Going for the Blue (4 page)

When the standard for the Beagle says “any true hound color” and for the Borzoi states, “Any color, or combination of colors,
is acceptable,” a limitation has surely been put on the efficacy of flash. It is nice when it is there, but there are many
other things that are far more important. Novices too frequently avail themselves of pet-quality purebred dogs just because
they happen to be flashy, and they go into the ring with a dog that is actually loaded with faults that no judge or good,
responsible breeder wants to see passed along to the next generation. Bottom line? Flash is pretty, flash is fun, it’s great
on a leash in your neighborhood, and you can get to meet all kinds of nice new neighbors—fantastic social glue—but glitz’s
value in the ring is problematical. And, unlike movement and the way the dog is structured from the skeleton out, it tells
you nothing of importance about the dog. Remember, in the show ring we are looking for genes that will make this individual
dog’s puppies as close to 100 percent of the standard as possible.

Flash and glitz should not be confused with condition. They are two very different things. The standards specify what the
coat should be like, and it is a matter to which a great deal of attention must be paid. Don’t even bother showing a dog whose
coat is “blown,” not up to standards. A dog is supposed to look terrific, and its coat is a big part of that. An Afghan Hound
whose coat isn’t elegant and flowing or a Labrador Retreiver who isn’t glistening with robust good health might as well hang
it up until grooming and diet have brought them up to a competitive level. I have seen many otherwise terrific dogs dumped
by the judge because they looked like grubby unmade beds. If ever there was an uninspiring sight, it is an unmade bed going
around the ring in company and competition with elegant, glistening hunks.

This is where tone comes into play. No judge prefers soft, mushy dogs over well-conditioned, well-toned specimens. No matter
what its assignment, to be a perpetual motion machine like the Border Collie or a lap sweetie like the Cavalier King Charles
Spaniel, a dog should have exercised appropriately and be strong and well toned when the curtain goes up.

FAULTS

Those dreadful things called faults can be rather more precise to deal with than the concept of perfection. There is usually
less opinion involved. It is easier to determine if a dog has two tails (I am sure that would be considered an unforgivable
fault) than it would be to determine if a dog’s one and properly only tail is perfect in every respect. Faults are found in
every breed: in the Bichon Frise, cowhocks (where the midleg joints, or hocks, on the rear legs, turn inward and the feet
turn outward), a snippy muzzle, poor pigmentation, protruding or yellow eyes, undershot or overshot bite, are all listed as
serious faults for the breed, as are a cockscrew tail (perish the thought!) and black hair in the coat.

When faults are considered really egregious, they can be the basis for out-and-out disqualification. The judge is expected
to dismiss any Papillon that is more than twelve inches at the withers (the upper portion of the third to the sixth dorsal
vertebrae, generally called the “shoulder,” where dogs are “sticked,” or measured for height) or if it is liver colored or
if its coat is any solid color, including white. White patches on the ears or around the eyes and a pink, spotted, or liver-colored
nose will also assure what otherwise might be a handsome little dog an invitation to leave the ring immediately and become
a full-time pet. An Italian Greyhound will usually get the old heave-ho if he has tan markings normally found on black-and-tan
dogs of other breeds. The lovely little West Highland White Terrier, or Westy, can get into trouble back aft. It is a fault
if the tail is set too low on his rump, or if it is too long or carried at half-mast or over the dog’s back. The tail is never
docked, so a certain length is natural and required. The Westy can also get in trouble up front, since excess timidity and
excess pugnacity are both to be discouraged by judges to whom the dog is presented. The German Shepherd Dog is disqualified
if it is white in color; if its nose is not predominantly black; if it has cropped or hanging ears, a docked tail, an undershot
jaw; or for attempting to bite the judge. (There is now a White German Shepherd Club, but it will be a long time before the
AKC or the fanciers of this breed accept the color. The gene that carries white in the German Shepherd is said to carry serious
faults as well. But by no means does everyone agree.) In some breeds biting is specified as a kind of ultimate no-no. In no
breed is it considered good manners. AKC rules are very specific. Menacing, suggesting that the dog should not be approached
and cannot be handled safely, calls for dismissal.

