I have sometimes likened Westminster to Brigadoon—the imaginary Scottish village celebrated in the Lerner & Loewe 1950s musical. It’s a charmed moment of canine ephemera that appears magically (and with a hell of a lot of hard work) once a year.
Broad assumptions are always a risky bet; just ask anyone in marketing. Yeah, everybody likes to eat but the reality goes off on a zillion tangents from there.
101 Park Avenue, in Manhattan, which houses the AKC Museum of the Dog, is sleek and modern, but on the inside lies a rich material past. The Museum and the AKC’s archives were first housed at the Club’s old headquarters at 51 Madison Avenue, then relocated to St. Louis, and then returned to New York in February of 2019. The collection now takes up several floors, and the Club’s public display is on the first through the third floors.
Sometimes it feels like life’s become one giant, endless festival of weird diseases. Okay, maybe that’s an overstatement but Covid has spawned plenty of unexpected repercussions.
This year has seen an increase of 40 per cent or more in the entries for the Irish Water Spaniel, Sloughi, Lowchen (Little Lion Dog) and Canadian Eskimo Dog compared with 2020.
Of our 196 recognized breeds, literally half–98 of the breeds–are considered low entry breeds.” That’s according to Dr. Charles Garvin, who has exciting news for the future of purebred dogs.
Stories of poor behavior do not seem to surprise us anymore. You can’t help but ask “where do people learn to act the way they do?” I believe the answer is “in the home.”
Judging dogs is a complicated process with many factors in play. Politics, biases and preferences are common human traits. A judge may be extremely knowledgeable but may have some unwitting or unconscious biases running around in their head. Some may be knowledgeable but not confident enough to stay on track – for example, when one handler has the best dog, bitch, and special in two back-to-back breeds.
It is quite hard for us nowadays to imagine just how popular the Smooth Fox Terrier once was. Sadly, he is now quite a rare sight in the US and in his English homeland. However, there once was a time when the “Gentleman Terrier” reigned supreme.
