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Chapter IV - From Middle-Rangers To Good Breeders To evolve from a middle-ranger to being a good breeder it seems to me that the first step is to raise your plateau. There is a thing called ringside judging, in which we all join. We sit there and mentally place the exhibits in the ring, usually and almost always by fault-judging. Now fault-judging is a thing on its own and is not always a bad thing, indeed in one's own kennel it is very necessary. But when sitting on the ringside, any fault stands out and the ringside has usually only learned the basic faults. They will completely discard a dog because of a light eye, never considering for a minute that a black eye in a Labrador is if anything worse. They will fault a curly tail and never notice the thin base of another tail, which is quite as bad. The over-heavy coat is disliked, but nothing is said about that extra bad fault in a Labrador, the thin coat with no undercoat, or to me as bad a fault, the half-coat which usually predominates in any class even among CC winners. So fault-judging goes on, often very ill-informed, not to say ignorant. And it is at this range of knowledge that the middle-breeder often sticks. Listening to an average bunch of ringsiders talking amongst themselves without looking to see if they are right is a big millstone round the neck of a potentially good breeder-to-be. These ideas are taken as correct and from that moment on the viewpoint of the listener may be fixed for ever. In other words it is taken as read and never thought of or analysed again. Thus the middle-range ringsider breeds middle-range exhibitors and the difference between the good dog with an obvious failing, and the mediocre dog with nothing much wrong to put your finger on, may never be learned. But when it comes to breeding, a mediocre specimen can give you little or nothing, whereas the good with the failing can give you lots and lots, provided you recognise and can correct that failing in your choice of stud-dog. I feel that a great difficulty with the middle-ranger is that they have not done their homework properly. They have not gone into why a Labrador should be like this and whether this or that fashion is helping or hindering the breed. The easy-to-spot fault such as cow hocks will from the ringside or even in their own kennel condemn a dog, while the much more difficult fault to see, tied-in-elbows, will pass unnoticed. Yet I have found from experience of working my Labradors on extremely steep hilly fellsides and hanging beechwoods that cow hocks can and in certain circumstances actually help the dog descend on the steep slippery slope, while tied-in-elbows are a hindrance whatever the conditions, either on land or in water. Don't get me wrong, both are faults, but one will damn the dog in the eyes of the middle-ranger whether breeder or exhibitor, while the other will pass unnoticed. The same is true of a straight elbow. The upright shoulder-bone (scapula) will be penalised, yet the straight elbow is not only passed over but will all too often actually raise the placing of the exhibit because it leads to an appearance of 'presence' in front. The dog is held to have 'great reach of neck' and the resulting rake of backline and over-angulation behind is not realized and goes unpenalised. To raise oneself out of the ruck one must learn these things and many others like them. A dog with a high stepping action is often held to be a great mover and the dog with a lot of hock-action at the trot is said to drive on well behind, yet in a horse the latter would be a bad fault called String Halt. To me any exaggeration in action is a fault which over a long day's shooting would waste a lot of energy, yet florid extravagant movement either in front or behind is often preferred to economic action. Again a dog that has high action in front and throws its legs high behind. moving very fast and spectacularly, gets great ringside acclaim - yet no one except perhaps a horseman notices that, far from covering the ground well, the hind-foot is not dropping into the slot left by the front foot as it should really to cover the ground, and that there is perhaps two inches under the dog left uncovered by either foot, enough to lose a race by several lengths. So how does the middle-rangers get out of this rut of ignorance? - By doing more and more homework, by looking at good Labradors and listening to the old hands, not the middle-rangers, and by lifting their own stock sensibly, trying always to get good ones into their eye and not looking at and admiring inferior stock. The rising breeder must never be content, must never be kennel-blind and must be ready to learn all his life. A lot depends on the breeding stock from which you start and even more on what you retain as your solid base from which to operate. The breeder that gets out of the pool of middle rangers sometimes has a brood bitch that can't go wrong whatever you mate her to. In my lifetime Braeduke Julia Of Poolstead was one and Ch. Hollybank Beauty another. A bitch like these two will lift the plateau of a kennel so that up-and-coming youngsters are being watched daily against a background of higher class stock. Or the middle-breeder may chose the Champion dog they decide to use very carefully, with their bitch in their eye as well as the pedigree, indeed more so. If you mate a good bitch wrong she will still produce something nicer than does the bad bitch, just as a good Champion dog will grade up a mediocre bitch even if only slightly. But mate a good bitch with right and you are very nearly if not quite there. So the better the bitch the better the chance of breeding a good one. For this reason I recommend the middle breeders to look very carefully at their stock and cut out the bottom. Because if you hack away the bottom your eye will get used to a higher and higher plateau and will start automatically to discard one tat you would have been proud to keep and show before. A low plateau breeds molehills, a high plateau breeds mountains, and a really high Champion and near-Champion plateau throws up Alps. For this reason I am not interested in the litter of which the breeder says that 'they are as alike as peas in the pod, there is not a ha'porth to choose between them. I can't even tell them apart myself. 