Quote Originally Posted by Karen View Post
I am so annoyed at the judging in this show. Both the judging and the challenges lately have been completely unfair.

Andrew only wants to be with Laurie. Anyone with an ounce of sense knew he'd excell at paying attention only to her. It would have been more of a challenge for him TO pay attention to commands from someone else. Whereas Leroy - the dog's a Border Collie for goodness sake. It is in his genes and his breeding to pay attention to moving objects. That Victoria called Teresa's body language toward him - and JD's toward Galaxy "threatening" was just plain stupid. There is no way either of those dogs felt threatened, not one bit. They are both herding dogs by breed, and needed extra effort from their owners to not move off their mark.
I actually have to disagree with this. If you had said this several weeks ago, Karen, I would have agreed with you, but now you have to look at the competition as a whole. In order to get this far, the dog would have already had to go through other tests that were not so much in the nature of their breed of dog. For example, I thought that many of the earlier tests were geared toward the bigger dogs and quite challenging for the smaller dogs. The fact that the smaller dogs got through them (Preston and Andrew) was quite and accomplishment. If the tests are now geared toward dogs more of his temperment than the others, so be it. They have to overcome their natural instincts to win, just the way he did in some of the earlier contests. It all works out in the end for those who last that long.

I do agree that the judging is subjective, but all judging is subjective. Not much different from the conformation ring really, where they have more easily identifiable criteria to consider.