What is working conformation? From the side.
I've seen a lot of mention of leg length as being the difference between the "show" corgi and the "working" or "old style" corgi. There's a strong implication that a longer leg makes a more "herdy" or "historic" corgi and is somehow healthier than the show-type corgi.
Leg length is NOT what you should be worrying about.
Leg length allows the dog to take longer strides IF all else is equal (if joint angles are equal and so on). So, yes, a Border Collie will take longer strides than a corgi. If what you care about is taking longer strides, I'd strongly suggest that you go get a different breed, but I honestly don't get heated about the absolute length of a corgi's legs.
What I see as very troubling is the trend toward breeding CARELESSLY and then saying that what a person is producing is a "working-type" corgi. Dogs always, always move toward the generic. Any time you stop breeding to the standard, the back shortens, the neck get shorter, the legs lengthen, the head becomes larger and plainer. That's not a legitimate choice where a breeder has decided that a particular feature is desirable; that's a breeder producing a poorly bred puppy and then saying that it's going to be healthier because it doesn't look like a show dog anymore.
So let's TOTALLY ignore leg length and look at what you must insist on to know that you have a good, sound dog regardless of breed, and why I said earlier that when early breeders found the Pems they started with they knew they had lots of work to do.
Here's a show-type Pem.
The first thing you should do - and this is not a corgi-specific evaluation; it's something we're taught to do in any breed - is to draw a line from the elbow through the shoulder, and another line across the topline.
In a good, sound dog, the entire head and most if not all of the neck should be both above and in front of the lines you draw.
The next thing you do is draw a line up through the middle of the front paw and toward the sky. This is the line of weight bearing on the heaviest part of the body. That line should look like it is through the front part of the body, NOT through the neck.
The next step is to make sure the dog can take good deep breaths and get lots of oxygen. The rib on a corgi should end more than half-way down the body.
Finally, you want a dog who is "balanced" - the angle formed by the shoulder joining the upper arm should be roughly like the angle formed by the femur joining the knee (in dogs we call it the stifle). On this lovely bitch you can see that the angles are very similar (it's normal for the rear angle to be turned a little bit; they're not supposed to be identical in inclination, but in the openness of the triangle).
Let's look at one of the early corgis, Ch. Rozavel Red Dragon.
Divide him in fourths first.
Do you see how much shorter his neck is, how much more upright the whole shoulder and front assembly is? His head is barely out of that quadrant and most of his neck is under it.
The weight-bearing line:
His front leg supports his neck, not the big mass of weight that is formed by the front half of his body. You should be able to see now why it is that his topline sags in the middle - if his shoulder and arm were set further back, the topline would be straight.
Ribbing:
His rib is just slightly past the middle of his body; not as good as the modern corgi.
And balance of angles:
He's not badly balanced, but there are two things that worry me - the angle in the rear is appreciably more open than 90 degrees, which means that the "hinge" of his leg was already open. He's not going to be able to get much more drive from the powerhouse of the rear than he's got at a standstill; he'll have to move from the hip instead of from the knee. Second, see how very much shorter the upper arm is than the shoulder? The upper arm should be as close to the same length as the shoulder as it possibly can be.
If someone is trying to sell you a "working" corgi, ignore the leg length. Ask for an eye-level stacked photo - you CAN get any dog to stack; put them on a stone wall or a countertop and they'll stand still - and draw these same lines on them. If the dog is sound, the lines won't lie. You should see a good straight topline that's created by a well-angled front that supports the body, not the neck. You should see lots of "hinge" created by a front and rear that are at 90-degree angles or very close to them. You should see a long arm, not a short one. You should see a good long rib. You should see a head and neck that are well up off the body. A dog built like that will be able to move easily and efficiently, and won't break down with activity. Leg length, in the end, means very little.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Joanna Kimball on
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Kerry, I came to dogs late. I started breeding rabbits (Dutch first, then Netherland Dwarf, a couple of lop breeds, ended with Standard Rex) when I was seven, moved to goats (Nubian, Saanen, Alpine), sheep (Dorset-Corriedale), ducks (Cayuga, runners, Ruen), chickens, and horses (didn't breed, but owned half a dozen).
We had unregistered English Shepherds and GSDs growing up, then my first purebred dog was a field-bred Great Pyrenees. Moved to Danes, then Cardigans, as well as as much rescue as I can possibly do. I bred literally hundreds of other animals before my first litter of puppies. My goats were shown in conformation and on milk test; my senior Saanen doe was one of the highest producers in the nation.
So, yes, I have had to put my money where my mouth is, and the basic concepts of conformation are the same across multiple species. Heck, I could put a duck up there and draw very similar lines. Across the spectrum of mammals you want weight-bearing joints placed well under the body to support the bulk of the animal's mass; you want a laid-back shoulder, you want a good hinge to be the powerhouse of the rear, you want a front that can get out of the way of the rear legs. When you evaluate the movement of a horse, you're looking for the exact same things as when you evaluate the movement of a dog. When you want a sheep who can give birth easily and then not injure its own udder, you're asking for the same pelvic construction as a sound dog. If you want a goat who can still carry a pregnancy without pain at age eight or ten you're looking for the same topline as I look for in a corgi.
