You bring up two excellent points. 1... What excites you may or may not excite me or any one else watching or judging. This is a subjective sport... a beauty contest with wheels. and 2.. Unless you see every brace, you cannot judge the stake, End of story.trueblu wrote:tenbears, however, I do want to be excited by range. Not just huge going, not running off, going with the handler,whether on foot or horseback. I've seen a lot of folks who walk their dogs, don't own horses, don't attend many trials,be very upset because, "my dog had 6 finds and the winner only had 2" or "my dog had so much style but he didn't place" or "man my dog really worked those fields, he listened, turned on the whistle, but he didn't place". Most of those folks don't have clue one what is expected in a trial and many have never hunted a day in their lives. Juddges don't count finds, judges are not impressed with a dog that hunts its rear off 50 yards away, judges aren't impressed with style if the dog yo yo'ed the entire brace, they aren't impressed with a wonderful stylish find dead broke on the horse path. Point is, it's really hard to knock the judging unless one knows what the heck they are looking for and knows dogs themselves AND rides all braces. There are a lot of experts back at camp sitting around telling how much they know!!
As for bigsugar's comment above. That statement is completely off base. If a horseback handler is "inconvenienced" by a walking handler then they are in the wrong sport. Walkers are part of the sport. If one cannot handle at the pace of a walker then they should run in AF where there are no walking handlers allowed in some of there events.