BREED NOTES
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WRI's Comments at Manchester 2008 |
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I very much appreciated being invited to judge my own favourite breed here, and enjoyed the occasion greatly. The entry of 158 was very satisfactory and the quality was pretty high. I was of course particularly pleased by the top winners and the Best of Breed winner (see below in Junior Dog) was very much what I am looking for in a good Border Terrier. The Bitch CC winner (Limit Bitch), as well as having many other virtues, has one of the best fronts around. Would that more of the breed had fronts like her! Bad fronts are, in my opinion, probably the most common fault in the breed today – pretty well in every country in which I judge, and it is something on which breeders need to work. Another issue is size and we should not forget that the standard calls for 15 ½ lbs (!) as the top size for dogs – they should also be able to be spanned - and many were not. One final point and that is that the picture which I have in my head of perfect balance in the Border Terrier and my interpretation of the breed standard’s requirement of ‘fairly long’ seems to be somewhat out of step with modern thinking. The modern trend seems to me to produce too many dogs which I believe to be ‘long’ rather than ‘fairly long’ – more particularly many which are too long in loin. Some people seem to attribute the word ‘racy’ in the standard, to the body of the Border when in fact it refers to the hindquarters. The American breed standard, to which many well known and revered UK breeders contributed when it was put together, calls for proportions where the Border Terrier’s required height to the withers is equal to, or slightly greater than, its length from the withers to the root of the tail. I agree with that and believe that is what is meant in the UK standard by ‘fairly long’. |
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