Robert,

Sure, you do not have to be a judge to know the breed or the standard, but the problem in NA since the beginning, the breed does not have any judge that really knows the standard. Since the beginning, the breed was judged by the judges of other breeds. No body can develop a breed without breed expert.

Concerning the protection of the genepool, you say the Épagneul Breton and the American Brittany are the same breed, so they should have the same standard. The only standard for the Épagneul Breton is the French standard, the FCI one. If the american judges learn the FCI standard and use it, all the lines that perform well under the AKC standard will be obsolete, so the breeders will only use the EB that fit the standard and the old AB genepool will be lost. So... where is your genepool protection???

Anyway, which breeder will accept to change the standard in North America after so much work using a different standard??? Someone has to be crazy to scrap his old breeding stock and use a "new" (for him) standard.

The only solution to continu to develop both lines (american and international) is to split the breed. We cannot use the same name for the 2 differents things... this has no sense.

I heartily agree with you, Robert

What I find curious is ...note the turn of stifle...how can grooming change that or am I looking at this too late in the evening...placement of ears????

I think that this only goes to show that a picture or photograph can be very misleading, even for best trained eyes...

It's amazing how diferent they look!! after grooming it looks taller!!

To me it does not look like a Breton after grooming.

I wonder by whom and when this notion of grooming came about? Just how did the exhibitors arrive at such a style???!!!! To me, the dog post-grooming looks more akin to a Fox Terrior than ever a Breton!!

It was started in the 1960's when an over coated dog named Sequani's Dana McDuff was "groomed" and he became the winningest dog of the times. Since then the fad grew and now there seems to be no turning back.....

We now have Field trialers that shave the whole dog down mostly in the south and Mid-west so that they run cooler in thier warmer fall trial seasons. So lots of photos in the ABC magazine portray many dogs that are smooth as a pointer. And Field trialers want a longer tail and they stroke them upwards so that the dog looks proud and statuesk on point.
A carry over from the Pointer fashion which by the way got started when an "Artist" painted a winner with a tail up in the air...and then it became "Fashon" to train tails up. Interesting how things get changed huh...

Well I prefer the " before" specimen
Though it is over angulated...One of our criterias is there should be a line from the tail to hock down...

Strange how fashion and trends can shape, influence and ultimately distort a breed's standard. Concerning this tails up trend for dogs on point, I agree that this has developed under the influence of pointers, but it normally shouldn't have had any incidence whatsoever on continental breeds, because it is not an attitude that is inherent to these breeds. Unfortunately, I remember hearing Brittany handlers in US field trials who would boast about their dog's «2 O'Clock» tail position on point ... and I agree with Goldie that this pure ignorance of the dog's breed standard brought up a tendency to dock Brittany tails longer and longer.

On this aspect, Europeans, and especially Italians from what I've heard, are much more conscious of the style inherent to a breed, and they will use a field work standard to judge the best dogs, just as conformation judges should be using a conformation standard in the show ring. (This might be part of the reasons why Italian Brittanies score so high and so consistently in European field trials.) This again is in line with promoting the distinctive traits of each breed, because if all breeds were to end up with the all the same features, there would be no use in having different strokes for different folks [/i] I have a few good european books with detailed field working standards for different pointing breeds, and reading these is quite fascinating, because the choice of terms must end up being so precise, that you can actually see the dog in motion in the field by simply reading the working standard.

Many years back, while I was serving on the CEB Québec's board of directors, we had written down what, in our view, should be an acceptable field working standard for our Brittany Spaniels... and the implementation of such a standard had been quite controversial, but in the end, it had a positive result on the competence of our field trial judges.