If you think about it for a second, the actual objective characteristics of the dogs have NOTHING to do with how well their hair is groomed nor how well their humans have sucked ass. And, both of those traits are more likely to help poor specimens win over better dogs. An objectively better built dog should not need to be groomed to highlight good traits and hide poor ones, nor should it need its human to grease the wheels by getting in good with the judges or the breed club or by out maneuvering the competition outside of the ring.

And if the goal is to pick the best breeding stock, how come very little of the competitions have anything to do with rewarding good breeding practices?

An objectively good dog wouldn’t and shouldn’t need to compete any more than once. It could be evaluated, scored, and sent on its way. Objective traits are unlikely to change.

In the world of college admissions, the standardized tests scores are supposed to evaluate ability in a form that is comparable across the board with all other students, and the idea is to develop tests that are unlikely to change with multiple repetitions. Although judging intelligence or the accumulation of knowledge is much more difficult than judging physical conformation, the SAT and ACT seem to do a much better job at a much harder task than fancy shows do at evaluating dogs fairly.

Dog showing is closer to GPA as a metric, as it’s about endurance and ass kissing and pleasing a judge over and over again, shopping for the right situations and avoiding problem judges or kids who ruin the curve. GPA is much easier to manipulate and game, and thus it’s not a good means of comparing students at different schools from different states.

Part of what makes a good college student is the ability to multitask and game the system, so colleges still use that metric. But gaming the system plays no positive roll in a dog’s ability to pass along good genes. Yet the crappy system remains.

If this really was an objective sport, you would see cameras, calculators and tape measures being used to assess the dog’s conformation and the judges would be engineers and orthopedic specialists. Movement would be assessed by motion capture computers just like golf swings and running patterns are analyzed for human and equine athletes.

And instead of continued head to head and breed to breed competition, your dog would get a score–much like a PennHIP test–which would compare its conformation to an ideal standard and rank your dog against all others in its own breed. This doesn’t preclude such nonsense events like Group placements and Best In Show, in fact it would clearly determine a winner. The Beagle that has a margin of error of 2% from the ideal Beagle Standard beats the Poodle who has a margin of error of 5%.

This system would even allow you to measure breed wide success in improving conformation. You could tell exactly how much better today’s dogs are than those of 10 years ago. There is no such metric today except the observation that many breeds today are horrible shadows of their former glory (or normalcy). I still don’t know why the entire German Shepherd community hasn’t given up and admitted that they have butchered their dogs and that they should no longer be allowed within 100 yards of an animal.

There are some Germans who still deny the holocaust, and there are many German Shepherd breeders and enthusiasts who deny that there is anything wrong with their dogs or that “good breeders” had anything to do with it.

Under my system, you wouldn’t even need to have shows. It could all be done online and instantaneously. You could have your dog assessed once and have a permanent evaluation of where he stood in the entire realm of dogdom. Such information could be shared all over the world and there’d be no need for all the hair spray, chalk, ugly shoes, dremmels, industrial wind tunnel vacuums, and ass kissing.

In these few hundred words, I’ve laid out the perfect solution for the entire realm of conformation dog shows; assuming, of course, that we want to do what they tell us they want to do: specifically: judge conformation against an ideal standard.

Any ideal standard can be put down into numbers: measurements, ratios, and symmetry. We don’t need to leave things open to interpretation, we can set them down in exact proportions.

But that’s not what really happens, so that’s why the system has never changed. What really happens is that uppity, self involved people want to use dogs as a means to aggrandize themselves and they want to feign objectivity while being utterly subjective and obsessed with transient fads. They don’t want to fit their stock to an ideal, they want to get one judge to say that their dog is mystically better than another dog which should earn them ribbons and points and fame and championships!

The fancy would never adopt an objective standard, because objective standards can’t be pressured or cajoled or bribed. There would absolutely be one dog in the breed that would come the closest to the ideal. And they’d have to set down that ideal in firm language and hard numbers. It couldn’t be left up to vague interpretations which could be argued over and
cover multiple dogs.

