Normally when you enter into the dog show ring the only things that the judge says to you are: Please take your dog around the ring, down and back please and maybe he/she will tell you to go around again. He/she doesn’t even speak when you win, lose or come in 3rd, he just points. So you walk out of the ring trying to figure out what was it that the judge liked about your dog or what he liked better about the other dogs. No feed back, no constructive criticism, just a ribbon or sometimes just empty handed.
Well, on Saturday, I had a judge that spoke. He said the usual things and then after my down and back, he said “do you know what pacing is?” I hemmed and hawed and said, maybe, I think so. So he explained what pacing was. It is when your dog runs with both right legs moving together and same with the left. Pacing is bad. What the dog should do is when her front right leg moves back so should her back left leg. He then said, “Sometimes if you go a little faster and pull on the lead a little bit that may correct the problem”, then he told me to go down and back again (not only did he tell me what to correct, he let me try it again – wow!) So we did, then he told me that I would get the feel of it and gave the blue ribbon to the other dog and we got the red. Oh well!
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