Death, Taxes & Revised AKC Judging Requirements

by Caroline Coile

Judging is not an entitlement. Judging becomes a farce if the person pointing has less experience in the breed than most of the other people in the ring. Judging, and specifically lack of breed-specific knowledge, is the #1 source of complaints from exhibitors.

Becoming approved to judge a group should not bankrupt your savings. Becoming approved to judge multiple groups should not take longer than becoming approved to perform brain surgery. Becoming approved to judge all breeds should not require becoming an AARP emeritus.

Those are the two viewpoints any architect of the AKC judging approval process must constantly balance. Make it too easy and you risk having judges who don’t know enough about way too many of the breeds they’re judging. Make it too hard and only a few will ever make it to all-breed or even multi-group status.

For most of the last decade it’s been accused of being too hard. In September, 2015 the rules were relaxed and the last two years have seen the greatest leap in additional breed approvals that any- one can recall. Judges could go from a few breeds to a group in a couple of years. And if they didn’t quite get all the breeds in a group, as long as the breeds they had constituted 80% of the entries in the group they could still judge at the group level under the 80% rule. That might mean for some the very first dog of a low-entry breed they ever encountered was when they judged it in group. No longer did they have to justify their placements to an AKC Rep, who many claimed didn’t know their breed anyway. Once a year they were observed for proper procedure, but they could place the dogs however they felt and need not offer any ex- planation. New judges were happy as they added breeds at unheard of rates, but older judges understandably resented that what took them years could now be achieved in months. Exhibitors, too, found many of the newer judges lacking in breed-specific knowledge. Show chairs were pleased they could more easily fill their panels, and with new faces. But they weren’t so pleased as the complaints from exhibitors rose. We all knew it had to change, and some judges even raced to get as many breeds as possible before the door closed.

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Posted by Alex on Jan 13 2018. 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.