You’d never need to do research on which judge prefers which style of dog, or which breeder you need to get in good with to succeed. You’d never have to attend parties or travel out of state or pay some dandy to trot your dogs around rings. You’d be able to give your puppy buyers real information that would tell them exactly how ideal your breeding stock is. There would be no more trying to figure out the difference between a Champion who won all his shows running away in one weekend and one who finally earned the points through brute force and shopping for sympathetic judges and shows with sand bag dogs entered only to get the numbers up to earn Major points.

And your dog would never need to be tarted up with expensive dye jobs, perms, eight different styles of scissors, chalk, mascara, or even lead. No more torture devices which would restrain your dog while you exact your lengthy and uncomfortable grooming procedures on their blank canvas of fur.

The fancy hair do would do nothing for the objective standards, as the grooming of the hair has nothing to do with conformation. It wouldn’t matter if your dog had blown its coat (the number one reason dogs are pulled from competitions) or if you were too fat to waddle beside your dog and needed to hire a professional handler. No amount of handling would make a poor dog score higher on an objective test.

Since my ideal, honest, dog show will never come to be, I’ve peppered this post with images from a dog show competition that is based upon grooming and artistry alone, just like conformation dog shows, but in this competition, the artists and the judges are honest and admit that it’s simply how good the dog looks after the groomer has worked their magic.

And just like regular conformation shows, the Poodles are the canvas of choice simply because they offer the hair stylist more to work with.

I personally think that the “Leonardoodle” is the best dog, but the judges gave it to the rideable Harley Davidson Poodle. It seems that even in such frivolous, but honest, shows, you can’t beat the pure blooded Poodle for top honors in fru-fru gaudy “art.”

Queen Victoria’s Dogs and Parrot by Sir Edwin Landseer, RA 1802-1873. c.1833-1834. Oil on panel, signed with monogram. 25 x 30 inches.

Queen Victoria’s Favorite Dogs and Parrot or The Royal Pets, as it is sometimes known, is a reduced replica of the picture of the same title exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838 (Royal Collection). This was the first Academy exhibition that Victoria viewed as Queen, her uncle, William IV, having died shortly after the opening of the 1837 exhibition. The Queen was already familiar with Landseer’s work. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, had presented her with a portrait of her spaniel, “Dash,” two years earlier. Landseer was to become a favorite, frequent guest, and occasional painting instructor to the Queen and the Prince Consort.

The composition of Queen Victoria’s Favorite Dogs and Parrot is centered around the be-ribboned “Dash”. Lying on a velvet covered footstool, he is surrounded by “Hester,” “Nero,” and “Lorey,” the last named being the Duchess of Kent’s parrot…The image of “Dash,” regally perched on his stool, became a popular needlework subject throughout the balance of Queen Victoria’s reign [p. 82]

- The Royal Academy Revisited (1837-1901), Christopher Forbes

Since many online archives and galleries have images which are poorly labeled with few, if any, keywords, I spent a lot of time looking at “dogs” and “Victoria pets” and the available works of any artist mentioned in conjunction with royal animals.

So when I came across Landseer’s “Study of a Dog Head” I almost flipped out thinking I had uncovered a long forgotten Border Collie of the early 19th century. Surely this must have been a dog he was commissioned to paint while visiting the Queens kennels, no?

Border Collie coloring, Border Collie ears, but those hush puppy eyes and a thick muscular neck that doesn’t come off the skull like a collie gave me doubts. And just look at the heavy bone and large toes in those feet.

Thanks to an excellent post by Retrieverman, I had my answer:

It is possible that collie types were among the dogs that came with the first settlers of Newfoundland and were part of the St. John’s Water Dog Breed. My evidence for this theory is a painting by Sir Edwin Landseer in which he shows a Newfoundland dog.

Newfoundlands were popular in his day, and most in Europe were black and white. Many had a distinct collie appearance, as this one did. The black and white Newfs eventually became less popular than their solid colored relatives. The black and white ones are known as Landseers, and in the FCI countries, it is a separate breed from the solid-colored Newfoundland. In the Anglophone countries, it is considered a color variety of Newfoundland.

