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deer, and boar. Their job was to catch and hold the prey until hunters arrived. Eventually, Bullenbeissers began to be used by farmers and butchers to guard and drive cattle. In the 16th and 17th centuries in Germany, they became valued as guards and companions. Three distinct types emerged. • The heavy Bullenbeisser, the descendant of the Mastiff • The large hound type, which became the Great Dane • The small Bullenbeisser, the ancestor of the Bulldog and the Boxer The Boxer breed we know today was developed in the late 19th century. In Munich, Georg Alt bred a female Bullenbeisser named Flora with a local male. Then he bred one of the males from the lit- ter, Lechner’s Box, back to Flora, his mother. One of their daughters, Alt’s Schecken, was registered as a Bierboxer, or Modern Bullenbeiss- er. Schecken was bred to an English Bulldog named Tom to produce a dog named Flocki, who became the first Boxer to be entered in the German Stud Book. A Boxer club was formed in Munich in 1895. The dogs varied a lot in size, shape, and color, so club members decided to write down a standard for the breed. In January 1902, the first German breed standard—known as the Munich Standard—was adopted. The stan- dard for today’s Boxer is not very different from that original. (You can learn more about it in chapter 2.) Developing the breed Among the early pioneers of the breed was Friederun Stockmann and her husband, Philip. They married in 1911 and began a life-long journey to breed top Boxers under the kennel name Vom Dom. In 1914, when World War I started, Philip took 10 of their Boxers with him into the army and set about developing the breed for the military. They were trained to find wounded soldiers, remove their

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