hips.