Article
Points

  The other day someone walked up to me at a trial and asked, "How many points toward an Amateur Field Champion does one get in a 24 dog 1 hour stake if the dog takes second place?". Wow! It took me a second to even digest the question and, no, I had no earthly idea. I do know where to find out. I think? Shoot, I am surprised if I get a letter from the AKC with a championship certificate enclosed. In other words I don't make a big effort to keep track of the points.

Maybe I am just out of the loop here so let me consider why I am accumulating and tracking the points on my dogs.

One reason is to have some means of letting people know just how good my dogs are. Why? Well I can see two reasons. One would be just bragging rights. The other would be to place some value on breeding the dog. I am a pretty good bragger even without the points but, you know, it seems that no one really wants to hear my brags. Every time I make some claim the other person has a better claim, even if I don't really know what their claim signifies. As far as breeding opportunities I have consistently lost money in the breeding business. I would do much better to let other breeders do the work and lose the money. I could buy a good puppy with the money that I save! I could really save a lot of money by buying an already trained dog!

But it's good that people keep track of the points. When I buy that next puppy I will probably look at the pedigree and look for the FC's. It's the "field" dogs that I am looking for. But more than the FC's on the pedigree I want to know the dogs that the puppies come from. I want to have a pup from parents that I like to watch work. I like them to have an athletic look that I like both standing and running. I like them to really love to find birds and point with so much intensity that you think that they will not be able to resist chasing that bird. I like intelligent dogs who can figure out where and what to hunt and how to handle new situations. I like social dogs who like people and like to work with them. I like to know that the parents passed on their good characteristics to pups in the past since you only know what genes are in the dog from it's offspring. And I like to know what kind of stakes get this dog to where it is today.

If someone just wants to put a title on a dog and they want it bad enough it can almost always be done over time. Every dog has his day and given enough chances of enough trials they are going to eventually get enough points for a title. Your odds are even better if you keep to the small weekend trials where the pros are not entering their strings of constantly trained and campaigned dogs to compete with yours. The stakes that I like to see in the history of a dog's placements are 1+ hour stakes with lots of high class bird dog competition. A few wins like these really make me sit up and take notice.

When it gets right down to it I guess there are really just one kind of points that I am personally interested in. It's those "points" that you see the dog doing when he/she is pointing a bird!

-Vic Williams