You thought that I would say "BROKEN"?

Nope. I am NOT going to say that because I  believe that some rules do work and are necessary.

On the other hand if we didn't have rules for judging the dogs, well, what might happen?

• Judges would have to judge each situation on it's own merit.

• They couldn't watch a dog and make a judgment by counting the number of broken rules.

• They couldn't just throw out a dog because the handler or scout made an "oops" with the rules.

• Judges could only watch each performance of handler, scout, and dog and then would have to make a determination to which performance was the most pleasing.

And what about the behavior of the handlers?

Handlers could handle their dog however they wanted and would have to be judged on the outcome.

They could pull out a tracker and find their dog in the middle of a brace. Imagine. If the dog was a mile off and needed bringing back then they would just ride off into the sunset. And if it was on point in the deep cover only a 100 feet away we would have to put up with seeing how the dog handled his birds!

P.S.

I wrote this a LONG time ago after attending a trial and seeing some gross mishandling of rules being enforced. That mishandling caused several bad calls and disqualifications of some great bird dog performances. I was ready to throw out the rules so that we could just judge the dogs on what we saw. Now, many years later, I read this and think about why we have those "rules."

We all know the answer. Rules were made because PEOPLE repeatedly acted in bad faith and could not be trusted to do the right thing. And as more people have done more unethical bad things more rules have been made. And as more rules are ignored we make more rules to enforce the rules.

It's sad when a sport like field trials have gone from a "let's let a few dogs go and see which one does the best" to one where the rules get in the way of awarding the best dog and handler. There was once a day when "good sportsmanship" was the unspoken rule and that rule was followed by all sportsmen ( women included.) Maybe there can be again?