From Whence We Came
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By Wayne Cavanaugh
I had a good conversation recently with a great, highly-respected judge about learning new breeds. He started in the sport many, many years ago with a breed in which movement was king. His thought was that because of his initial background, he wondered if he sometimes put too much emphasis on movement over type in his newer breeds. Accordingly, he was working on learning about the subtleties and details of breed type in those breeds. That simple insight alone tells you exactly why he is a highly-respected judge. He has the passion to learn and continually improve no matter how long he’s been in the sport. As important, he was keenly aware of his beginnings and how that perspective consciously or subconsciously could affect his outlook over a half-century later.
We don’t often think about how our impressions are shaped by when, where, and how we started in the sport. How much do our earliest impressions of dogs, people, and presentation create our template for the sport? I’d say plenty.
One of my closest friends, the late Dr. Jim Edwards, and I worked together at the AKC back in the 1990s. We first met showing dogs twenty years prior to that. We saw the sport the same way. We shared opinions on the way dogs were being shown and trimmed and we shared a similar view of the world in general. We saw nearly all dogs of all breeds the same. We liked the same dogs about 90% of the time. Jim was a biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. My undergraduate degree was in Literature, with a contemporary American poetry concentration. Jim always said that the difference in the way we evaluated dogs, as subtle as it was, it that he tended to judge more from the inside out while my tendencies were more from the outside in. Of course, he was right. Our evaluation processes were affected by how our disparate science and art backgrounds shaped the way we learned to see.
When young professional handlers catch my eye in the ring, I begin to wonder where they came from, who they worked for, where they learned. Breeders, judges, owners, and exhibitors, anyone involved in the sport, I cannot help but wonder how they got started. How did they find out about the sport, how did they get their first dog, who were their early mentors and how did they meet them? But most of all, I’m interested in how all of those factors come together to shape the way they see the dogs and the sport.
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Posted by AnthonyA
on Nov 13 2020. Filed under Current Articles, Featured.
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