'I shudder to myself and think of this litter ranged together in a class at a show. I see myself as the judge wandering from end to end of the line, unable to sort them out because they are all nice, healthy, normal puppies with nothing outstanding or interesting about them. What do you do? Give them all a doubtful first prize? Or withhold from the lot of them? And then picture them again in a bigger class with another litter that are also as like peas in the pod standing beside them. It makes me depressed to think of it. As a top Smooth Fox Terrier breeder once said to me, 'Anyone can breed a run-of-the-mill puppy. It is the outstanding one that is difficult to breed.' Raise your kennel plateau by all means, and then try to turn your mountains into Alps, but you won't do it by breeding litters that are so alike that you can't tell them apart, because no one else will be able to either. To me the only thing that is worse than a dead-even litter is a kennel-owner who shows you three generations of Labradors with a grand old bitch as the grandmother, a less good daughter and what to me is a dud puppy. It is amazing how people will do this. Apparently they can't see that they are downgrading instead of the other way up.Indeed they will publish photos showing this clearly, especially in books and magazines from abroad, where such photos often appear. The deterioration from a good old-English-bred bitch to the horrid puppy seems absolutely clear to me, yet because they have bred three generations of the breeder seems unable to spot it and shows the photo round with pride, even publishing it. To make your way towards the top you must upgrade and you must cull severely. By that I do not mean destroying the puppies as does a Huntsman, but selling as pets, and if you have reached a reasonable plateau in your kennel you will now be discarding what to a middle-range breeder would be their top puppy. I am also sure that you must not rear too many puppies in a litter, and as that sort of culling means either a foster mother, hand rearing or putting some puppies down I shall deal with that in the chapter on keeping a kennel viable. Again it is a great help to know exactly what you want from your litter. Nowadays too many puppies running about your place are a great source of danger with Parvo-Virus still with us. But the good breeder doesn't want to make a mistake and sell the puppy which should be kept; so to know beforehand exactly what you want means you can sell some of the rest at eight or ten weeks. Discard if you can, doing so immediately you are sure. If you are wanting a dog puppy for yourself you can sell most of the bitches. If a bitch then sell all the dogs except perhaps the best one. This seems to me to lead to a formless conglomeration of Labradors building up in numbers, because much less is sold quickly than if there was a plan. Another thing that puzzles me and I sometimes I think I am alone in this, is that I know before I even think of which stud-dog to use, whether I am wanting a dog or a bitch from the litter, breeding quite differently one from the other. This means I only run on the best of the sex I want. This is one of the ways to keep the size of a kennel within reason, because you are not cluttered up with puppies eating their heads off just because you are waiting to see which of the several five or six month old puppies of both sexes is going to turn out the best. The unsorted puppies are always a tremendous source of risk from infection. Unless you are a big kennel with plenty of help you just can't afford to do this either from the work point of view or financially, because rather than growing into money like beef cattle, they are becoming less valuable, especially in the case of dog puppies. People will buy a dog puppy at eight to ten weeks old, but a seven month old dog is bad to sell, especially if it is one of a batch which you yourself the breeder has picked over. No one wants second-graders at that age. So these surplus puppies have just been eating away any profit that could have been made on them earlier and have also had a lot of money spent on them in inoculations. So once again we come to the same old thing. Stare and stare at your own stock until you really know it. Then you can better choose the dog to suit each individual bitch. I have always found it a great help to set the limit of sorts on my numbers. For years and years I had the basic stock of two stud dogs, one old and the other young, one or at the most two old age pensioners, two or three bitches in their show career ages and about three puppies with six months between each of them, i.e. a baby, a showable puppy and a puppy just going out into the big show world which is expendable if it doesn't make the grade. This is added up to about eight or nine Labradors which stretched to twelve as the Spring and Summer came and went. But each Autumn came the jumble sale, and the kennel was firmly