Dogs and Westminster 2006

So the Westminster Dog Show for 2006 is over. The dog I liked was the first doggie to win his Group to get into the “Best In Show”. I didn’t write about it. I didn’t feel the need to.

I did write about the French Bulldog earlier, but that is just a post about wanting to see that girlie, not for her to win, not that I didn’t want her to win her group. The Non-Sporting Group has so many good dogs in it, and it’s not easy to be a French Bulldog there. In any case, she was so cute, and just beautiful. They did a little segment using her and the Bulldog and the Boston Terrier to compare similar breeds and show how the judges compare … which they supposedly really don’t do, just look at the dog and compare it to it’s standard, not look at other similar breeds or totally different breeds in comparision. So it was nice to see Joy there, hanging out with her Bulldog cousins.

My love for dogs has been limited. Through the years I’ve shown a propensity to be known as a Cat Lover. I am a Cat Lover. We only have 6 cats right now. I could have many more, if I could [but can’t]. I like the idea of dogs. We have a dog. We had other dogs. Always something that we got from someone, a sort of “rescue” is how we got our first dog, and our second dog. Both of them were so unruly and untrainable by us that we resorted to county help to take them off our hands.

Growing up we had cats, and one time we had a dog, but it was short lived, a small dog of what variety I’m not sure, smooth coated, black and white, I can’t recall more detail, it was “just a dog” at the time. It got hit by a car when a neighbor kid led it away from our house one day. That was my “family dog” experience.

When I was in my more grown-up years, but still living at home, one day a lovely female dog showed up looking for attention. She was a Rottweiler, so gorgeous, no ID and she stayed for three days, then dissapeared, never to be seen again. I loved her. She was so sweet, and what a package she was. I have a picture taken during that time, of her and me together. Summer of 1988.

Ever since then I knew that I wanted a Rottweiler bitch. My DH has come round to understand how a Rottweiler would fit in our family quite well. He wasn’t on board right away though. We don’t have a purebred dog yet, but want to get one or two or three eventually.

Our current dog is a stray. His sister and he wondered down our street one day. DH had seen them up on another road earlier and it looked like they had been dumped off, there were three of them. When they got to our house, and they did come to our house all by themselves, there were only two.

We just happened to be out front doing things in the yard, and the puppies saw us and tottered down the driveway into our hearts. We cared for them and wondered if anyone was looking for them, but knew most assuredly that they had been dumped.

Those puppies were cute, and looked to be a mix of some short haired breeds, some sort of sheperd [german] in there. So I gave them “German” names. I was right then looking into German family info (geneaology) so it was fitting, it seemed to me 🙂 Gretchen and Lothar were what I dubbed them. Gretchen didn’t live past her puppyhood though, she was attacked when feisty she went tunneling under the fence late one night. It wasn’t her digging, it was the mean dogs behind our house that dug that earth out. It was late, dark as dark can be on a moonless night. Horrible yelps were heard and fighting. Lothar had gone in too, but he came back to our yard pretty fast. Gretchen didn’t, and finally she tried to struggle through but could barely move.

I carried her back to the house and she was listless, wouldn’t get up. Alive, but obviously in shock. She died in the night [just a few hours after the event, it happened so late as it was]. Externally there were no wounds. The dogs in that yard were big mean dogs. The next day they dissappeared. The whole story isn’t here. It’s just a rememberance of key details. We lost her. It was so sad.

So her brother lives on, Lothar is a big boy now. He’s semi-trained. We haven’t had the battles with him that we had with the previous dogs we had had. He’s strong and runs fast.

Here’s a recent photo, from January 13, 2006, of Lothar out in the backyard running. An action shot 🙂

I have thought of setting up some agility training for him, but just haven’t quite had the umph to finish him up with obedience training yet. Chalk that up to our small house and our renovations. Complicated, and morso than I’m thinking, no doubt.

Lothar is a lover dog. I mean he loves. He has a gentle strong lover way about him. His sister was the feisty one that was super energy chipper lets-do-this-bad-thing sort of pup. Once she was gone Lothar grew more secure as the only.

One of these days we’ll get a Rottweiler or French Bulldog. They have different tasks for us. The Frenchie is to be my sweet companion. The Rottweiler is to be the true protection of our family, herding the children, scaring away intruders [if there are any] etc.

Of course I haven’t gotten into what we’ll do first, when we’ll do either.

I’ll just get back to the dog show here:

Shaka is the Rottweiler that won Best in Breed and Best in Group. Shaka was the one dog in Best in Show that I was rooting for. There were two other dogs I’d have applauded, but there were a few that I would have had a sour taste for. Of course it was a sour win. Terriers. Blah. Shaka lives in Georgia. Sharpsburg, GA in fact. Shaka is one of those special dogs with a Breeder/Owner/Handler. If you watch dog shows you might have seen Shaka before, special segments with Shaka as well. That is one mightily trained dog. 🙂

So we are stuck with a year of egg-headed-Rufus. :rolleyes: The stats back up the fact that Terriers win Best in Show over any other Group by far. That smells to me. [Though I don’t especially like any Terriers, but think the Smooth Coated Fox Terrier is cute to look at. It doesn’t matter if I like terriers or not to say this, I just think Terriers are easier to pair with standards, that if one is good, it’s premiere. I still say it smells. I am not even a psuedo-expert, I’m just saying from my limited knowledge, something smells. I said it again. It’s stinky, you know.]

I just have to rest on the laurels of last years Best in Show [Westminster 2005]. Carly the Short Haired German Pointer. What a dream that was. I liked her in that show and about blew the roof of the house off when she won. She was strikingly obvious, and I couldn’t believe that the judge chose her. Nearly unbelievable, though I did believe it.

Boomer the Dalmation in 2006 was nice. The Pug was really nice (a bit freaked out, but recovered to strut wonderfully.) Then Shaka, just perfect. But no dice. Just pretend this is Yahtzee scoring. That’s what it seems like, it’s a crap shoot as to who’ll win. The dice are rolled and saved/re-rolled with Yahtzee rules, and in the end it was not what I would have done with the dice. You know how you can play Yahtzee alone, or with others, but you roll and do with your dice what you will [scoring]. You see someone else roll something you would use, but they pick it up and reroll it. Yikes. That is the only way I can explain how I feel about Judging in dog shows.