The aforementioned painting is Landseer’s Neptune:

The largest painting, and a most fetching one indeed, depicts a life-size Newfoundland in a Scottish landscape. He is “Neptune,” painted on the 60-by-79-inch canvas in 1824 by Edwin Landseer (1802-73), England’s pre-eminent 19th-century painter of animals.

Landseer painted the handsome Neptune several times; in fact the black-and-white variation of the breed is called a Landseer Newfoundland because he made it famous. In this portrait the dog has adopted a heroic pose, standing at attention on a rocky cliff above the sea. Behind him men are hauling fishing boats onto the shore as menacing black storm clouds fill the distant horizon.

Newfoundlands were known as sea-rescue dogs, and Neptune is ready to spring into action, a lifesaver on patrol, as the wind whips the sea into whitecaps (and flattens the fur of his meticulously depicted coat).

“ ‘Neptune’ is regarded as one of the greatest 19th-century canine portraits,” said Clare Smith, a specialist at Christie’s. “It shows both Landseer’s mastery of anatomy and his ability to capture a dog’s personality.”

W. D. Gosling, a member of the Gosling banking family, commissioned the portrait, then had it framed with oak timbers salvaged from the H.M.S. Téméraire, a warship that fought alongside Lord Nelson’s Victory in the Battle of Trafalgar. The portrait is expected to sell for $800,000 to $1.2 million.

An interesting parallel between Neptune and my Mercury, besides being named after mythological gods/planets, is the morphology of the white coloring. Notice that Neptune’s white blaze forms around a central black void at the crest of head just like Mercury:

This spot, along with an homage to the traditional Border Collie name of “Mirk” (gaelic for Black), is the genesis of Mercury’s name: Astraean Mercury Rising. His blaze looks like a small black sphere ascending through a white flame, much like the planet closest to the Sun. He was the second puppy born and the first was named after the Sun itself.

And don’t forget to get some sheep for your Barbie’s collie to “herd” for fun.

And look, they even show “the eye.” You silly sheeple, Collies for Barbie really can herd…errr…work!

All of the above creatures were designed, created, and photographed by Gerry of Gourmet Felted, the “Geppetto of Needle Felting.” She’s created almost every breed of dog in felt and will even make a miniature of your very own pet for only $175. She’ll even make you a Coyote Collie if you ask her really nicely and don’t bitch about it being too small, too fluffy, and incapable of a good day’s work.

“Tip” is looking for a good forever home on Ebay right now. Expand your brood without having to buy more food or pick up more poop.

This illustration shows a young woman, “Golden Eyes,” dressed in a khaki-colored dress and cap standing with a collie dog named Uncle Sam who holds a “Liberty bond” in his mouth. A nude kewpie-like figure bangs a drum lower left. Their act of patriotism supported American soldiers during World War I.

Scientists in Austria report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a dog may stop obeying a command if it sees that another dog is getting a better deal.

The study tried to quantify the behavior by using well-trained dogs that readily offer a paw on command. The researchers used two dogs side by side but treated them differently, giving one a better reward (sausage) and the other a lesser one (bread) when the paw was given, or giving one dog no reward at all.

They found that the quality of the reward made little difference. But in the case in which one dog got no treat at all, that dog became less and less inclined to obey the command.

- NYT, 12/08/2008

Watch the video of the experiment.

If you want to read the New York Times article and don’t want to give them your e-mail, you can always find current working logins at BugMeNot.

I’m not surprised that Border Collies (and perhaps other dogs) show such complex reasoning and emotion. While I’m sure fellow dog owners often prescribe deep thought or intent into our dog’s actions, anthropomorphizing human traits on to them that are likely inappropriate and unfounded. But this study shows that we might be underestimating how sophisticated dogs really are.

I have pride in my dogs. And they apparently have envy in each other. But what happens when pride devolves into envy, envy grows into greed, and greed leads to theft? Well, look no further than the New York Times for your answer. It appears that they haven’t learned their lesson from the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal.

