What Has Happened To The Retriever Hunt Tests?

??by Chris Robinson

It takes quite a bit these days to get me to climb on the soapbox as age and experience have tempered the burning desire to “right a wrong,” something which is a fierce fire in the heart of every successful investigative reporter which is what I do in “my other life.” For more than 40 years I’ve been engaged in this frequently stress- ful, hectic and often dangerous journalistic genre along the way collecting a wall filled with awards from the pro- fession for stories I’ve done as well as more than a few lumps, both literal and figurative, including one contempt of court citation for refusing to reveal the sources of a story I and a fellow re- porter had done.

It has been said that one of the vital traits of an investigative reporter is that they must have a low threshold of in- dignation which is a polite way of saying it doesn’t take a whole lot to get us ticked off. However, as I’ve matured in the profession –some less charitable editors have referred to it as gotten lazier– I’ve noted that it takes a much more egregious outrage to breach that threshold. In order to make the now somewhat arduous climb to the top of the soapbox, the topic has to be something about which I care and what’s occurring has to be deeply offensive, not just to me but to a whole lot of other folks.

One such topic is the AKC’s retriever hunt tests and what has happened to a really great concept–a non-competitive test for hunters and their dogs. It has reached the point in some areas of the country where the tests have become so difficult and tricky, laden with so many traps for the dogs, that even veteran retriever field trial participants, no strangers to tricky, trap-filled tests, are shaking their heads in disbelief at what judges are requiring dogs to do in order to earn an orange ribbon.

It was never supposed to be like this. The two men who wrote the original regulations for the AKC’s retriever hunt test program, A. Hamilton Rowan and Michael Diesu, envisioned a wonderful program in which retrievers would be tested on the things that hunters would ordinarily want their dogs to be able to do. The tests were supposed to simulate usual hunting situations as much as is possible, albeit in an artificially created situation. They were supposed to be a fun means for just regular, run-of-the-mill hunters who actually hunted with their dogs to evaluate the dogs’ training and abilities in a non-competitive situation. What they have become instead is a highly competitive sport dom- inated by professional trainers and a near horror show for the dogs as the tests have become so difficult that they require the dogs to ignore their natural instincts, in many instances, including sometimes at the senior level but frequently at the mas- ter level, in order to complete them. In other words, retriever hunt tests have become little more than another version of retriever field trials.

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Posted by Alex on Apr 26 2017. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.