It truly was a great pleasure for me to lecture in Estonia in mid-spring of 2007, and to judge part of their Sieger Show. Exhibitors came from all over the Baltic region: Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, and I believe a few from Russia (handled by Russians, if not). As one of two SV judges, I found the quality to be of a rather high level, on average. (Erich Bösl of Piste Trophe kennel, who felt the same way, did the adult classes, and I did the puppy and veteran classes).

“Into the jaws of the dragon and into the valley of Death flew the sexagenarian,” to take liberties with Tennyson. And like the great winged darkness that soared in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” the menace of SARS was to threaten me in April of 2003. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the latest viral killer to come out of eastern Asia, was closing or quarantining more and more schools, apartment buildings, hospitals, and businesses in Hong Kong. By the time I left China, the same thing was happening in Beijing much farther north. I may have got out just in time to avoid being locked in somewhere. On my way to the Orient, I heard of an American plane being held...

As a kid during the war (the big one) I used to read comic books and later watch movies with Charlie Chan (no relation to Jackie) that had mistaken ideas of the way Chinese talked and acted, no doubt holdovers from the fabricated fancies of the late 19th-Century novels about building the railroads in the wild west. One of those terms used in both media was the saying, “Chop-chop!” which supposedly meant “Hurry!” After I judged a dog show in northeastern China this Spring (2005), I learned a more primitive, new meaning for the words. Unfortunately, the trip did not work out as well as other China trips have...

  The modern dog is to a great extent a manufactured product. That is, most breeds had been developed originally for specific purposes, but more recently have been changed via selective breeding to suit personal ideas of aesthetics (beauty). Utility has largely taken a back seat, but even in those circles where certain job functions are the breeders’ primary concerns, physical characteristics are often a result of breeders wanting the extreme rather than overall balance. This has led, over the last couple of centuries, to more differences between breeds than Nature might have developed on its own...

Years ago, in the age of print media, there was a situation in the German Shepherd Dog Club of America in which people were striving in vain to speak out about the GSD Breed Standard. In many cases, members were not allowed to express their opposing opinions on the breed Standard in the GSD Review, the official journal of the GSD Club of America. Those who ran the club also ran the magazine, and their editor was on a tighht leash, although how much she actively sympathized with the power structure’s proclamations was anyone’s guess. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (and I actually was one for a while) to see the obvious slant the officers of the GSDCA had on the subject. I maintained that the members had the right to...

Hardly had I recovered from jet lag after returning from an assignment in China, when I started the grueling travel mode again. As usual with my Asian assignments, it was more than 32 hours from bed to bed, with no sleep possible (for me) on any airplane. But this time the venue was Korea, and the assignment was for two weekends of shows plus a seminar for Korean judges at the office classroom of the Korean Kennel Club.

The game is the same (go to ground, in the quarry’s lair, and flush or drag him out), but the “game” (in the sense of what species is being hunted) will vary a little in size from the small rats to the large otters. Despite a miniscule percentage of terriers ever likely to be asked to enter a burrow after such prey or pest, the purists in the world of dog fanciers want the breed to remain true to its original purpose.

Travel broadens one, they say. While that epithet was meant to refer to the mind, it has a döuble-entendre for me, in that it tends to broaden my waistline as well. As a roving technical representative for some 30 years, I had opportunity to “wine and dine” on company (expense account) money, which meant that I could afford to develop into a gourmand and connoisseur. Since the mid-1980s, I have also globe-trotted in my avocation of judging dog shows and lecturing on cynological topics. As Keats put it, “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.” I have yet to stand, like Cortez, upon a peak in Darien, but I have experienced his “wild surmise” in 50 U.S. states and some 30 countries so far, several of them many times. One recent assignment was a return to China — a different part than I had seen before.