I once watched the judging of a Working Dog breed. There were seven dogs in the ring, and each was goofier than the next.
Every time the judge tried to approach a dog, it went ballistic, acting more like a kite on a string than a dog on a lead.
The judge walked up and down the line, studying the dogs from a distance and stroking his chin. At the end he dismissed the
entire class with the comment that there wasn’t a single dog worth pinning a ribbon on at any level. There was a lot of grumbling,
but the judge was right.

Among the 160 or so breeds and varieties of dogs recognized for show purposes by the American Kennel Club, there are thousands
of details like those above that forever separate show dogs from pet-quality purebred dogs. However, understanding that concept
does not assure you of acquiring a show-quality dog. You select your adorable puppy, but some other force will determine what
the grown dog will come to be like. Ultimately, you live with and love the dog that fate has designed for your health and
hearth. If you can’t love your dog, faults and all, you are missing out on a major part of the fun.

Expectations can be high (they usually are in the dog-show world; hope really does spring eternal), expenses can have a brutalizing
impact on a family’s living standards, travel is intense and costly, but if a judge sees three-quarters of an inch too little
ear in an Afghan or a missing black eye rim or any other such catastrophic shortfall, it is back to loving and companionship
for the wanna-be show dog and its owner. He or she, or, in short order,
it
, will be kept forever from having a Ch., for Champion, before his name. It’s amazing how little the dog itself cares about
this.

All dogs were once mixed breeds or random-bred, albeit the Bloodhound, Greyhound, Samoyed, Afghan, and many of the others
go back centuries or even millennia in pretty much their present forms. A good many breeds that we still recognize attended
the birth of the Christian era. Others are quite new. Just about a century ago, for example, Louis Dobermann began breeding
what he was sure would be the ultimate police dog in Dortmund, Germany. In fact, his namesake did become a kind of ultimate
guard and protection dog. He started his Pinscher with the Rottweiler (a magnificent descendant of the Tibetan Mastiff via
Rome), a European Pointer of some kind, and some Terrier, and he added some Greyhound—eventually coming up with the Doberman
Pinscher. That is a very different kind of scenario from the Ibizan Hound’s, the “Watchdog of the Dead,” whose look-alike
ancestors with the sacred name Anubis guarded the tombs of pharaohs. The funerary sculptures of Anubis match today’s Ibizan
Hound standards to an amazing degree.

When is a Doberman Pinscher or any other dog a member of a recognizable breed? When it breeds true, or in other words, when
you can have reasonable expectations about what will appear on whelping (birthing) day and in the weeks that follow as the
puppy begins to mature. When a dog is “your guess is as good as mine,” you have a random-bred dog variously known, disrespectfully
and idiotically, I think, as a Heinz 57 (no one shows a pickle—or who knows, maybe they do but in a different context), mutt,
cur, pariah, or mongrel, usually muttered with at least a sense of derision. The most derisive comment of all is surely, “Oh,
it’s just a dog.”

What do random-bred dogs have to do with dog shows? Absolutely nothing, and this is not institutionalized hubris or snobbery,
either. Leotards and tutus have nothing to do with either ice or field hockey and a palette and easel have nothing to do with
ballet. All activities—call them arts, crafts, enthusiasms, sciences, contests, games, sports, fancies, therapies, hobbies,
or businesses, as you will—have a core purpose, established rules, and, one hopes, qualified participants. A dog show is all
about the best purebred dogs around, and I say that without casting aspersions or looking down a hairy, regal nose.

Ostensibly a dog show’s purpose is to single out individual examples of any given breed that are the closest to their own
brand of perfection and select them to be mated and produce more and better puppies in kind. This kind of selective breeding
has gone on for a very long time, a lot longer than there have been dog shows to memorialize this ultimate contest in opinion.

It is perfectly all right for a show-dog owner to say rude things about a competitor’s little pride and joy—they often do—it
is accepted, although admittedly rude. In fact, if ruder things are said than those whispered remarks about the competition
at a dog show, they will be about the judge.

That is OK. Judges are fair game. However, no one has the right to say anything rude about a random-bred dog. They already
have enough on their plate, God love ’em. They need all the respect they can get, for in that way fewer of them might be euthanized.