reduced from the bottom upwards to winter strength, about six or seven. This meant selling some very nice stock each Autumn, but these mostly went abroad to become Champions or breed Champions for their new owners. Thus selling each year from the bottom I was keeping my own kennel plateau up and had room to try and breed an Alp or at least a mountain each new spring. As I am now approaching old age I have altered my plan slightly and have a winter strength of five which consist of one stud-dog, two good show-age bitches and two youngsters coming on. I am already operating this, so I know it works and that I can carry on just the same as before, only with less to sell and less work. If I can keep four years between each of my dogs I shall only ever have one O.A.P. as well. One of the things I very soon learned in my Labrador life was that you don't need a big kennel to be a good or top breeder, that is unless you are breeding commercially which is something I don't know about. There are very few big kennels of Labradors in Britain, but I am told by a commercial breeder of other breeds that to make a kennel pay and keep you as well, i.e. as a sole livelihood, then you need somewhere near about fifty to sixty bitches at least. You would have to travel the length and breadth of the British Isles to find such a Labrador kennel. There is I think only one really big kennel of about forty Labradors that is in the top echelon and that is not a commercial kennel, indeed I don't think we have one in Labradors. And I hope sincerely we never shall. Most good Labrador kennels have about fifteen dog in all. Having visited many kennels in different breeds while still going round with my professional photographer daughter Anne, we went to some really large (by British standards) kennels. Time and again we were struck by the fact that in a kennel of forty or fifty dogs only a double handful at the most were really worth sticking to, the rest, as in any big racing field, 'also rans'. One kennel sticks in my mind as an object lesson, this being a well-known kennel of Terriers kept by a wealthy woman who certainly didn't need the cash, but who was having a near-breakdown through over pressure, largely caused by too many dogs, too many kennel-girls and too much worry from puppies, possibility of diseases etc. She kept about sixty bitches and as we were personal friends her husband asked us to have a good look at the kennel and give advice while we were photographing. When we came to sort things out, there were two really top-class dogs, both Champions, who although father and son were both in the prime of life and their stud-work. There were also two decent young dogs which might possibly grow up to become Champions and were starting to win well but were still in the doubtful stage. They looked likely to go on well but could still take a wrong turn, especially one of them. They were worth running on, just as an insurance in case the two established star dogs should go wrong by accident or misfortune. The rest of the dozen or so males that were running about were definitely nothing like up to the high standard of the top of this kennel. Now to the bitches, the most important part of any kennel, indeed the strength. Here we saw six or seven superb bitches, the sort that are worth their weight in gold and would be the envy of anyone in the breed. The rest of the possibly thirty to forty adult bitches we saw were ordinary run-of-the-mill stock. Then we went to the well-filled puppy sheds and runs. Here were masses and masses of youngsters of every age, some sold abroad already, some to sell and varying enormously in every way. We picked out several lovely puppies, which incidentally and not by co-incidence came from two or three of those superb bitches we had already singled out, and then mentally discarded the rest of the many puppies. The owner of the kennel, our friend, who was so overdone with dogs and worry that she could no longer see the trees from the forest was quite astonished. 'it's most extraordinary,' she said, 'I had Lea Pearson (one of the best Terrier judge of the day) over to see the kennel last week, and he picked out exactly the same ones that you have done and advised me to keep only these and to cash the rest'. This advice she unfortunately did not take, and very sadly worry and nerves led indirectly to her death a very short time afterwards, within a year I seem to remember. This pointed out to me a thing I never forgot, that the strength of a kennel depends not on numbers but on having very high quality stock only. She could have carried on her life-hobby happily for years had she reduced to that nucleus of four stud-dogs, about nine top bitches and the litters she could have bred from each year. The whole of the rest of that huge kennel were completely superfluous. However, being heavily overstocked is not usually a fault of the good Labrador breeders. They perhaps don't set themselves a hard and fast numbers to keep, and indeed they would be foolish to tie themselves down too definitely. They must make enough room to be able to run on that very promising puppy whenever one turns up. They must also be able to run on that very promising puppy whenever one turns up. They must also be able to run on that brace of pups that, like the two young Terrier dogs mentioned above, have not quite decided which way to go. But a good breeder is always looking for room for the next rod-in-pickle or the next batch of puppies, so they must plan so as not to get overstocked. As this is of vital importance a chapter on the subject follows. |
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