1 82 British Dogs. 



the improvement of the dog great, but they lack the absolutely necessary 

 qualification of a judge, and as such they are failures. The judge must 

 be a man of order, possessed of a natural ability for clear and accurate 

 comparison and rapid analysis ; he must be able almost at a glance to 

 take in the whole animal, and roughly estimate its approach to his ideal 

 standard of excellence for the breed ; mentally dissect the several pro- 

 perties of each one, and place them in the order in which they approach 

 nearest to his idea of perfection. The qualifications necessary are partly 

 natural and partly acquired by experience without a natural taste for 

 the class of animals he judges together with an aptitude in the arrange- 

 ment of facts, and a power of analogy, no amount of experience will ever 

 give that quickness and decision absolutely necessary to be successful as 

 a judge. 



There is a rather widespread opinion that to be a good judge a man 

 must first have been a successful breeder. That is I think a position 

 quite untenable. There is no doubt much to be gained by experience in 

 breeding. The really successful breeder not the merely lucky breeder 

 the man who starts to breed with a defined purpose, and keeps that 

 in view until he attains it, has gained much that will raise his qualifica- 

 tions as a judge ; but it does not make him one, for the simple fact 

 is, that that man was a judge to begin with. On the other hand, the 

 effect of such experience on some minds is narrowing and prejudicial, 

 and in all cases it requires the counteracting and correctional influence 

 of the experience of others. 



That experience as a breeder is not absolutely necessary to the making 

 of a capable judge, I might put forward many instances in dog show 

 circles, but it is perhaps better to show the fact without drawing on 

 that source. Readers at least country readers must, many of them, 

 have known in the days when the butcher and the farmer dealt with 

 each other directly, and beasts and sheep were " sold by hand," many a 

 clever dealer who could value each of a herd to a fraction, and at a word 

 could tell in what points the animal was best and wherein wanting, and 

 yet such men may never have farmed an acre, and never bred either a 

 cow or a sheep. If we take the case of horse judging it is just the 

 same it is not always either the breeder or the owner that is the best 

 judge, and there are many men who never even owned a "screw" 

 whose judgment is accurate and valuable. The experience gained by 



