Pat Craige-Trotter – Owner-Handlers Get Advice from an Expert

By Joan Harrigan

Originally published September 2017

Owner-handlers looking to grow in the sport of purebred dogs could find no better example to follow than someone who has won 11 Hound Groups at the Garden. It’s almost not necessary to mention her name—but of course, we’re referring to Patricia Craige Trotter.

Her record is incredible—the top sire and dam in Norwegian Elkhound history. One of the first amateur-handled Number One Dog Amongst All Breeds—Ch. Vin-Melca’s Vagabond-in 1970. She’s won numerous Quaker Oats awards, Fido awards, and was the AKC Hound Group Breeder of the Year in 2004. Her book, Born to Win has become a bible for dog breeders, and her AKC Gazette column won a Maxwell award from the Dog Writers’ Association of America.

Most of these accomplishments occurred while she balanced family, dogs, and a full-time job teaching history. She has many rosettes and enormous BIS ribbons, but Trotter also has the very first dog show ribbon she ever won—back in 1947. Her marriage to Chuck Trotter in 1994 started her judging career and reduced the showing of the Elkhounds to occasional weekends, but at heart she is still an owner-handler.

A DIFFERENT TIME

“I grew up in a kinder, gentler, innocent age,” Patricia Craige Trotter says. Growing up in the 1940s in Norfolk, Virginia, Trot- ter was an enterprising and passionate dog lover who created her own opportunities.

At 11 Trotter started her own mobile (“and by that I mean my two legs”) pet grooming business. “I’d knock on the doors of people with dogs with a carton of grooming supplies. For 50 cents I’d wash, groom, de-flea their dog on site and make it look as beautiful as I could!” Trotter started learning to groom at age 10 from Muriel Laubach, a local cocker breeder. Laubach socialized her dogs at Trotter’s elementary school yard while the children were at recess. “I talked with her, and she knew I was passionate,” Trotter recalls. “I asked my mother if I could go to her house after school, and she agreed.”

Cocker Spaniels were the “in” breed at the time, and Laubach taught Trotter to groom and handle them in the ring. Her first purebred, a black cocker, came from Laubach’s kennel. “Dau- Han Cockers were only a mile-and-a-half from my house,” Trotter says. “In the other direction, there was an Airedale kennel, and I worked there, too.” In time, Pat expanded her dog career to grooming at a local vet’s office. Trotter had a full schedule for a teenager—“up early to take care of the dogs, then off to school and working with dogs after school.” She joined the Tidewater Kennel Club, and did any “grunt job” asked of her. She was willing to work and learn, and understood the importance of local kennel clubs. Trotter chaired her first show when she was only 22.

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