The Sanctity Of Standards

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76 – February, 2025

By Wayne Cavanaugh

My introduction to the sanctity of breed standards began in 1990. I had just started working at AKC in New York when a reasonable and simple, we thought, program was underway to unify the format of the standards. It was pretty straightforward–paragraphs, where necessary, would be rearranged so all standards would have a similar outline. It would start with a general description, then flow from heads to tails. It was the same order judges use for examinations and the way most people think. No word changes, just the order. Bedlam ensued. It was if AKC was attempting to re-etch the Ten Commandments.

Lots of activity ensued. Breed clubs searched for lawyers. The lawyers asked questions that had never occurred to anyone before. Who actually owns the breed standards? Hmmm. Was it the breed clubs or the AKC? Safe to say the shaving cream hit the fan.

An entire novel couldn’t cover the events that followed but the dust eventually settled, perhaps from sheer exhaustion. At the end of the day, AKC wrote and adopted a well-written, comprehensive, four-page document called Guidelines for Writing Breed Standards. To keep peace in the valley, the guidelines allowed that standards written prior to 1989 could be revised without reformatting. Some say it was much ado about nothing. Others say it was the beginning of the end of civilization. Fortunately, most opinions landed somewhere in the middle, and no one was injured.

I’m a fan of the Greyhound standard. It’s the shortest standard with 223 well-chosen words. When applied to an understanding of how Greyhounds run and hunt, and a study of the paintings of the era, it provides a clear picture without using a protractor or adding 2,000 more words. Especially if you’ve read the poem, The Properties of a Good Greyhound written by Dame Juliana Berners in 1496. Legend has it that Dame Berners was a fly-fishing nun and the author of A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle. Loosely translated from English to, well, English, the book title is something like: A Treatise of Fishing with an Angle. Similarly, her Greyhound poem from the book translates something like this:

Click here to read the complete article
76 – February, 2025

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Posted by AnthonyA on Jan 31 2025. 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.