It’s enough to make a cat laugh!

Press, 11 October 1979, Page 21

It’s enough to make a cat laugh!

From

JOHN WILSON,

a former

“Press” staff writer, in Geneva

The appearance of posters around Geneva advertising an "exposition canine” at nearby Evian naturally caught the attention of two expatriate New Zealanders who had shown their own Afghan hounds at shows around New Zealand. We drove the 40 kilometres from Geneva, across the border into France, in trepidation that we would find New Zealand standards shown up badly. At an international show in Europe, we thought, we would probably see superb animals shown impeccably — there were to be 1600 dogs, from France, Switzerland, Germany, the Soviet Union, Belgium, Austria, and even Africa. But we left Evian at the

end of the day satisfied that the “colonial” feelings of inferiority with which we had approached the town in the morning had been quite unwarranted.

Accustomed to the stringent requirements made of exhibitors at New Zealand shows, we were surprised to see conduct in the ring that no New Zealand judge would have tolerated. The exhibitors themselves were a ragged, untidy lot. They made at best desultory attempts to stop their dogs sprawling, even fighting, while they were waiting in the ring. They smoked casually, chatted with onlookers, and left the ring for a light or a drink while

some other exhibitor’s dog was being judged. The point of a show is, of course, to assess dogs not their owners, and the judge’s tolerance of lax behaviour among the exhibitors we might have let pass, except that the way he went about judging the dogs themselves seemed, to our New Zealand eyes, even more extraordinary. He made no attempt to feel the dogs’ forms — although the flowing coat of an Afghan hound can, notoriously, conceal grave faults in an animal’s body. He did not require the dogs to be “set up” in the position in which faults in form can be most easily detected. Height at the shoulder and dentition seemed to be all he thought important.

Assessment of movement is critical in judging Afghans, but the judge at Evian was content to see dogs led or followed in any fashion, in any direction, and at any pace, in such close confines that any approach to the flowing movement at which

Afghans can excel was out of the question.

The circle in which all the dogs are run round the perimeter of the ring after the individual examinations was all collision and confusion, with dogs cutting each other off, leashes becoming tangled,

and exhibitors tripping up. It was Continental traffic on a small scale. What had seemed a mess to New Zealand eyes degenerated into near chaos when the judge suddenly realised, towards the end of his judging of one class, that he had already dismissed a dog he wanted

to include in his final assessment.

Whereupon he led a merry chase out of the ring, out of the building, trailing behind him a disorderly procession of dogs, exhibitors, and bewildered spectators until the missing dog was lo-

cated and judging concluded on the spot far from the official ring.

Any small New Zealand show is better ordered than we found this major international “exposition” to be. But the dogs themselves provided the final, most pleasing, surprise. There were dogs at the Evian show whose magnificence shone through the casual showing and apparently negligent judging.

But the best New Zealand dogs would have held their own easily and stood comparison with the best of the 84 Afghans in the show. If the dogs and the showing standards at Evian were typical of a big European event, New Zealand dog owners can hold their heads high.