by Josh Dean
The judge concluded the movement portion and then asked the handlers to stack the dogs. He walked the line once, briskly, and pointed first at Jack, pulling him out. Kimberly wasn’t sure if this meant he was the group winner or merely the first dog in a first cut from which the judge would further winnow. It was the former, and Jack leaped up on Heather as the judge raised an index finger to indicate that he had been given his first-ever Group 1 over several nationally ranked herding dogs. Kimberly yelled and nearly hugged the strange woman she’d been hiding behind. She was ecstatic. The joy wasn’t quite Westminster level, but it was pretty close.
The group broke up, and Kimberly headed to meet her dog and handler, but once again Heather—who at this point was basically sprinting back and forth between buildings, so that both Tanner and Jack were attended to—whizzed past with her hand up, and a tight hold on Jack’s lead. Kimberly still needed to stay away—and there were still four groups to go before Jack got his chance at Best in Show. It would be at least six o’clock before Kimberly could actually greet her beloved dog.
Granted, circumstances provided a nice salve, even though he didn’t win the big event. “Seeing how things played out at Westminster was exciting,” she explained later. “Watching that judge go back and forth between Jack and Rowan. That was a highlight for me, because it’s so prestigious. But he gets nothing for rankings.” What she means is that an Award of Merit at Westminster is great but provides no points. The Group 1 at York, on the other hand, would be a massive boost to his all-breed ranking, even though he didn’t win Best in Show. The two Group 4s at Wildwood, after all, had catapulted him toward the top twenty, and winning the Herding Group at a show as large as York would add several hundred points to his total. It might be enough to crack the rankings for the first time.
Kimberly was very much a newbie in the Australian shepherd community, having no history in a breed that is rich in owners who’ve been at it for years, and the fact that she showed up out of nowhere with a dog who immediately started winning made her very cautious of gloating too openly. No matter how excited she might feel after a win, she was treading very lightly. “I don’t want to seem boastful,” she told me. “I don’t want to be hated.” Thus, after York she was proceeding carefully. She went out of her way to congratulate all the dogs in a Facebook post she wrote after getting home. In return she received many kudos in the comments.
When he finally got home on Sunday night, Jack trudged in the door, had a drink of water, walked to a corner—which wasn’t his usual sleeping spot—lay on a heating vent, and crashed.
I suppose you could dismiss Westminster as a fluke—or, as I did, as a good omen of things to come—but Jack’s success in York was the first sign that he’d officially crossed the line from unknown to contender-on-the-rise, and it would explain why Kimberly was exhibiting some hesitation for the first time when it came to bragging more openly about his exploits. There’s a fine line among show people between friend and foe, and an owner is constantly tiptoeing along it. The hive mentality that brings together owners who are all emotionally and financially invested in this somewhat arbitrary pursuit (and thus irrationally inclined to overreact) coalesces around the reality that most dogs out there lose far more than they win. And you take consolation in other losers who share your disappointment and tend to feel better about losing when you can blame that losing on something, or someone, else. Especially a dog and owner who win.
Kimberly obviously wanted to win, but she also wanted to be liked; she genuinely appreciated the camaraderie she’d found in shows and the kindness of other, more experienced owners who shared advice and supplies and even hotel rooms. Unlike the smug owner who’d invested tens of thousands in crafting a top dog, Kimberly mostly got lucky that she happened to stumble upon and fall in love with the right random puppy online, so it was going to be a difficult balance for her to push Jack forward while maintaining her place in the larger community of average owners.
On March 23 she sent me the following e-mail.
Hey!!! Check this out. Jack is on the top 20 All Breed list. He’s number 20, but he’s on the list!!!! Hopefully our Group 1 last weekend helps us move up! We aren’t on the Breed rankings yet but if my calculations are right we would have had 40 points as of Feb 28th. Friday entries were 19 and Sunday was 30. Cross our fingers that we hit the Breed Top 20.