Take a look at this graphic they published with their dog envy story published December 2008:

And now take a look at this graphic by Louis Agassiz Fuertes published in “The Book of Dogs” and by National Geographic in March 1919:
Notice anything? I swear, sometimes a photographic memory is a curse. I often experience déjà vu, which I think is an artifact from my mind preserving certain elements with crystal clarity but losing the context of those memories. So when I experience something very similar again, I can’t quite place the previous exposure and my urge to recall the greater details becomes a mini obsession.

Luckily, it only took my subconscious a few days to piece together a 90 year old painting from National Geographic with the week old image from the New York Times. CSI, eat my shorts.

So how do two guys, their dogs, and a couple of GPS units warrant a full page write up in the New York Times Art Review? If you consider tracking the lines and patterns that people and dogs make via GPS a modern (and often abstract) version of the Nazca Lines; then Hugh Pryor, Jeremy Woods, and their dogs Boris and Jemma are modern artists drawing on the same artistic tradition.

Long ago came the ancient Nazca lines in Peru. More recently, in the 1960′s and 70′s, came Earth artists like Michael Heizer, making tracks in the Nevada desert with a motorcycle; Robert Smithson, building his spiral jetty in Utah; and Richard Long, turning walks in the English countryside into conceptual drawings through space.

Now come Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor, a young British duo who use the Global Positioning System’s network of 24 satellites, which can track a person’s location on the planet to within a few yards, to produce virtual art on the Internet.

As G.P.S. receivers have become smaller and cheaper, a growing number of digital artists are exploiting the technology. Like much digital art, the ideas are often spiffier than the visuals. Wood and Pryor tend toward cartoonish shapes that look as if they’re drawn by an Etch-a-Sketch. But they lately have also managed a few artfully nervous abstractions, made by strapping a G.P.S. device to a poodle, a border collie and a Jack Russell terrier, which betray a certain perhaps unwitting animal attraction to the work of Giacometti. Their basic concept is, in the end, inspired: that the technology of surveillance may produce a poetry of form, and that there is art to the way we move through the world, if we are just alert enough to it.
- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times – December 14, 2003

Any spectator at a sheep trial will tell you that there is beauty in how a Border Collie moves. The eye, the crouch, the swift and stable outrun, so smooth that you wonder if the dog is hovering instead of running. The conservation of motion, a swift stop and stare almost frozen in space, a tilt of the head and the flock moves.

A spectator at a Frisbee competition will tell you the same thing. A grace in movement, effortless leaps and stalls, helicopter spins and gravity defying vaults. Or in Agility, when a well trained dog finds the perfect line through the course, as if the obstacles only exist to aid the dog in a luge-smooth series of arcs and turns. The fastest flyball teams run the course as gracefully as an Olympic swimmer, the jumps and the box which evoke a lumbering and awkward hop-hop-hop-and-slam in a novice dog become mere pebbles in the stream to the trained dogs.

So it’s no wonder that two forward thinking men wanted to capture that ephemeral experience by using GPS; heck, even some sheep trial judges have joked that they could GPS the dog and the sheep and judge trials remotely from anywhere in the world with a computer.

Wood and Pryor have an interesting and growing portfolio of GPS graffiti, some planned out meticulously like reproductions of ancient earth-art, self referential works like the word “WATER” spelled out using a speed boat on a lake, and some organic works like tracking a lawnmowers path over a lawn or the movements of traffic through a city.

The technique creates an effect like time lapse photos of car lights in the dark, long streaking and jerky lines that are a record of motion.

Now, just to prove how brilliant Border Collies are, and not to be outdone by artistic Elephants or other animal artists, precocious Boris the Border Collie used his GPS “brush” to paint a doggy self portrait across the fields of Cutteslowe Park, Oxford:
The two men are also integrating the concept of tracking a point through space and time with live video and new advances in point tracking algorithms. Below, they track a tennis ball and the tip of a dog’s tail with video at the same time they track the dog using GPS. The two smaller videos at the top of the frame show how effective a potential image stabilization process would be using the tracking information.

Explore further at the GPS Drawing website.