The Northern Cavalier KingCharles Spaniel Society
The Northern Cavalier King|
Talk presented by
Mr Brian Mitchell
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"I was asked to say a few words on judging
in Australia, so I won't take long so you can all get back into the sun. We, unlike you, don't have one ruling body even though we are a country of only 20 million people. We have 8 ruling bodies under the umbrella of the Australian National Council which has no control over the 8 bodies which is made up of six, one for each state and one each for the two territories the Northern territory and the Australian Capital territory and they may contain incorporated companies so of course the umbrella organisation can't have more than a limited influence and they only meet once a year. Most of you will know, even though Australia is such a long way away, that it is a huge country with a small population, and most of the population is in the coastal capital. Most of Australia is not populated, as a result it is almost impossible to have a system like you have. As a small country you can all get to the shows and there is more than one show each weekend for your breed. In Australia, every show bar a very small number is a Championship Show. There are qualifying points, because we do not have CC's at every one of those shows so the title in Australia is seen in a very different fashion to the way it is here. I would hate to see anything done to diminish the value of the British title because around the World it is looked up to. Not all Champions here of course appeal to everyone but all I would say reach a certain standard. That is not true in all other countries and is certainly not true in Australia. I'm not being critical of Australia because you have a system where they have to cater for the big population centres like Sydney and Melbourne, but you also have to cater for the country people and the country people could be hours away and they have to have their shows as well. But it does mean the city people can go out to them and take their points away and make easy Champions for themselves. There is never going to be an ideal system. Unlike you we have to be a member of our Kennel Control where most people in this country do not belong to the Kennel Club, but in Australia you cannot show a dog, you can't even go into the ring with a dog to handle it, unless you are a member of the Kennel Control. In New South Wales, where I come from, there are 12,500 members much the same as Victoria, but then you can go down to the Northern Territory where there are only 412, that was last year in a huge area many, many times the size of Britain. Then we have Western Australia which is completely separate, and it's 4 hours flying time from Sydney to Perth, so more people who live on the East of the country have been to England than have been to Perth, except when we have the Americas Cup of course. Every state is different and every state has different rules. You can be in Sydney and go to six Championship Shows in one weekend, not every weekend, but you can. If you have handlers you can get dogs to all of those. Whereas in South Australia, the Kennel Control there arranges things so there is only one Championship Show available to people in a fairly wide area, so it makes making up a dog a completely different process all around the country. It's so different to here, in a sense it has a value as long as one does not see the title as the ultimate destination. If you ignore that, and you say to yourself that you aim for a certain standard and forget the title, it has a value that perhaps you do not have here, but it's not often seen that way. Support for dog showing unfortunately has reduced in the last 15 years because people have so much more to do than they used to. Numbers wise there has been a reduction by about a third, it has not affected Cavaliers as much, nor has it here of course. Many other breeds have gone down, not getting the support they used to. I don't know what the answer is. Distances, people tend to believe here that people travel a lot more over there than you do here, that is a myth as most of the year people will stick to shows within their area like Sydney or Melbourne. Whereas here if you want to make up something, or show a lot, you have got to travel. People in Australia will tend to travel for the few specialties each year, and they are long distances, but they are not an every day occurrence. I don't think there is a lot more I can tell you that you don't already know, so if there is anybody would like to ask me anything that I can answer then I will." Mrs Wheeler asked "How many points you need to make up a Champion?" Mr Mitchell replied " You need one hundred and the maximum number of points you can get with one win is twenty five. You can get the twenty-five in different ways. You have five points regardless even if there's nothing else there plus one for your own dog so this is something that I know not everybody can quite believe, it does not apply so much to Cavaliers but it certainly does in some breeds, you can actually make up a Champion without ever meeting another dog of your own breed! There are many breeds, Cavaliers are not among them, although entries vary enormously, but you can get your six points and if you work it out by dividing 100 by 6 and you can see how many shows you have to go to, to make up a Champion. That is why I say it is terribly important for you in this country not to diminish the value of your title as there is no other country where the title counts for as much as it does here, I have noticed in the Dog World there appears a move to do so, you can never go back, you will never recreate what you have now. There are other ways you can get your points, up to two or three years ago the dog, and supposing there was only one dog there, would get its six points and supposing there were six bitches the winner getting eleven points and that would be it and the dog might get best of breed but only get six points that was changed a few years ago so the dog would now get the points from the whole entry, but only up to twenty five. Also we can not make up Champions under the age of one year they have to get their last points over the age of one." Mrs Gillies-Compston asked "What about the Grand Champion?" Mr Mitchell replied, "The Grand Champion in Australia is one thousand points, in New Zealand it is different kettle of fish, it is fifty CC's and three all breed Best in Shows. I don't know why the title was brought in Australia in the way it was because all it does is to encourage people to go to the country shows with their dogs to get cheap points and when we get a whole series of shows that go on day after day after day at agricultural shows, there might be ten of them they are circuits and if a dog can win six groups with 125 points he can get two hundred points basically in one of those circuits and some get two or three thousand points, I don't want to be critical of particular dogs but it is well known for certain Grand Champions to be unable to win higher than third or forth at a specialty. So I just tell you that as an illustration for although a Grand Championship may belong to an outstanding dog it is not necessarily so. New Zealand is different, I think New Zealand is better from that angle as New Zealand is a very different from a dog perspective." Someone then asked, "What are your entries like in Australia?" Mr Mitchell replied "We have recently had an all time record for Mrs Waters in Victoria, it was about 340, that includes baby puppies of which there would have been probably 40. The