Article: Breed Standards: How do we make sense of them?

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Breed Standards: How do we make sense of them?


Breed standards are HIGHLY subject to interpetation and 10 people reading the same standard can very well get 10 totally different mental pictures. So how can we use a breed standard to keep breed uniformity and, more importantly, how do we decide what interpetation is not only correct but healthy for the breed? To do that you have to go past what your breed standard says and learn how the dog's body functions and what physical structures help or hinder the dog in completion of a given task, specifically, those in which it was developed to perform weither house pet or gladiator. This will require quite a bit of heart and dedication on your part because you need to intensely educate yourself in dog anatomy, dog movement and the effect of the way a dog is built on how he moves, what your breed was bred to do and what kind of body and mind it took to do it, watch your breed do what it was bred to do, or in the case of an inhumane, illegal, or no longer existant breed purpose, something as close to it as possible, and finally, you must develop your eye so you can spot the traits that make a dog look and function more like his breed or less like it.

Now, I am not saying there is an absolutely precise physical structure a dog needs to have. Most traits have acceptable extremes of variation and if a trait lies somewhere within those extremes, then it's fine. You see this is what breed standards are (or at least supposed to be) all about. Defining what the extremes (e.g. ears anywhere from slightly pricked, to 75% pricked) and absolutes (e.g. shoulder angulation of 50º) are the job of a breed standard but we should not just read a standard and accept its words or our interpetation of it as what is right. Using it as a starting point, we need to do our research and one way to do that is to dare to have discussions about our interpetation with people who disagree with it, because weither right, partially right, or totally wrong, there is something to be learned from every opinion. In the very least we learn what ISN'T right. But most often, even if we still think the other person is wrong, it gets us to think and really evaluate what it is we believe we know about our breed and how it should be built. Open mindness can teach you a world of things if you let it!

I totally believe that the conformation (show) ring cannot completely judge a given dog's ability to perform the task it was bred for but I do think it has its place in dog breeding because when in the hands of knowledgable, open-minded judges, breeders, and handlers, dog shows serve to give the breed a unique, physical identity, that is consistent from dog to dog. But evenstill, we cannot use it as our sole measuring stick when evaluating how well a particular dog can perform the task for which it was bred unless we do that task with the dog or something that closely mimics it. Competing with our dogs in working/performance sports keeps us in a reality check because being human none of us are immune to falling in love with a trait that we think helps the breed but in reality makes it less able to perform.

Though I don't agree with everything that they do, I love the concept the United Kennel Club (UKC) has put forth of the "total dog" which means, in a nutshell, you breed for all the traits the breed is meant to posess, not just some of them. These traits can be lumped under the catagories of conformation, working ability, health, and temperament. Pretending for a moment perfection is attainable, I do not think we can reach true perfection in a breed unless we hit perfect in ALL of the catagories. For is not something that is perfect, something that is complete, finished, and at the highest goal it can reach? With that definition in mind, if we reached perfection in less than all of the catagories, there still is farther to go, a goal in which we have not reached. That is not total perfection, only partial. And if we love our breed we should strive to, or at least condone those who do, bring the breed as close to total perfection as it can possibly get.

It is not an easy goal, partially because of the elusiveness of perfection, but much moreso because human nature is the whatever-I-think-is-right-and-if-you-don't-think-it-it's-wrong midset. But really, how can we ever know for sure what is right and what is wrong if we don't challenge what we know with a differing point of view? If we don't know what the other points of view (POV) are, and the reasons for these views, how on earth can we possibly know if we're right and they are wrong? How can we compare our POV to that of one we know little or nothing about? Makes you think doesn't it?

I can't remember where I saw this quote, I think it was in a Richard Stratton book, but it made so much sense. Parephrased it says "The more you learn, the more you realize just how much there is out there to know, and how utterly much of it you do not know." That is so true. There is so much knowledge that can be gained that you couldn't get it all even if you lived for a billion years. Knowledge is infinant, and really if all of mankinds knowledge that he's attained in his existance was brought together and made into a liquid, it would be drops into an ocean. That's how big knowledge is.

Love your breed and get to know it. Find something as close to as the breed's original purpose and do it with your dog. Watch how the dog moves as it works. Do this same task with other dogs; observe how they move. Rank each dog from the best to the worse then examine their physical structures. Eventually you are going to see common traits between the best performers!

And now I end this article with a quote that I made up. "If you aren't breeding for the total dog, what ARE you breeding for?" May we some day live in a world in which ideal specimines of the dog breeds live and walk among us. Nothing is impossible for those who refuse to believe the impossible exists.
 
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