I make no apology to Gabrielle for sharing this from her F/B page - think it is worthy of comment by the differing audience of Champdogs breeders/showers - your views, folks?

http://www.thedogplace.org/ShowPlace/Preferred-Type_Gammill-091.asp

The words "I prefer" have never appeared in a breed standard.     Yet I often hear of judges talking about what they prefer.   Seems they soon lose sight of the standard once they start thinking about what they prefer.

I have listened to discussions where a judge declared that he judged on heads     weird, because there's so much more to a dog than a good head 

I can remember when showing my Burmese,  at the one show, she won all her classes, Best Blue etc.   Yet the CC was withheld.    I felt I had to ask the judge (nicely)  why.   She told me the cat was wonderful, but " she didn't look like a Bambino Cat "  (BIG name in the breed at the time)  

My reply was, that I had entered my cat in the Burmese classes, not the Bambino classes.

A look around the hall confirmed though that the judge had put up a Bambino Cat in all her other classes.

Amazed really. What are the breed clubs doing about this as surely they should be the ambassadors of their breeds and should be making a stand against this ?

Hum.  For starters, all judging is subjective, and there is always going to be an element of a judge putting up 'their type'.   Clearly there should be no variety of type IF people bred to the Breed Standard, but this all boils down to the individual interpretation of the Standard too.   Further, all judges (and given we have a majority of Breeder/Judges in the UK where overseas (USA) judges tend to come from the ranks of handlers) should be judging based on not only the Standard but with knowledge of what's going wrong with a breed.   In other words although it's not all about one aspect of the dog - if for eg. fronts are deteriorating in a breed, those hounds with an incorrect front, should, in my opinion, not stand over a dog with a good one, regardless of the rest of the animal.    And yes, I tend to look at heads first (relevant in my breed) and if I don't see, in my opinion, a typical head/ears/eye colour, that marks a dog down in my view!!   I could never put up a dog with a poor/untypical head.

I suppose over a season, this rewarding a preferred type evens out so everybody gets a look in - or should. And exhibitors do learn who is likely to favour which dog/type, so simply wouldn't bother entering.  This is also why generally speaking, all-rounder judges get a bigger entry ..... and may well be able to focus on the whole animal based on the Standard, where a breeder-judge doesn't.

On the other hand, as happened in my breed in recent years, a top winning dog took it all - and that made it hard for any but a strong judge not to go with the flow for fear of not knowing what they were doing.   Once on a roll .......... and extending that, newcomers always flock to the top winner of the day = a breed can quickly deteriorate because ALL dogs have faults!!!