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Chapter II - The Middle-Rangers I am taking it for granted that you should have read your books, done your early home-work and have now graduated into the vast range of good ordinary decent middle-breeders. You will certainly have been in for three years or so and have bred your first litters, will have a goddish brood bitch with which you got your true start, having discovered and recovered from any initial mistake you made and are now no longer a real novice. In other words, you are now in that vast reservoir of Labrador breeders that go to make the breed. This reservoir is fed from below by novices graduating as they learn. To get into it is very easy, almost inevitable if you are seriously interested in Labradors and have the opportunity to keepon in the way you are going, i.e. to make it a major hobby. It is, however, very much more difficult to get out of the middle-range, and may never do. The first question is can you keep on with it? You have to be able to keep about five or six Labradors at least, to be able to breed two or three litters a year and run a couple of puppies from each litter, at least until you can see which is the best for you to keep. You have to have a bit of room, a little bit of land and no bad neighbours, indeed no near neighbours at all if possible. A keen and compatible husband or wife is very useful and you must somehow contrive never to neglect your children. All this in itself adds up to a big difficulty but the vast majority of Labrador people do it without much trouble and funnily enough, their children are usually much nicer and more responsible people than the children of those who don't have such an all-consuming hobby. So keen learner-novices move up into the middle-range as water seeps from spring into the resevoir. How to get out at the top is the next question. Many middle-rangers never do get into the higher echelon however hard they try. There are such a lot of reasons for this that is hard to analyze why. One of the very first things that comes to mind is how they have evolved into middle-rangers. As novices they had ironed out initial mistake in their early buying, although having got fond of their very first Labrador they will have it for the next ten years. They will then have gone to a good kennel and bought a decent bitch or bitch puppy or two on which to build. The better that good kennel the better the foundation, but it must always be remembered that neither the good breeder nor the top breeder will sell their very best bitch or their best puppy. So the novices will always be starting, with very few exceptions, with a decent Labrador bitch or puppy with some 'if' that has caused the breeder to sell it. And believe me the top breeder and even the good breeder knows very well what he is doing, In my own case, once or twice the ringsiders have said 'M.R.W. has sold the wrong one' and of course 'word' immediately gets back to me. And like other breeders I smile quietly to myself and think 'That's all they know' because I know exactly why I sold that particular puppy and not the other, even though it might appear the best of the two to outsider's eyes. This happens to all good breeders and as a general rule they certainly don't sell the wrong one, because having bred it and reared it they know something about it not apparent to the ringsider. It may not even be a fault, it may be something like that it is noisy in kennel, or chews, or is a bit sharp, or in my case rowdy, because I like a quiet Labrador. But whatever it is, you can be sure that even the best of buys from a top or good kennel will have an 'if' or two, even though very slight. So now the middle-ranger has a small kennel consisting of his original 'mistake', plus a decent bitch or two with the odd 'if', and two or three youngsters bred from these early buys. Here he is at a disadvantage because any puppy he breeds will be running about in this collection and therefore constantly be judged against it by the owner. Anything worse will be sold as a pet, anything better will stick out like a sore thumb, but those much-of-a-muchness will often be kept as well. In this way the average standard of the kennel will not be improved except very slowly indeed. The plateau, by which I mean the kennel norm, will be fair to average, and when these puppies get into the show ring they will still be fair to average, because all the other middle-rangers will have stock of exactly the same standard. The good breeder's plateau will be at a much higher level, so that the stock at home is running against a better standard and anything not up to it will be sold. If the middle-ranger can realise this and raise his plateau then he is on his way to being a better breeder. This leads directly to a second big millstone round the middle-ranger's neck and that is the ringside, in other words his fellow middle-range competitors. It must be remembered that the ringside is largely composed of the vast reservoir of middle-rangers, only a few graduating into the higher breeders, the range being fed all the time by novices. The ringsiders who now know quite a lot and are starting to judge a bit, but as yet have not all that much experience, will go for the obvious choice from the ringside, the nicely balanced, well presented good showman and will nearly always judge on outside appearance because they cannot do much else from where they are sitting. They cannot 'go into' the dogs, which is what the good judge must do, and to me he isn't a good judge unless he does go thoroughly into his dogs. But what the ringside can't see and might not know enough to realise, is that the judge may find that the ringsider's choice does not stand looking into, the basic conformation or some other essential being wrong. But the judge find that the top breeder's dog in the same class does not falll to bits under his hands, so up goes the top breeder's dog and down the ringside choice. Here come the crunch because the ringsiders demur, and agree among themselves that once again wrong has thriumped and the top 'name' has won and that there is no justice or honesty in the game. This is a very big millstone, because the novice listens to others instead of looking to see why the winner went up. The middle-ranger is all too glad to find an excuse for his own lack of top wins, so instead of looking up at his dog and also looking at the top dogs, he joins the novices and comes in time to subscribe to the idea that 'names' win because they are 'names'. Once he really comes to believe this he will be a middle-ranger for ever, because he will never discover why the good breeder's dogs win. For many years I have seen promising novices come up into the middle-rangers and have felt hopeful that they would eventually become good breeders and my heart has sunk because they have come up and said that very thing, that 'Mrs. Blank can win with anything'. As soon as they start thinking that, I have no further hope for them. They have mentally evaded the issue that it takes a better dog to win. The next millstone is ignorance and here I am afraid a lot of middle-rangers fail. They have not learnt from their homework, studied the breed and what it is for, looked at old photos and read what the old-timers said. They have not bothered to learn anatomy, not even the little bit one requires to judge the dog. They have as learners, learned from and listened to learners, and quite literally they do not know their stuff. They do not know the Standard, and will perpetuate myths about what a Labrador should have or what it should be, often erroneously. Many middle-range breeders get stuck because of this, and if they do get released it is often because they get a small judging engagement. Then the eyes of the blind may be opened and they get the real shock, because they suddenly realise the vast difference between an average dog and a good one. Indeed it may be the very first time they have had their hands on a really good dog. If they can take advantage of this experience they are on the right road, but there seems to be a lot of middle-rangers who can learn nothing from handling a good dog. They can always find the faults but they never discover or bother to learn outright virtues. So there they stick, owning decent average dogs often only just above the level of mediocrity. The last big millstone that hampers the breeder who is trying hard to get out of the middle-range is that he gets cluttered up with stock. He can't sell or put down his original mistake because he naturally loves it. He can't part with the first puppy he bred for sentimental reasons, the children loved that little one and he wants to keep two each from the three litters he is breeding this year, and also wants to breed again from his foundation bitch before it is too late. And it's time, he thinks that he kept a stud dog. So before he knows where he is he is cluttered up with ten to fifteen dogs. The neighbours, the wife or husband are kicking and so the kennel is becoming less and less viable until it may grind to a complete halt. It is so important to know what and how to sell to keep yourself going and with room to improve, that I am devoting a separate chapter to it. So to sum up, the obvious millstone that hampers the middle-rangers are: First, that their stock is being looked at daily in their own kennels against perhaps slightly mediocre Labradors, while the top breeders are weighing their stock against Champions and near-Champions. Secondly, they listen to ringside instead of looking for themselves, so get wrong ideas about 'names' and why people win. The third millstone is ignorance and this is one that they may or may not be able to remedy because to overcome ignorance one must have time, must be literate, must have an eye and must be able to learn, which everyone cannot do. And the fourth miilstone that prevents them rising higher is that they let themselves get overstocked. |