Voyage of the Beagle

UPDATE: Edited for syntax. Content unchanged.

This most excellent graphic is from the folks at OBEYTHEPUREBREED.COM -- it's also available in Pug.

My first dog of my very own was a beagle. Field-trial bred, she had a chest like a wine cask, limpid eyes and a bay I hope to hear in heaven: it was a deep, beautiful, roaring aauuoooo that lasted endlessly between breaths, and according to neighbors could be heard at least a mile away. That bay was a sound with the power to change the course of a person's life, to make dog-haters and poodle-owners of some, and convince others that a well-lived life must at some point involve keeping a hound pack.

THESEUS
Go, one of you, find out the forester;
For now our observation is perform'd;
And since we have the vaward of the day,
My love shall hear the music of my hounds.
Uncouple in the western valley; let them go:
Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.
We will, fair queen, up to the mountain's top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

HIPPOLYTA
I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding: for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

THESEUS
My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee'd, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tuneable
Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn,
In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly:
Judge, when you hear.

Maybe sometime they'll set that play in the South, and the voices will sound just right.

My parents shuttled my beloved beagle and me to an obedience class run by one William Koehler and his assistant Bob Yankie [a fine hand with a dog -- he did the illustrations for Koehler's first book on dog training]. We "graduated" with a respectable score, but my girl was not an eager participant. Her tail was always down and her warm eyes unhappy, and an observer might have believed the talk that beagles are stubborn dogs, slow learners, and hard to train.

In fact, she may have been the smartest dog I've ever known. She learned like lightning, knew a million tricks, was quickly and absolutely housetrained, hit the back door with a paw to let us know she needed in or out, and never left the kitchen to visit the rest of the house, but at night when the coast was clear would slip across the hall into my brother's bedroom and sleep on his bed. During dinner she would choose a spot between my father's chair and mine and sit up with her forepaws against her chest, and she could hold that position for at least twenty minutes. She looked like one of those pear-shaped toys you can't knock over, her extra weight functioning as ballast.

Beagles can make fine agility dogs: Marietta Huber's Squiggles [on the left] earned a Mach11 and was on the gold medal-winning Mini team at the FCI World Championships in 1998. Squiggles was still enjoying the sport at 15. Beagles are great contraband-sniffing dogs, as demonstrated by the Beagle Brigade in airports across the U.S. The AQIS uses beagles, too, and in the private sector they sniff out termites, gas leaks and, of course, rabbits.

A beagle is all nose and appetite. My girl ran away from the cabin one summer afternoon and returned with her nose raw from glorious hours of sniffing. I'd like to say she came back because she loved us and was sorry in her good-natured way for causing a general panic, but I'm pretty sure she was just hungry.

The secret [food] to training a beagle [food] is finding the right [food] motivator [food]. "Fanatical about food (even after being fed)," says the AQIS, a description beagle lovers will recognize as massive understatement.

I cheered out loud when Uno [on the right, maintaining his boyish figure] won Best in Show last week at Westminster. CBS newsman Bob Schiefffer says he cheered, too, and his wife was so happy she cried. "Beagles are the best dogs that ever were," he stated in his commentary on Face the Nation. Will Uno's win trigger an increase in pet store/puppy mill beagle pups? I hope not -- I want to believe the breed is as popular as it's going to get. Marie over at K9 Solutions has more on the chances of a beagle population boom. If you think you'd like to add a beagle to your family and have decided on the rescue route, check out Beagles & Buddies in El Monte, SoCal and visit your local pound or all-breed rescue.

Me? I'm counting the days until retirement, a place in the country and a roo-rooing hound pack of my own. I heart beagles.

Zamora Hills [and some dog show]

UPDATE: Edited for syntax. Content unchanged.

Michael and Bridget Slaven, both from County Tyrone, Ireland, settled in the hills west of Zamora, CA in the 1800s. The ranch now belongs to their grandson Bill Slaven, host of the Zamora Hills Sheepdog Trial. Click on the photos to make 'em bigger.

Take along a pair of binoculars. The range ewes are set out on a ridge maybe 700 yards distant, and the sheepdog won't be able to see them as he walks with his handler to the post. The dog -- a working border collie -- will run more than half a mile to reach the top. The hills all around are vast and green and empty: it's beautiful countryside, not great for crops, but good for sheep and cattle.