The goal of conformation is to make an animal - of ANY species - that can obey its heart and its instincts, as long as possible, without pain. A really poorly put-together dog can still hunt (and often hunt well), but it's fighting its body to do so. It's going to be in pain at the end of the day and it's going to be arthritic by the time it's five. A really unsound corgi can still herd, but why on earth should we be asking it to fight its own body to do so? That strikes me as unfair at best. And then breeding that animal, knowing that its offspring are also going to be more tired, more painful, need to eat more, etc., is just a terrible idea. You always breed to produce the soundest and most efficient example of your breed that you possibly can. -
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Permalink Reply by Chris West on
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That is some really interesting information!! I can't wait to get home and take a side pic of Frosty so I can see what he looks like in this scenario!!
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Permalink Reply by MagnoliaFly on
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Leg length is important if you plan on taking a corgi to the world agility championship where they have to jump 14" in the small dog category. They need to be able to push hard enough to get over those jumps cleanly and not tired out from exertion.
For worlds corgis in the small dog category can't measure over 13 3/4" at the shoulder. Most of the corgis I see are a 2-4" inches shorter than that and would never be able to make it over a 14" jump without injury.
A friend of mine who went to AKC Nationals last year with her MACH4 corgi Ben told me a corgi made it onto the World Team this year. She is taller than most corgis from what I heard. -
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Permalink Reply by Beth on
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I just wanted to expand a bit and say I don't disagree with Joanna's conformation assessments so much as get frustrated by the implication.
Dogs and cats are about the only animal I can think of where we have a competitive championship judging system for breeding stock set up solely on looks. It would be so easy to add performance requirements to dog shows, and yet it's not done and I don't know why.
If you are breeding a dog to have conformation to do a job, then the final proof is actually doing the job. And so we judge young race horses in the sales ring on conformation and bloodlines, with a well-conformed horse from mediocre blood lines being worth considerably less money than a well-bred one wiht mediocre conformation (you don't want a horse that will go lame the first time she gallops, but the liklihood of having heart and drive and desire can be gleaned more from the pedigree than the angle at which the neck ties into the shoulder). There are countless champion race horses and Olympic show-jumpers and world class endurance horses out there with less-than-perfect conformation. More importantly, there are TONS of perfect-looking horses out there who can't compete worth a darn.
If you are breeding dairy cows, the final proof is milk production. If you are breeding working stock horses, than "cow sense" is the deciding factor.
Yet with dogs for some reason we have devised this system for determining breeding stock that goes mostly by looks. We can talk a lot about stifles and pasterns and toplines, and it's not that those things don't matter at all because they do. But ultimately you need the "talent" to go along with it and talent can't be judged by appearance.
If I could wave a magic wand and have my heart's desire, we would have a world where all dogs with working backgrounds need to do some sort of work to prove their mettle as top breeding prospects.
I'm just a pet owner who loves my dogs, but I have a lot of contact with people who have dogs that work in one form or another, and while some breed clubs have done a good job by having it in their culture that a hunting dog should hunt and a herding dog should herd, there are many others who put the be all and end all of the breed's future in the hands of the bench shows. -
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Beth -
Goats, sheep, cows, horses, rabbits, chickens, ducks and other poultry (including pigeons and peacocks), rats, mice, pigs... All of them have conformation-based championships.
I actually bred, showed, and milked Saanen dairy goats, so I'm very familiar with the way it works in dairy animals. The same things that make a sound dog make a sound goat (or cow, or sheep). A deep ribcage means better ability to store and metabolize food and oxygen. A well-laid-back shoulder means a goat who will live longer without breaking down. A free, open gait is the sign of body parts that all work together. Cowhocks interfere with the udder and cause injury and infection. And so on and so on. Among the top dairy herds, conformation-based showing of at least a portion of the herd is considered an absolute requirement, and the animals that are not shown are typically bred to increase their conformational quality as well as their milking ability.
I would personally object pretty strongly to the idea that we have to have a performance requirement in dogs, and it's not because I couldn't (and don't) fulfill it. My current show puppy is out on a farm right now, spending several weeks with stock, before she gets cleaned up and heads off to the Cardigan Nationals. I object to it because I've seen what happens when it is implemented. It becomes tremendously political, it causes huge vicious arguments, breed clubs split and splinter, good breeders head off and breed apart from a registry, etc.
The reason there are four or five registries right now that all claim to be "the" wirehaired pointing breed hunting dog registry is a great example. All the dogs in all the registries are good, sound dogs; the split is entirely based on arguments about what a genuine working test is, what instinct the dogs should have to display, whether they should have to kill cats and raccoons as a part of the hunt, who was put in charge of being the proctor of the tests, etc. That kind of splitting hurts breeds, further fragmenting and contracting an already small gene pool.
What about breeds whose job is either gone or incredibly difficult to test? Should we neuter a Shar Pei who won't kill another dog (because that was their job, after all)? Should we force every Elkhound breeder to travel to find wild moose?
