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Written by Jewel
Blanch, our New Zealand author and correspondent.
When I owned Afghan
Hounds many years ago, one of the most frequently repeated tales
I heard was that Afghans were complete airheads, and quite untrainable.
This statement was a classic example of the master placing the
blame for his own shortcomings on the servant.
That is a poor analogy
because an Afghan Hound will acknowledge you as an equal, but
your servant, it will never be! I suspect that this is the reason
for them being labelled as "stupid".
Just because they don't
rush to answer your beck and call doesn't mean that they don't
know what you have asked of them. They know very well, but they
will only pander to your silly little whims, if it so happens
that they have nothing better to do at the time.
They are, at the one
time, aristocrat and clown. If you understand this, you will find
that an Afghan Hound is one of the easiest and most fun dogs to
train, or so I found.
We always thought that
one great advantage I had, strange as it may seem, was my blindness.
A blind person is not able to have concentrated eye contact, and
this very lack appeared to help my dogs to feel relaxed. I have
been blind most of my life, and during that time, have owned,
and trained dozens of dogs for various tasks, and have never found
this lack of eye contact to be of any significant importance.
The particular dog
that I am going to tell you about was capable of a very intense
gaze, a fact that my sister discovered to her own discomfort.
One evening, Deslie tried to stare Wendy down, but it was she
who was stared down!
Before I get on to
the real meat of this story, I would like to tell you a little
about Wendy [Calahorra the snowbird]. She had been seriously
injured in a car accident when she was about a year old, which
had left her partially crippled. Although she had all her legs
intact, she usually hopped around on three.
I had shown her in
conformation several times before the accident, and she did quite
well. After the accident, I did show her once, but I did not expect
her to be placed because of her rather strange gait. It was just
a ribbon parade for the Afghan Hound club to which I belonged,
so I had entered her merely to make up the numbers.
Much to my amazement,
she took best bitch on parade. On reflection, I am not sure whether
that says something about Wendy's outstanding conformation, or
the lack of same of her competitors, but be that as it may, taking
bbop on three legs wasn't a bad effort.
Above, I said that
*I showed Wendy, but this was not strictly accurate. I did all
the preparation, but in the case of the Afghans, for indeed I
showed more than one, I had someone else handle them.
I did show Newfoundlands
and Maltese myself, but the accommodation I had to make for my
blindness made it impossible to show Affies successfully. Even
with the Newfoundland, it was marginal. The difficulty lay in
the fact that I had to have an escort, who would be on my right,
and the dog on my left. This
meant that the available ring for the dog to show off its paces
was considerably reduced.
When showing an Afghan
Hound, a ground-eating, flowing stride is one of the dog's most
outstanding features, and to show the gait to its maximum advantage,
it is necessary to have as much room as possible, hence my having
a sighted person do the handling.
As you no doubt have
deduced, I was enormously proud of Wendy. However, the point of
this story is not her achievements in the conformation ring, but
rather in the other ring ie that of competitive Obedience. This
is the story of our attempt to gain a CDX title.
In New Zealand, the
dog only has to qualify once to gain a CD or CDX. I stand to be
corrected here, but it is my understanding that in the sport of
competitive Obedience in the U.S.A, the dog is required to keep
its attention focused on its handler's face.
Now, I am writing about
competitive Obedience in New Zealand as I knew it 25 years ago,
so handling styles may have changed in that time, but then there
was no insistence here for this unwavering focus of attention.
The dogs that I worked
in the ring, whether it was a Papillon, a Maltese, a German Shepherd,
or an Afghan Hound, were all superb heelers, and this was because
my steps tended to be a little erratic, and so they had to watch
me like hawks for they were never quite certain where my foot
was going to come down; would it be in a perfectly straight line
or would it be a little to the right or left of it?
Only by watching my
feet very carefully would they be able to keep themselves in the
correct position. I won't bore you with the first part of the
test, for it was the "drop on recall" that amazed and startled
all the lookers-on. I must explain here that I got a little verbal
help from the ring steward in so far as he/she would say "bear
left" or "bear right" if I was going crooked in my heeling [a
very real possibility], and in the "drop on recall", the steward
would call "now" when the dog was within one stride of the drop
zone.
I left Wendy sitting,
while I retired to the far end of the ring. I am relating the
events as they were portrayed to me after the test was completed
as I was unaware of there exact nature at the time. When I called
Wendy, she left her position like a cheetah in pursuit of its
dinner.
She reached the drop
zone in two mighty leaps, and the spectators were quite sure that
she would not be able to stop, let alone drop. The steward called
"NOW", I commanded "DOWN, Wendy crashed to the ground as though
a giant knife had cut off her legs.
These three actions
were almost simultaneous. She was travelling so fast that she
actually skidded several yards along the grass. People said that
they had never seen a "drop on recall" like it, not even from
the "quick as lightning" border collie.
We lost a couple of
points on the dumbbell retrieve. This was my fault as I threw
it out on an angle,, so when Wendy returned with it, her sit was
not quite straight, and then we lost another three points for
anticipation on the scent discrimination.
Wendy and I faced in
the opposite direction as the scent cloths were being laid out.
As we turned around, I had the option to tell her to "STAY" but
I didn't.
Wendy saw the cloths,
and without waiting for my command, [after all, she knew as well
as I what she was expected to do], she whizzed out and grabbed
the correct cloth and returned with it.
Wendy qualified for
her CDX with a score of 167 points from a total of 175. Most of
the points we lost were due to errors on my part. Wendy [now Calahorra
The Snowbird CDX] was the only Afghan Hound to have gained
an Obedience title at that time, and I would not be surprised
if that record still stands.
If your
appetite has been whetted by these stories, they and others are
to be found in "My Life With Guide Dogs". The book is available
directly from the author, Jewel Blanch on 3.5 inch computer disk
at a cost of 10$US, p&h inclusive. Jewel
Blanch
Text
and images copyright 1998 Jewel
Blanch
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