What IS a Non-Sporting Dog?

[EweSheep]

Quote:
I will always be owned by Kees. My old guy is 13 now, sadly slowing down but doing fine for his age. He's much happier now that winter is here.

That name sounds familiar. I'll have to see where the Kees pedigree database has been moved to and look it up.

I looked it up and I am glad he had several offsprings but there was a daughter of his named Pepsi, owned by a lady in Farmer City that raises Kees too. She did say she was not the greatest specimen but a very loving companion.

Tigger had very good conformation even he has retired from the show ring. We do have pictures of him somewhere LOL! We called him the "Laughing Kees" because he always have a smile no matter how bad your day was! His favorite thing to do, he would go outside and then we go on a chase with him to be avoiding being caught. He LOVED it and laugh all the time because we were chasing him. He was a riot! Very very loveable dog you can ever ask for! He loves everybody but he was very peculiar with black people coming at the door, he would growled at them...not very friendly at all. I don't know why but he has a thing about black folks. Any other race, no problem!

 

[wordgirl]

Oh - thank you, keesmom and vicki2x2! THAT makes it make sense. Yes, the UKC groupings do seem to be set out a little more logically.

Thanks to everyone for helping me figure that out.

 

[BlacksheepCardigans]

AKC keeps trying to re-align the groups but it's an incredibly difficult process. Everybody knows that the current groups don't make a ton of sense, but re-alignment has to be a once-and-for-all (or at least for-lots-of-years) process, so they have to get it right. So should, for example, Poodles be in the sporting group? A future "companion" group? The working group? They've done all that and more in the course of their breed development. Should Elkhounds be in Hound, Working, Northern, or Herding? They fit all of them.

Where you put a breed also tends to subtly change the character of that breed's conformation. Many of us have thought for years that Danes should be moved from the working group to the hound group, because the Working group tends to emphasize size and mass and de-emphasize movement. You can win a Working group without being able to move soundly. We think it would be better for the breed to be forced to have great movement to compete, and de-emphasize height, which is more the case in the hound group and is just as true to the dog's historic job (and more in line with the standard, which says Danes should be 30/28 inches but in fact you are pretty much dead in the water unless they're 36/33).

Every single breed has those kind of questions, and people who feel super strongly about them. Even in my own current breed (Cardigan Welsh Corgis), while the breed has only ever been a herding dog, they're a dwarfed dog. Judges who don't know dwarfed structure can make really terrible decisions about which dog to reward. So it would be tempting to ask for a separate group of dwarfed dogs, so judges have to know what makes a sound short-legged dog. And then there are the practical considerations; if there are fifteen groups a show day could end up going until six at night, which is exhausting for everybody and the judges can't fly out that day.

The last time they tried a group re-alignment was just a year or two ago, and everybody got so furious at everybody else that they had to table the discussions indefinitely.