262 The Sporting Dog 



week after sticklers for carefulness in locating 

 birds. The most demoralizing judges are those 

 who have in their minds no fixed rules at all, but 

 divide up the awards as politicians distribute 

 nominations — to satisfy geography and various 

 interests. Still, judges seldom pick a poor dog, 

 and at the end of every season the best ones are 

 found to have done the most winning. Granting 

 this, it is likely that field trials will begin to de- 

 cline, — as coursing invariably does in such a case, 

 — unless the owners find judges upon whose 

 mental processes as well as moral intent they can 

 rely with some certainty. A step toward a more 

 reliable method would be to abandon the three- 

 judge custom at field trials and employ one judge, 

 giving him power to select his own assistants to 

 follow different dogs. As the practice now goes, 

 winners are often selected by the judge who has 

 the most of that petty self-assertion so commonly 

 found in company with narrow comprehension ; 

 or by a compromise in which each judge's first 

 choice is set back for a dog not really first-class, 

 but good enough for a sort of "nobody objects" 

 agreement. Progress and experience may be ex- 

 pected to adjust these tribunal troubles, which, 

 after all, only show that high-class dogs are more 

 abundant than they used to be at field trials, and 

 that finer powers of analysis are demanded to 

 determine the many close contests. 