There's also always the questions about what you should do with the exceptions. My bitch Clue fractured her pelvis at age 2. She's a beautifully put together dog who passed all her health tests and is herdy as heck, but there's no way in hail I'm forcing her to get a HX title. Should I not be able to breed her? In corgis, injuries are very common; should we force a dog with a growth plate injury and a consistently painful front leg into a trial situation? -
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Growth plate injuries in corgis are so common precisely because they're corgis. It has nothing to do with show- or any other type breeding. What makes a corgi short-legged is a defect in the growth plates and the other connective tissue; the growth plates are thin, brittle, and rippled. They're much more prone to breakage than a long-legged dogs'. That's also why corgis "go down" in the back and why they're so often dysplastic. Weird connective tissue. Make the connective tissue normal and you're looking at a Shiba Inu, not a corgi.
The reason you will have a hard time winning if you don't get your puppy from a winning breeder is that it's really hard to produce nice corgis of either breed. The breeders who are consistently doing so are the ones you should be buying from. It's NOT politics. The dog world is political between breeders, with lots of friendy-friend groups and so on, but it's not very political in the ring. I've said this many times before, but I walked in to the Cardigan ring as a brand-new owner-handler that NOBODY knew, with a dog bred 1,500 miles away, and I am a CRAPPY handler, and I won like bananas. I got yelled at by judges for being such a bad handler more than once, but they put my dog up. Clue's biggest majors came under Jane Forsyth, who not only won BIS at Westminster but judged BIS there forty years later, and trust me that she does not know me from a hole in the ground; and Joy Brewster, who was a top handler for decades and who also would not know me if she tripped over me.
I don't know what you're talking about with the breed clubs; they all have different rules about becoming voting members but the most common model is a one-page application and the signatures of two members. Not "the right" members, just other members. -
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I think a CGC is too easy to get and wouldn't consider it a true "temperament" test. I'm a CGC evaluator.
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Permalink Reply by Shepdog on
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You know... that's interesting to hear from an evaluator. I've thought that myself (and yes, my dogs have it on there because -- well, why not, right?) I see a lot of dogs who have a CGC that I sure wouldn't consider stable by any means (and I had one years ago that easily passed that CGC but wouldn't have ever passed a true "temperament" test whatsoever. He was a mental train wreck (a tough rescue) but he could do all the bells and whistles he needed to do while in the class and for the pass... but I was on top of him 24 -7.
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There are lots of things I would change in the test if I could, but I'm not on the AKC committee that does those things and they'd probably reject them because they want to make money on passing dogs.
I think the dogs should be required to re-take the test every 3 years or so since we all know behavior changes as a dog grows up. A puppy tested at 12 months of age may be a very different dog in two or three years. They note this in their material but don't require the dog re-take the test.
Where I work we use it more as a manners class and a prep course for dogs looking to do pet therapy. The pet therapy test is much harder and more stringent. The CGC prepares them for it and for most families it helps them understand the importance of having a dog accept strangers, greet politely, accept grooming, follow simple commands pretty reliably and isn't that what every family wants?
And you are right - I'm just saying I wouldn't consider it a test of temperament even though many people consider it as such. -
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Permalink Reply by Sky and Lyla on
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I took this comment to mean that the CGC is not a temperament test, not that it is a sham. I don't think the AKC ever intended the CGC to be a temperament test, it is merely a test of whether or not a dog can perform a handful of obedience commands. Temperament would be a tricky thing to really and truly test as so many ill tempered dogs are still obedient and can be trained to do just about anything. I don't, however, think anyone should or would call a test worthless for not doing something it was never meant to do.
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@ Kerry - see my comment in detail wherein I explain why I believe it is too easy to get.
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CGC is not meant to be just a handful of obedience commands. I just looked for my copy of the evaluator guidelines from the test and could not find it. I think I still have it here somewhere but I'm in a hurry to get out the door. Anyway, I was a little surprised we passed because we needed to repeat two things twice (both involved Jack getting a little too eager to want to see the tester's dog). And then I read the note to the instructor on the official form and there was something to the effect that the overriding theme was that the dog was good-natured and manageable, and repeating an exercise can be permitted if it does not interfere with that requirement.
We did TDI at the same time which has a few extra test items, but the CGC does require the dog to allow a stranger to brush it, look at its teeth and in its ears. It requires the dog to stay calm in the face of sudden noises and high activity, and it does require the dog to stay calmly with a stranger while the handler leaves the area for at least 3 minutes. So it's not a temperament test, but an unstable dog should not easily pass either.
Since we did TDI we also had wheel chairs and stuff, but basically in the test they had someone doing figure eights in a wheel chair, someone walking around with a walker coughing loudly and muttering an stomping the walker, a child skipping around singing and someone else rattling bags or something, and we needed to wander around through that noisy threatening group on a loose leash without the dog appearing unnerved or unduly distracted.
They also do things like pop open umbrellas, drop a metal pan and as an addition for TDI, make you walk past food on the floor.
So it's not really testing obedience. A very skilled handler could get a beast of a dog to pass with a lot of work, but the test is designed more for novices who want to do other things with their dogs. -
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