Choosing a Dog

[Dos Perros]

Oh figured I'd add an anecdote to this thread. I recently went with a buddy down to Oklahoma to pick up a setter puppy. It was going to be 1 of 3 6 month old pups that had a summer of training in the Dakotas. It's funny how things go...I was careful to keep my mouth shut as I didn't want to put my thumb on the scale at all. He ended up picking the dog I at first had pegged as the third best. Basically we handled all three, petting them and such. Then we ran each individually on some planted pigeons. He picked the wildest one that arguably ran the best. I would have picked the calmest one that arguably ran just as well. Unfortunately the prettiest one didn't range very far or show much independence, otherwise that would have been an easy choice.

 

[2ski]

Im not sure where I said a test was a competition… But you can still use a test to compare dogs across testing standards.

To be clear, I’m not interested in the offspring of dogs that have just been “tested” and not trialed either.

Unfortunately a lot of testing in the country has resulted in lowering the standards not bettering the breeding.

This is what you said and what I was responding to.

"Competition is really the only level playing field when comparing abilities across the spectrum. It’s nice that a guy hunts his dogs regularly, but unless you can quantify how that dog performs against other dogs, there’s no benchmark for what is good and what is bad in dog quality."

So while a test sets a standard, I don't need a competition amongst dogs to tell me which litter I'm going with.

 

[JGood]

@2ski how do you pick a breeding/litter without comparing the dogs going into the breeding?