other specialties, depending where they are, the Sydney one gets about 200 which would include the babies and we still get about 40 babies. The other states get fairly good entries on the whole for their specialties because people will go to them. The ordinary every day shows vary from out in the country - a hand full of dogs or less even in Cavaliers and sometimes in the cities and metropolitan areas they vary from a hand full to 50 or 60." Mrs Gillies-Compston asked " Do you think it works to have outside a city a National Showground and all the shows being held there?" Mr Mitchell replied "I don't think its healthy because dogs are going there week in and week out and you don't know what they are leaving there. But of course it is lovely to have your own showground, as you don't have to worry like you, as to where you are going from year to year. I am amazed to find that Manchester Dog Show is going to Stafford next year and other shows are using venues outside of their areas, and I find that shocking, but we don't have that problem as we have our own show grounds. In New South Wales we have 260 acres, and in Western Australia and even though it is a small state they have a marvellous showground in Perth, Brisbane in Queensland have put a lot of money into their showground. There is not one answer, it is marvellous to have your own showground and in Australia every little community in the country has its own showground. It will have its own racetrack and they are used for the community, and for dog shows and in that respect we are better off than you." Mrs Gillies-Compston then asked, "What does Mr Mitchell think about judges training?" Mr Mitchell laughed and in reply said "Can I just say to you don't ever support judges training because I started judging in this country at a very early age and I carry on making mistakes as I'm sure some of you saw yesterday, you learn so much more I think by going around judging at the Open Shows. I know you don't have as many Open Shows as you used to but you still have them, and for example, for years, and I've judged many, many toys for years before I started to award CC's. I could never get Pugs right in my mind. I just had like a blank, I could never get them, I always thought I was the worst Pug judge and I'm sure the Pug people thought the same. I went up to Carnoustie one year to judge the North of Scotland Toy Show. I travelled by train arriving at five o'clock in the morning, so I sat on the beach at Carnoustie, and when I arrived at the show, I was advised that the Pug Judge could not make it, so I was to judge the Pugs and I thought oh no! But it was marvellous, because into the ring that day, came a most beautiful Pug, and I realised then I had never had any good Pugs to judge, and I knew I could build on that. You only get that sort of experience by doing it over and over again, nothing can help, no training scheme will ever give you that experience. I don't want to be critical of Australia, because it is a lovely country but with their judges training scheme, if you can imagine it, you can be passed to award the equivalent of CC's in every Toy Breed in a scheme which only takes you a few months to complete? It is ludicrous, and it's only on paper! If you get through the initial acceptance for the scheme, you are virtually guaranteed to pass, as there has been so much litigation by people who have not passed, if you do not pass you just sue the LSWBC. If you start doing that you will put yourself in the same situation. Here, certainly when I was younger, basically you were asked to judge in the beginning by people who had seen the sort of dogs you were showing, whether you had bought them in or bred them, people would assume, that if you were seen with good dogs then your opinion was worth having. If you made a mess of it you were not thrown out, you were given another opportunity, but the initial qualification, was the sort of dogs you were seen with, and I think that is fair enough. We all know that there are people who can not translate that into the ring, and we all know people that have not made it to the top in their own breed but non the less are excellent judges. The two are not necessarily tied up in the same person, sometimes they are, but not necessarily, the experiences year after year I think teaches you. Every time you judge you go away and you think, was I a bit kind to that, should I have done that, some stand out, a lot of places could go in different ways, depending on what emphasis you are putting and that is why the way things are different, as people do have different emphasis." Mrs Gillhespy asked "What would you say are the greatest strength in Cavaliers in Australia at the moment?" Mr Mitchell replied "I don't think there is one, because you can not see the breed in a National sense, because of the geographical divisions. I am old enough to remember before there were motorways. You used to have much more regional types, in all breeds because, we all used to send our bitches by train in those days, those that wanted to, therefore they were not used as they are today, as people were not as mobile. But you knew in those days for example, there were more people who built up strains, so if you wanted a particular beautiful head etc you knew where to go for it. Today, breeds I feel are an extension of a kennel, a breed is like one big kennel, it never used to be the case, there were certain elements that were similar, but it's not quite the same in Australia you do have these set divisions. We had many years ago one of your arguably greatest sires, in as much as Molly Coaker sent to Western Australia, a dog called Homerbrent Henry, who sired three English Champions from only 5 litters, Caption of course and the two Highead bitches and if you looked at the internet, as I did recently, you would see that from every litter he sired, there are significant descendants. In the same way as Champion Homerbrent Samantha, I think there are Champion descendents from every one of her litters, which I think is probably a record. With Henry, because of the expense of sending bitches from the Eastern States to W.A., that dog was virtually not used, I went over there in 87, I think it was to judge at the Americas Cup Show during the defence of the Americas Cup, which was a fabulous time to be there, and it was the biggest non-royal show of the year, and I withheld the dog CC in Cavaliers. At the end they all came in and I thought they were going to crucify me, but in fact it was the other way round, I said to them "you have had one of the greatest sires in the world in this State and what have you done with him?, nothing!" I think they rather regretted having me at their show." Mr Mitchell asked Mrs Coaker "Is it right the rumour was that you tried to buy him back? Is that true?" to which Mrs Coaker replied "No". Mr Mitchell said "But you would have liked to" to which she replied "Yes". Mr Mitchell continued "Henry had a wonderful home, I saw him when he was 12 years old and he was still in good condition." Returning to the original question Mr Mitchell continued "But that's what could happen, you can develop a regional type and if you had more people there building up strains it could be valuable, in effect it has not happened and you get different types." It was at this point that Mr Townsend had to draw Mr Mitchell's talk to its conclusion thanking him on behalf of those present for such an enlightening talk, to which those present gave a show of their appreciation.
Transcript taken from a video of the Rally by Ian Sidgwick |
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