Sporting Breed Conformation Champions Should Also Be Good Field Dogs

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310 – April, 2022

By Chris Robinson

Dogs with conformation championships and field titles are of immense importance to the future of virtually every sporting breed. “Nonsense,” say the people whose canine world begins and ends with the show ring. “Baloney,” is the snort from those folks whose philosophy is, “If a dog is a good hunter, who cares how it looks.”

As is usually the case with people on the extreme edge of anything, both sides are wrong. The conformation-only folks have given us dogs that may be fashionable in the show ring but are, in all too many instances–particularly with the breeds split between “show” types and “field types”–not particularly interested in birds. On the other hand, the field-only people, with many breeds in the sporting group, have produced dogs that bear little or no resemblance to what’s called for in the breed standards. Standards, it should be remembered, were written–for the most part–many years ago by people who actually hunted with their dogs and were describing dogs capable of spending a day in the field or the marsh. What’s more, the “If a dog is a good hunter who cares how it looks” dogs frequently do their job on heart alone. They have conformation flaws that cause them to work so hard in the field that it shortens their effective lives as hunting dogs. While some of the breed standards have been revised over the years, for the most part, they still reflect much of the original writers’ intentions.

Unfortunately, there are too many people in the dog world today that have the mistaken idea that what is currently winning in the show ring for any breed is the ideal specimen. This false notion has led to the near demise of several sporting breeds as working hunting dogs. While they are capable of earning championships in the show ring as well as group placements and even a BIS, they can’t, as the saying goes, “Find a pork chop in a phone booth” and their attitude toward birds can be summed up in a single word, “Meh.”

Click here to read the complete article
310 – April, 2022

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