Rules and regulations

While there has long been concern about judges being up to speed on the Kennel Club’s J-regs, change is afoot, finds David Tomlinson

A FEW YEARS AGO

I was chatting with an umpire friend about the Laws of Cricket — the rules, first drafted in 1744, which control this most ancient of games. “Of course,” he said, “they’re not nearly as complicated as those for field trials. Just take a look at the J-regs.” For those who don’t know, the J-regs are the Kennel Club field trial regulations. They are many thousands of words long, and cover (or attempt to cover) virtually every possibility and eventuality in the world of trialling.

In fact they are so long that there have been frequent complaints over the years that many judges had never read them or, if they had, it was no more than a cursory glance. That’s hardly surprising, as the J-regs cover 50 pages, and they have been regularly changed, modified and updated over the years by the Kennel Club’s field-trial sub-committee. The latest version of the J-regs, containing a number of important provisions that came into effect on 1 February 2022, can be downloaded as a PDF from the Kennel Club website.

The challenge for the J-regs is producing a set of rules for the most difficult and unpredictable of competitions. According to J(A)

1a, “a field trial should be run as nearly as possible to an ordinary day’s shooting”, and this where the difficulty begins. However hard you try, it is exceedingly tricky to run a competition involving dogs during an ordinary shoot day.

The majority of retriever trials, for example, are based on a walkedup day’s shooting, though few serious game shoots would even consider shooting walking-up pheasants. In addition, ordinary shoot days never have to cope with so many people, be they judges, stewards, handlers or even spectators.

The other problem is that a number of the handlers, and possibly even the judges, will have little experience themselves of ordinary shoot days, having come into the sport through dogs and training days rather than shooting. The J-regs do their best to overcome this by giving detailed advice in Annex A. It is the judges who are responsible for the conduct of the trial, and J(A) 3c reminds them that are “expected to maintain and abide by the highest standards in accordance with the appropriate Codes of Best Practice”. This means that they should not only be familiar with all the J-regs, but also with The Code of Good Shooting Practice.

All change

“A number of the handlers will have little experience of ordinary shooting days”

There has long been concern that not all judges are as au fait with the rules as perhaps they should be, but things are changing. After this season, judges who want to remain on the judging panel must not only have attended a Kennel Club judges’ training programme seminar on the J-regs, but they also have to pass the examination that has to be taken at the end of the seminar.

There are, however, exceptions, amusingly called grandfather rights.

This exempts judges who were appointed to the A panel before 1 January 2010, along with those involved in the pilot scheme for the judges’ training programme and any judge who has been a Kennel Clubapproved presenter. This excuses a considerable number, for there’s

a high proportion of a panel judges who were appointed before 2010.

It’s important to note that judges are appointed for each of the four subgroups — retrievers, spaniels, pointers and setters, and HPRS. This means, for example, that a retriever judge isn’t qualified to officiate at a spaniel trial, nor an HPR judge at a pointer and setter trial. There are a few judges who are qualified to judge more than one sub-group, but they are the exception. As far as I am aware, no one has ever qualified to judge all four sub-groups.

On the Kennel Club’s website you can find what are called seminar scripts for each of the four groups. These are not only essential reading for anyone planning to take the exam, but really useful for anyone running a dog in a trial. The scripts run through the J-reg rules, explaining exactly how they should be interpreted. Spaniel judges are reminded, for example, that when examining a shot bird to ensure it hasn’t been damaged by a dog, “they should take into account direction of shot, the bore of the gun, the type and hardness of the ground among other things”.

Examples of the questions that will be posed in the exams are also provided on the website. With each question a choice of answers is given, and if the sample questions are anything to go by, getting the right answer isn’t too challenging. For example, in a spaniel trial, which is an eliminating fault?: a) quiet handling; b) hard mouth; c) not stopping to flush; d) disturbing ground. (It’s b.)

Giving back to the sport

As anyone who has ever tried will tell you, judging is never easy. Handlers should remember judges are volunteers trying to put something back into their sport. Even with a detailed knowledge of the J-regs, mistakes will still be made. Hopefully these will be fewer with better-qualified judges, but I’m not convinced grandfather rights are a good thing. Surely everybody should prove they have the knowledge to judge fairly and consistently?

As anyone who has ever tried will tell you, judging a field trial is never easy

Managing so many people — including enthusiastic spectators — at a field trial can be a challenge