The distinction between the two rankings is this: The top-twenty breed ranking is based purely on the number of Australian shepherds defeated. Each time Jack is named Best of Breed, he gets one point for every dog entered that day (nineteen on Friday, for instance, and thirty on Sunday). All-breed rankings, on the other hand, factor in group wins and placements. If a dog wins a group, as Jack did for the first time in York, he gets a point for every herding dog defeated—if there were twelve collies, say, he gets twelve points, and so on for all the herding breeds entered. A single group win, or placement (because if a dog is given a Group 4, he gets all the herding dogs, minus the three that beat him), carries great weight and can shoot an Aussie up the all-breed ranking, but to build breed points you need to consistently win Best of Breed.
Kimberly provided a link to the rankings in the Canine Chronicle, the monthly magazine that prints them and also keeps them updated online, and there he was, at number twenty, Ch Wyndstar’s Honorable Mention. (Beyoncé was solidly entrenched at number one.) The dog at number twenty in the breed rankings was the Westminster Winner, Ch Copperridges’s Fire N Bayouland (aka Rowan), and at seventeen I noticed a familiar name: Ch Heatherhill Shock N Awe (aka Shocka), the Crufts winner we met at Wildwood.
I wrote back, “Wow, he’s nationally ranked! I bet you never expected that when you bought a puppy from a stranger in California.”
I received her response a few seconds later. “He’s done a lot of things I never expected,” she wrote. “I love that boy!!!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pardon Me While I Fondle
Your Dog’s Testicles:
Show-Dog Judging Explained
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Perfection in a dog doesn’t exist. We can—and should—strive for ideal structure, but every dog will have some flaws. That’s life.
—PAT HASTINGS
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What is a perfect Australian shepherd anyway? As with any breed, this question has a very specific answer: the “breed standard,” crafted and lorded over by each breed’s parent club. A breed standard is somewhat fluid and changes over time, sometimes dramatically in the case of newer and less common breeds, over which a few determined breeders wield tremendous influence.
The Australian shepherd would be considered a midsize dog. Its general appearance, according to its standard,* “is well balanced, slightly longer than tall, of medium size and bone, with coloring that offers variety and individuality.” Unlike the standards for many of the fussier looking breeds, which focus largely on physical characteristics, the Aussie’s official definition is as much about its personality and agility. “He is attentive and animated, lithe and agile, solid and muscular without cloddiness. He has a coat of moderate length and coarseness.”
Among the many (many) traits a great Australian shepherd must have is compact, oval feet “with close-knit, well-arched toes,” “well-sprung” ribs neither “barrel-chested nor slab sided,” and coloration that can vary, within reason: “White on the head should not predominate, and the eyes must be fully surrounded by color and pigment.” (We know why this is.) He has a “smooth, free and easy gait” and “should be able to change direction or alter gait instantly.”
Trust me when I say that this barely scratches the surface of the great specificity with which a human is supposed to judge an Australian shepherd dog during conformation. To watch this process, however, is to be wholeheartedly confused; it’s mind-boggling to look at a ring holding, say, twenty Aussies (or, in the case of Westminster, forty-five!) and even begin to comprehend selecting out the finest specimen.
Nonetheless, that’s what t
he judge must do.
What’s clear is that judges work hard to earn this right. For a start, a prospective judge should already be a dog-show person—a breeder, owner, or handler who has a vise-grip lock on the specificities of at least one, if not several breeds. The prerequisites for judging vary by country and change frequently, but the current criterion in the United States is that a prospective judge must have “been involved in dogs” for at least twelve years and “bred at least five litters that resulted in at least four champions.” Beyond that he should be an expert in a particular breed in order to be approved to judge it, and once approved for two breeds a prospective judge can apply for two more. The maximum number of breeds a first-time applicant can apply to judge is fourteen. To make it worthwhile for a judge (and the kennel club paying his/her way) to travel to a show, it makes sense for judges to be as well rounded as possible. The best judges can assess toy poodles and miniature pinschers one day and Great Danes and bullmastiffs the next.