The Slaven family's Zamora Hills Sheepdog Trial is one of the best-known in North America. The dog that wins won't earn points towards a title, since the USBCHA shuns such nonsense, but everyone at the trial will know what that dog is made of. The judge this year is Jack Knox, and with any luck I'll be there with bells on to watch part of it. [Probably Sunday, given the drive and all. Look for a pug.]

If you are going to be anywhere near Northern California from February 15th through the 18th, pack the folding chairs, sunblock and binoculars and follow the directions to Zamora Hills:

Directions to trial site: North on I-5, take Zamora exit, head west, 92B is about 1-1/2 miles from exit. Turn left and the ranch is the first place on the left. From Highway 505 – Take the Zamora exit and head east. Turn right on 92B (about 4 miles from exit).

First run is at 7:00 each morning -- Nursery and Pro-Novice dogs run on Monday. Food and drinks will be available at the trial site. There'll be fine handlers and dogs from as far away as Canada. Bill Berhow will be there: he and his good dog Pete won Soldier Hollow last year. Here are some shots from 2007.

The handler's post -- the Lombardi Tower -- is out of sight on the left. Sheep are set out on the far ridge, at about one o'clock from the orange post in the middle of the photo. There's a dry creek bed between the drive panels and the pen. Sheep are brought around the orange post (rather than around the handler's post) prior to the drive. The shedding ring is to the left of the pen.

The shedding ring is in the middle of the photo, marked with sawdust. The shed's done --- the dog is fetching the sheep to the pen. 2007 judge Bill Berhow is seated on the flatbed truck. The Lombardi Tower [named in honor of rancher Guido Lombardi, a long-time champion of the working border collie in California] is just to the right of the shedding ring.

Top young handler Haley Howard steps down from the tower as Diona [out of sight behind the sheep] brings the range ewes to the shedding ring. Legs at left belong to the judge -- I recognize the knee brace ;~)

End of the day, and Diona is about to put her sheep in the pen. The good ones make it look so easy.

***

Something else is coming up... oh, yeah. Westminster.

The announcer will say something about border collies being great sheepdogs. And smart. Tops in agility. He may say that this or that dog has an AKC "herding title," which means the dog was able to follow tame sheep down a fence line in a small arena. Three times! But the truth is that none of the border collies in the ring at Westminster can work stock. Not one is competitive in agility. Here, in a nutshell, is what the border collies at Westminster are bred for:

Head
The skull is broad and flat between the ears, slightly narrowing to the eye, with a pronounced stop [from Merriam-Webster: "the depression in the face of an animal at the junction of forehead and muzzle"], cheeks deep but not prominent. The muzzle tapering to the nose, is strong and the same length as the skull.

No, that isn't from the AKC standard, but it might as well be, since the conformation ring in the U.S. has all but surrendered to the Australia/New Zealand standard. [You can read more about the border collie and the AKC here.]

Breeding to the conformation standard of Oz means that a border collie pup without that pronounced stop will be sold to a pet home on a spay/neuter contract, no matter how excellent his health and how keen and biddable he may be. His good-looking littermate with the "perfect" stop -- the perhaps slightly more anxious, perhaps somewhat less intelligent pup with perhaps one or two very mild health issues -- is the one that will go on to win a championship, and he is the one that will stay in the gene pool. And so it goes, generation after generation. "This is the head I'm breeding for," I heard a woman at ringside announce the year border collies were "recognized." Her dogs won at Westminster.

Breeding to a conformation standard produces healthy, stable companion dogs by accident rather than design. This isn't meant to suggest that show breeders want to produce dogs with health issues and less-than-stellar temperaments, or that they don't take health and temperament into consideration. Of course they do. But the pronounced stop [among other characteristics described in the standard] is absolutely essential, because without it a border collie has no hope of success in the breed ring.

If the goal were simply to produce healthy, temperamentally sound companion dogs, breeders might take a page from guide dog experts and start crossing Labs with Goldens. They would breed pugs that don't need surgery in order to breath normally, and bulldogs that don't require C-sections to whelp. They would breed dachshunds and Bassets that don't develop back problems.

They might even give up the conceit that breeding for pronounced stops has no effect on working ability. The truth is that breeding for appearance eats working ability for breakfast. A good stockdog needs a finely calibrated set of tools to get the job done. A pronounced depression at the junction of the forehead and the muzzle ain't one of them.

Conformation-bred border collies are beautiful dogs, and no doubt fine companions, but the cookie-cutter structure, the matching fluffy coats and those pronounced stops have come at a considerable price. If you are lucky enough to be at the Zamora Hills trial next weekend, you'll see what the border collies at Westminster have lost.