JECs – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

By Caroline Coile

We’ve all been there. We take our chance on a permit judge. We watch while the judge proceeds to butcher the standard. We blame the judge. Maybe we should blame our parent clubs’ Judges’ Education Committees (JECs). The fact is that far too many JECs do a poor job of educating new judges, supplying them with vague, conflicting or biased information. Do you know what your JEC is telling new judges? Do you even know who is on the JEC? The answer to both should be YES. Their teachings are directing our future judges about what is right and wrong in our breeds, and their members are deciding what is to be taught. These people, more than anyone in our parent clubs, hold the future of our breeds in their hands.

JEC members are made up of breeders and exhibitors, with their own biases and agendas. In most clubs the JEC chair is appointed by the President or Board, and the chair then chooses their members and mentors. This is one of the most important appointments the Club will ever make. Can the chair choose members from varying backgrounds representing the diversity of styles consistent with the standard? Or will the chair choose only members who echo their agenda or share their bloodlines? Perhaps the chair and President are one and the same, or share similar bloodlines. How might this affect what they preach?

JEC members dictate what appears in presentations or published materials. Mentors make up a larger group of approved breeders or judges who have been deemed capable of imparting breed knowledge on a one on one basis.

When I asked for opinions from a wide group of exhibitors about their parent clubs’ JEC, I got an earful. Some were satisfied with the choice of mentors. These tended to be from clubs in which every single breeder-judge was named as an official mentor, or in which every breeder who met the AKC’s requirements of 12 years in the breed was a mentor. In both cases these JEC’s allowed mentors who may not have agreed with their own philosophies but allowed alternative interpretations to be presented to prospective judges of the breed.

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Posted by Alex on Jun 28 2019. 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.