Hi Ronald It's a long story about Sarplaninac standard, especially his height, but I'll try to make it simple. On southern mountains of Serbia and mountains of Macedonia you can find many diferent Sarplaninac types, like Karabash, Merdzan, Tigar, Murdz etc. You could read all that on breed profile of Sarplaninac on this site. Biggest were Karabashers and Merdzans type dogs but it is not unusal to see some extremly tall specimen of some other type. Smallest were usually iron/gray colored dogs, but they were forced by the standard as "true" Sarplaninacs, and funiest thing of all is that in first five decades of 20th century when first written standards for Sarplaninac were developed (but there is whole another issue about that, because of Karst Shepherd thing), number of iron/gray colored dogs on mountains was very low and stil is and always was. Why are these dogs favored by standard, we can "thank" Yugoslav Army to. They wanted smaller dogs with good working skils and camoufalaging color, so they were perfect for them and many Sarplaninac breeders in Yugoslavia tought that this is the wright way to bred Sarplaninacs. After decades of breeding, breeders saw that their dogs were usually smaller than dogs on mountains and then in order to increase the hight of their specimens, few of them made biggest mistake of all. Instead to go to Sarplanina region and try to correct this with genuine Sarplaninacs, they went to another breeds such as Kavkaskaya ovcharka, specimens similar to iron/gray colored Sarplaninac and start breeding them to their dogs. Years went by and today there is only about 20% of pureblooded Sarplaninacs but some say that their number is much lower. Main traits of Sarplaninac should be his character and harmony of his complete constitution, because first of all, he is a working dog. We should not insist only on his hight because we can't allow to our selves to make the same mistake twice, otherwise we will distroy this breed completely. In Sarplanina region, hight of males variates between 60 to 90cm (even higher dogs are present there), same thing is with Sarplaninacs bred in kennels out of Sarplaninac natural habitat. No mether how tall the dog is, if he can not walk properly or if he puts his tail between his legs in presence of other dogs, he might be pureblooded Sarplaninac (both, mountain types and so called "urban" variants), [u]but he will never be [/u]GOOD SARPLANINAC! This is of corse only my opinion Ronald, and if your dog is 73cm high, beleve me, his hight is much more then presentable for Sarplaninacs. One more thing. I've never saw or heard that mountain dogs had or have problems with HD and I think that this is only influence of other breeds mixed to that dogs ancestors. Aleksa aleksatomic@yahoo.com