At the early stages in a dog show the judging is limited to one breed at a time and the field is divided between the sexes.
At one point, then, you will have all not-yet-champion, or unfinished, male Cocker Spaniels of a given class in one ring together,
all unfinished female English Springer Spaniels in another ring nearby or about to follow the Cockers, and so on through the
breeds. Newcomers to the dog-show world don’t seem to have difficulty comprehending this system, but later, when the seven
groups and Best in Show (BIS) slate are judged, the eyebrows go up. When it seems that a Chihuahua is being judged against
a Newfoundland, and a Miniature Poodle against a Bullmastiff, a puzzled expression is the least one could expect. Of course,
such judging is never done. No such thing is happening. It just seems that way to the uninitiated. Eventually you end up with
seven dogs of seven different breeds (unless it is a one-breed or specialty show). When it gets down to the final contest
and the seven group winners are competing for Best in Show, each of the seven dogs is being measured against the standards
for its own breed, perfection being worth one hundred points. The judging is not dog against dog but individual dogs against
their own breed’s standard. (Don’t worry if you’re not following all this: classes, groups, and judging will be discussed
in greater detail in Chapter 3.) In the Sporting Group ring, then, after the initial judging of the individual breeds, there
will be twenty-four breeds represented by one dog or bitch each, in most cases. Each of those dogs will have already won Best
of Breed or Best of Variety of its breed earlier that day.

POLITICS IN THE RING

Hang on, now it gets bumpy. The breed we call Cocker Spaniel (a totally different breed today from its ancestor, the English
Cocker Spaniel) will be represented not by one dog but by three, each a Best of Variety. One will be black, another will be
parti-color (a pinto, of sorts), and the third will be an ASCOB (any solid color other than black). Aside from color, the
three Cocker Spaniels will be judged by exactly the same standards. Remember, they are but varieties within a breed.

But hold on, one might say, there is only one Labrador Retriever in the same Sporting Group ring, yet Labs, too, come in three
color varieties: black, yellow, and chocolate. Why is there not one of each of them in the ring? The answer is politics. One
winner, remember, is chosen for each of the seven groups (winning that coveted ribbon, called Group 1). The hanky-panky that
puts three Cocker Spaniels in a Sporting Group ring means that breed has three cracks at Group 1 and hence at the Best in
Show judging that follows after all seven Group 1s have been chosen. But the Labrador Retriever will be either black, yellow,
or chocolate, and that means that outstanding breed of enormous popularity will have only one shot at Group 1. Depending on
the quality of the competition, that can be a definite advantage for the Cocker Spaniel. Nobody said that life is fair.

The same kind of political monkey business appears in the Terrier Group. The wonderfully robust Bull Terrier has both colored
and white varieties, and the standards clearly state, “The standard for the colored variety is the same as for the white except
for color.” I have watched a colored and a white Bull Terrier in the Terrier Group ring that were litter-mates. The shenanigans
involved give that breed an edge, just as with the Cocker Spaniels.

How do these things happen? Most breeds are represented by AKC member clubs and possibly other group and regional clubs as
well. Each club sends a delegate to the AKC delegate meetings every year. If a club (“fancy”) wants to propose a change in
the rules or standards, such changes have to be voted on by all the delegates (460 of them). The Cocker Spaniel and the Bull
Terrier people apparently once upon a time had some favors they called in. The changes that do pass are incorporated into
the standards, which are then published by the AKC. The politicking that goes on at a delegate meeting is nothing short of
awesome.

Some years ago, as the elected delegate of the American Bloodhound Club, I was at the center of an AKC brouhaha.

A delegate representing a hunting dog stood up to oppose my being seated, saying that I would sabotage the hunting sport if
I were allowed to sit in their midst. He had done some back-of-the-bench campaigning ahead of time, and some other delegates
were convinced that for the sporting fraternity I was the devil incarnate. It was very embarrassing for most of the delegates,
the AKC officers, and me. The vote was pushed aside and slated for the next meeting. Finally I was voted in and the delegate
who so hated me resigned. (To the best of my knowledge we have never met, which is just fine with me—I don’t even remember
his name; I presume he had one.) He didn’t have to resign, of course, but a lot of people were pleased to see him go. Yes,
there are politics in the world of purebred dogs. Big deal! There are politics in Congress, in the Supreme Court, and at the
Academy Awards, too.