g a l o d y

I am afraid this is going to become a working test rant…  Not a rant against organisers, judges, stewards or the people who help run tests, all of whom give up their time freely and generously, but against the testing system.

It would be easy to hear this as sour grapes, too, which it is not intended to be…

Grey worked her ass off for me yesterday and performed 3 tests perfectly - according to my judgement, my values and what I want to see my dog do.  The 4th test was the water test, and she dropped the dummy on the floor for that – it just missed my hand.  However, despite the fact that her only mistake (in my eyes) was this, the Water test was our highest score, since she scored 24/25.

Hmm…

She performed the easy seen retrieve perfectly, with no help from me.  (Beyond shouting ‘Lost’.)  And she performed the memory retrieve with off-lead heelwork again perfectly, with excellent heelwork.  She did not sit and present at the end of her retrieves, as we don’t train our dogs to do this.  It is not required by KC regs and it is not convenient on a shoot to expect a dog to sit and present game.  At the end of the day, the judge in his ‘comments to competitors’ said that he had given extra marks for sits/presents, because they reflected ‘finesse’ and he had docked dogs which hadn’t done this.  So, for our 2 retrieves, which should have had almost top marks, Grey got 23 and 18.  The latter was a huge penalty simply for not sitting and presenting, but I can think of nothing else she did wrong:  She heeled perfectly, sat on one command, heeled back and easily retrieved the memory.

So this is my complaint about working tests:  That the marks are entirely arbitrary and what is valued varies, according to each individual judge’s preferences.  One judge might want to see sits and presents; another judge might prefer delivery to hand and give no additional marks for sits/presents; another judge might dock only 1 mark for dropping a dummy after exiting the water; whilst another judge might dock half marks for this.

Then we move onto the hunting test.  Since there were 38 dogs in Novice and one small patch of grass to run them on, we had been told that hunting was not being marked – only steadiness to shot and dummy.  I guess we might complain that arguably the greatest and most important aspect of these dogs is their hunting ability, and here it is not even being tested.  We might wonder whether it really is possible to have classes with 38 dogs.  Or we might conclude, oh well, perhaps working tests really should become a glorified retrieving test and all hunting elements before the shot dropped – perhaps it is better that way.  But all that is by the by…

When it was Grey’s turn to complete this test, she hunted very well and got out to the sides of the field.  She used the wind well, going out in front of it and hunting back into me.  It was not a hot day and I was glad she had been able to show what she was capable of.  Then I heard a click from the starting pistol and saw the dummy flying through the air, so I sat her.  The gun had not fired.  Grey sat instantly to whistle and was rock steady to the dummy.  The judge wanted to re-do this, so the gun would go off.  So, again I hunted Grey up a bit and he tried to fire the gun – but it didn’t go off again.  Still the judge wanted us to re-do this, with the gun.  He asked us to wait whilst the next person went.

This was fair enough, I thought:  If this whole test was entirely about steadiness to shot and dummy falling and not about hunting, then the shot should be the same for all dogs.  So we waited, another dog ran, and we went again.  This time Grey hunted rubbishly.  She had already been over the ground once, and she knew there was nothing there.  But – hey-ho, I thought – the hunting isn’t being marked, and even if it is, she did it great the first time.  This time the gun fired and Grey sat and was rock steady.  (For the third time.  So, yes, we actually did this 3 times in a row, with the steadiness perfect each time.)

Yet, for this test, she scored 17!!!  Perhaps the hunting was being marked – but, if so, Grey hunted great the first time.  And we were explicitly told that it wasn’t a hunting test.  In his comments at the end of the day, this judge said that he had zeroed any dogs which weren’t steady on this test – which again did suggest it was entirely a steadiness test, since they would gain no points through hunting if they were not steady.  Yet again, lack of clarity and lack of information about exactly what is being judged and with what criteria in mind.

So, by the end of the day, I felt that not only had Grey performed well enough to be in the cards, but she might even have won.  I’ve done a lot of working tests now and I think I’m a pretty good about knowing when we’re in the cards.  Only to find she hadn’t placed at all and these scores in no way reflect the way she carried out the tests.

I know I might be taking all this a bit too seriously, but the fact is that the working test system is hopelessly flawed in the UK.  There is no clear concensus about what a good dog is or about what should be scored.  On one of the retrieves, another competitor told me that the judge had marked her down lots for using her whistle to recall the dog after he had picked the dummy – this judge had arbitrarily decided that any whistle-use was going to be penalised, regardless of how fast or well the dog completed the retrieve as a result of the whistle!

The result is that you can finish the day and think that you could not have done anything better, had you wanted it – only to then find such terrible scores.  Furthermore, of the 2 judges, one judge gave Grey the 23/25 and 24/25 scores and the other judge gave her 17/25 and 18/25…..

I stress that this is not sour grapes, but a rant against a system which is impossibly flawed because we cannot train for a constantly-shifting standard.

I can think of no other competition, in any area in life, where people are judged without even knowing the rules and what exactly they are supposed to be trying to achieve.  I can think of no other competition where each judge arbitrarily decides for him/herself, without competitors even knowing, what it is they are marking.  It’s a crapshoot, not a serious method of helping breeders assess their dogs.