If today’s prospective judges should ever feel overburdened by the road to certification, they should consider William Lort’s path to the profession. It’s always unfair to compare your autobiography to one from the nineteenth century, when anyone who merited notice from historians seemed to lead a life worthy of a motion picture, but Lort’s story is a standout even in that context. A father of twelve children, the British-born Lort was a surgeon by profession, but like so many young men he decided to take a backpacking trip to first sow some wild oats and headed off for the then-extremely-wild Rocky Mountains of the United States, where “with only his knife and gun he lived off the land with the fur traders.” After making some “important geological discoveries,” he was named an Associate of the House by the U.S. Congress, and then it was off to South America and then Canada, where he dabbled in whale hunting. On one particularly turbulent voyage, he jumped ship during a storm to rescue the captain from drowning, then took command and sailed the damaged vessel safely through the storm. He later became a champion swimmer and in his retirement explored the Arctic. In between he joined England’s Kennel Club, created the stud book for pointers and setters, and was one of the first breeders of Irish setters and field spaniels. He would not have been a boring dinner companion. Lort was not necessarily the first conformation judge, but he was one of the first to gain notice. According to Ann Hier, author of the excellent compilation Dog Shows, Then and Now, he was “a compelling force who successfully established the authority of the dog show adjudicator.” In an age before written standards existed, he judged the dogs “at a glance.” Bully on you, Lort, old boy.
Today there are more than three thousand AKC-approved judges, and most of them can judge numerous breeds. It should go without saying that you can’t start judging the group competition at AKC shows until you’re certified to judge all the breeds in that group (otherwise how can you possibly judge a giant schnauzer against a bulldog?). But once you can judge one group, you can judge Best in Show—the thinking being that by this point every dog has passed two rounds of judges and is so good that there is no wrong choice. “We always joke, how hard is it to judge Best in Show?” Westminster’s David Frei told me. “Close your eyes and point—you’re going to hit a great dog.”
At the very top are the all-arounders. Less than 1 percent of the three thousand–plus AKC judges around the world are jacks-of-all-trades, eligible to judge every breed.
Simply put, a judge is looking for the dog that best approximates a perfect specimen as laid out in the breed standard and measured in any number of ways. A dog that is known to be a good representation of the standard is said to be “typey,” because “type” is what makes an Aussie truly an Aussie. As the dog writer Tom Horner once wrote, “Type is the sum of those points that make a dog look like its own breed and no other.” (There is such a thing, however, as being too typey. This would mean generically attractive in an entirely uninteresting way; to use an apt but extremely dated analogy, it is like Richard Grieco as compared to Johnny Depp.)*
In analyzing the “structure” of a dog, the judge is assessing it as something between a fashion model and an architectural installation. Several unfamiliar terms come from horses: “withers,” for instance, is the term for the high point of the back, after the neck, and is the point from which height (to floor) is measured. Other terms are more familiar and make the poor animal seem like a side of beef; they are terms shared, in fact, with actual sides of beef sliced apart by butchers: Brisket, flank, and hock are all terms used in show judging.
* * *
ANNOTATED ILLUSTRATION OF A DOG’S STRUCTURE
One thing working in judges’ favor is that all breeds have roughly the same number of bones—between 319 and 321,* depending on the length of the tail (or, in the case of Aussies, a dog that’s either docked or naturally tailless). That simplifies things a little. Good judges also hone this “eye” over time, first in the breeds they know best and then slowly in other breeds the more they study and judge them, so that they can survey a row of stacked dogs and immediately rule out or focus on certain specimens. This is a difficult thing to imagine for those of us who haven’t spent a lifetime obsessing about canine perfection, but the general idea isn’t so hard to grasp; it is the ineffable sense that all humans feel when something just looks right—or wrong.
