The Queen's Dog Won, So It MUST Be a Mutt!

The Queen of Englands's champion gundog is being accused of being a "cross-breed" by rivals who claim she should be banned from competing because cross breeding gives the dog an unfair advantage.

Read that sentence again.

Mallowdale Diamond, who was given to the Queen as a present in January 2013, is one of a number of dogs facing claims they have an unfair advantage because they are Sprockers, a cross between a Springer spaniel and a Cocker spaniel, The Sun claimed.

The four-year-old has competed in a number of competitions, winning the Yorkshire Gun Dog Open Qualifiers in 2015 and the Kennel Club Open Qualifiers last year.

Rivals claim that Sprockers are bigger and faster than pure breeds. A group of 20 judges are alleged to have written to the Kennel Club to voice their concerns.

Andy Platt, a former judge, told The Sun there was “a lot of suspicion” that the four-year-old is a Sprocker.

“The Kennel Club is an association for pedigree dogs and they have got their rules that no unauthorised cross-breeding can occur without their permission,” he added.

In short, in a competition about FIELD WORK, Kennel Club paper-hangers are complaining because their (allegedly) working dogs are not as good at their job as the (alleged) cross-breed.

Right.

In the U.S., we have a saying: "the bullshit stops when the tailgate drops."

The sore losers are flying a very clear and amusing flag: their dogs are not as good as cross breeds, real or alleged. They demand to be judged on a curve where papers trump actual objective field performance.

They are saying, rather loudly, that the Kennel Club has failed to produce the best working dog, and the evidence is that any dog that wins a Cocker Spaniel field trial ahead of their own dogs must be a cross breed because it clearly has super-powers that the less functional Kennel Club dogs do not.

As I noted back in 2011:

As always, the threat to working dogs is the tar pit of the Kennel Club from which no breed has ever emerged intact and still working.

Tar pits look benign -- cool water tends to pool on top -- but nothing has ever come out of them but bones.

In the case of the Kennel Club, what has emerged, time and time again, are exaggerated dogs devoid of working instinct, nose, and common sense, with coats inappropriate for the job, and skeletal structures that are often inadequate for a day in the field.

No one who courses dogs looks to a Kennel Club dog to do the job, and the same is true for working sled dogs, herding dogs, cart dogs, pointers, setters, or retrievers.

And now we can add field Cocker Spaniels to the list of dogs that Kennel Club theorists have (apparently) ruined by selecting for looks rather than real-world performance.