Black Ribbon

permitted a wet Bingo to shake off all over everyone, tried and failed to get Chuck Siegel to give her an individual lesson, and then insisted that she and Bingo must do a Novice run-through. Bingo had a trial coming up, she said. Irma capitulated. With no help from Eva, Irma and a few volunteers cleared away the high jump and the bar jump. During the run-through, Irma made the same kinds of tactful suggestions and helpful observations that she’d made to everyone else and that everyone else had accepted with thanks. Eva, however, had already tried everything Irma suggested, wasn’t making the handler errors that Irma pointed out, didn’t like this approach, rejected that one, and otherwise made an obnoxious fool of herself.
    So if you can write up Eva Spitteler as an angel in dog heaven, go ahead. Also try the sympathy cards, so many of which had now appeared that they’d lost their shock value. Scary clippings also continued to appear. We already knew about canine illnesses, hazards in the home, and poisonous plants. We knew not to leave our dogs locked in airless cars on warm days, and we knew that the sweet taste of antifreeze made it an especially deadly threat. Throughout my late-morning course on canine first aid and CPR, I kept reminding myself that I protected my dogs from these and other dangers and that I either knew or was learning what to do if my precautions failed. When I practiced CPR on the canine mannequin, I made sure that I knew exactly where my hands belonged and how much force I’d need to use if Rowdy or Kimi ever lay as lifeless as the doggy dummy. Ginny, Cam, and I had a worrisome talk about bloat, for which there is, of course, no first aid. Once a dog’s abdomen starts to swell, all you can do is get to a vet. But not every vet knows how to perform the lifesaving surgery. All of us trusted our own vets. Here we felt suddenly unsafe, far from home. Everyone reminded everyone else always to soak dry food in water and never to exercise a dog just after a meal. That morning, I’d waited until after lure coursing to feed Rowdy. Even so, I listened hard to the reminders and warnings.
    After first aid, I’d let Rowdy go twice through the jump chute, which turned out to be a series of bar jumps set at equal intervals along the length of a narrow passageway formed by a tall, thorny hedge on one side and a hurricane fence on the other. The point of the activity, I thought, was to identify and correct jumping problems, especially bad habits that could eventually injure bones and joints. A couple of experts had already assessed Rowdy’s jumping for me, and the chute jumping instructor had confirmed their opinion that his form was excellent. But maybe it was Rowdy who’d gotten the real point: Leaping over jump after jump, he’d had a lot of fun.
    On the yellow pad, I scribbled, Jump chutes. Chute jumping? Fun. Brilliant start. I wasn’t even sure what the activity was called. I tore off the page, crumpled it up, threw it in the wastebasket, and began to block out the article about making life easy for judges by understanding the guidelines they had to follow. Sped by the sense of knowing what I was doing, I made swift progress. How, I asked, might exhibitors, stewards, and even spectators inadvertently put the judge in an awkward position? Without actually criticizing clubs for failing to train stewards, I reminded my readers that “under no circumstances may a judge look at a catalog until he has completed judging.” In the ring, dogs are, of course, identified only by the numbers of the handlers’ arm bands. The catalog would enable the judge to see the names of dogs, handlers, owners, and breeders, information that could bias judging. In reality, experienced breed judges didn’t actually need to see a catalog to know precisely who was who, but the ban on looking at the catalog was nonetheless an attempt to minimize politically motivated judging, and I approved of it. And what other options did the AKC have? Were handlers supposed to enter the ring masked and hooded? And what about readily recognizable dogs? If they, too, were disguised beyond recognition, how could anyone be expected to judge them? So, no catalogs anywhere near a judge, and no chitchat that could be misconstrued, either, nothing at all that might appear to bias the judge. Also, exhibitors had to avoid even the slightest appearance of doing the judge a big favor or giving material thanks that might be misconstrued as