Pat Hastings is one of the most familiar names in dog showing. She is a former professional handler who began showing dogs in 1959 and is today an accomplished judge. Though she had no recollection of him when I spoke to her by phone, it so happens that she judged Jack in his first show as a finished champion, way back in Lackawanna, when he was basically a rookie. Hastings chastised Kimberly, who had impulsively chosen to handle him that day because of a conflict in Heather’s schedule, for putting too much product in his hair, but she still pulled him out as one of the two best dogs, giving him a hard look despite Kimberly’s faux pas before making him runner-up, as Best of Opposite, to the bitch that Hastings had selected as Best of Breed. That bitch was a finished champion with a professional handler.
Hastings, who resides in Washington State, is somewhat unique among judges in that she makes her full-time living in dogs. Most are either gainfully employed or retired. But Hastings, who retired from a career as a professional handler after her husband and handling partner, Bob, died in 2002, writes for magazines, sells books, evaluates litters of puppies, and travels around giving seminars about breeding, handling, and judging—these travels in turn increase her exposure and facilitate far-flung judging assignments.
Currently she is approved to judge “almost four groups”—Working, Herding, and Non-Sporting—plus “twenty-two of the twenty-seven terriers.” And she admits what seems obvious: “There is absolutely no way in the world anyone could memorize all standards.” A good judge, then, just has “an idea in mind of what this breed should look like—its proportions and angles and head.” Foremost, she says, a judge should be able to recognize a breed by its head and silhouette. “If it was behind a fence and all you can see is the head, can you identify it? And if it’s on a hill, with the sun behind it? That’s where I start.”
It is absurd to expect judges to suppress their own tastes. Preferences are clearly an influence. “It shouldn’t have an effect, but get real,” says Hastings. “Judging is one hundred percent relative.”
To Hastings the most important thing is that the judge look at the breed standard “as a blueprint that allows that breed to do the job it was bred for. That’s what it was written for.” She thinks it’s crucial for a good judge to go and watch “these dogs doing when they’re meant to do.” In the case of Aussies, watch them herd. “But all standards are open to interpretation. Plus, everybody uses one side of the brain more than the other. If you’re analytical, you’re more influenced by structure and motion; if you’re an emotional, artistic type, you’re much more influenced by cute and pretty and hair and face, and you are who you are. Which is why a dog can go Best in Show one day and get beat in bre
ed the next.”
As I heard Helen Lee Jones, an AKC judge whose background is in poodles and dalmatians, explain it, “Every breed standard is determined by the function of that dog and calls for very specific characteristics.” To use an example of a breed that outsiders sometimes confuse with the Aussie, a border collie moves in a crouched position that looks a little sneaky, but if an Aussie were to move that way, he’d be judged as shy or tentative—either of which would be a major problem in that dog’s ability to do its job.
Likewise, the Aussie is slightly longer than tall, befitting its agile nature. By contrast, a Doberman pinscher is a square breed—a sound one has the same length from chest to rump (or, rather, from forechest to buttocks) as from the withers to the ground. Most breed standards keep these things at least a little vague and general, but in some standards the authors have spelled out distances exactly. A good example is the golden retriever. The America’s Sweetheart of dogs according to its AKC breed standard, is “measured from the breastbone to the point of the buttocks is slightly greater than the height at the withers in a ratio of 12:11.”
Tails vary greatly and have purposes that can be generalized. If you know that a breed is supposed to work in water, its tail serves as a rudder, so a water dog that holds its tail upright is going to lack that rudder and be a less good swimmer for it.
Once a judge has eyeballed a dog and employed whatever personal tricks are helpful for assessing certain elements—say, using the thumb and index finger in the “I crush your head” position to approximate a particular distance—he next must “put his hands on the dog.” Something you inevitably hear when people are talking about how a new, exciting dog looks is, “Did you put your hands on him?” There are several reasons for this. For one thing, hair gets in the way. On coated breeds it’s very difficult to assess a dog’s chest by sight, and many breeds—Aussies, for instance—emphasize chest size in a major way because a shallow chest would inhibit heart and lung capacity. An Australian shepherd with a chest that stopped above the elbows, for instance, could never do its job.
