Every Dog Has Its Day—

She’ll Pick The Working Winner At Westminster

By Dottie Evans

We’ve got a celebrity in our midst — but you wouldn’t know it if you saw Patricia Laurans dressed in her comfortable clothes shopping at the Big Y, puttering around her Mt Pleasant Road garden, or making the rounds of Saturday morning tag sales in search of dog crates.

But tune into the USA Network on Monday night, February 13, at 8 pm, and you’ll see this longtime Newtown resident at the pinnacle of her profession as dog show judge work the 130th Annual Westminster Kennel Club All Breed Show. The show may also be seen live in streaming video on the Westminster website, www.westminsterkennelclub.org.

In November she did the sporting group at Mohegan Classic that was on ESPN.

“I feel very fortunate. I’m still pinching myself. I’ve been a judge at Westminster before. This will be my seventh time,” said Ms Laurans.

Dressed in formal attire and totally focused on picking a winner in barely 30 minutes minus time out for commercials, Ms Laurans will walk out into the center ring at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Her job will be to select the best working group candidate from 24 entries to compete the next night for Best In Show.

“In my mind’s eye, I have a picture of the ideal dog or bitch for their breed. It’s not A against B, but each dog being judged against its breed standard,” she said, during an interview held January 19 after returning from Tampa, Fla., where she judged the herding group in the AKC/Eukanuba National Championship.

“I feel it in my hands and I see it in the set of the head. You know what you’re looking for,” she added, describing the zone of concentration that underlies the quiet verbal cues she gives to handlers and their dogs.

“Go round the clock.”

“Form a line, please.”

“OK, let ‘em fly!”

As she approaches each animal, she is careful to reassure it by making soft-voiced comments such as “hey, baby,” or “you’re a love,” though she claims not to be aware of what she is saying.

Mainly, she wants to feel the set of muscle and bone under each thick coat. Examine the teeth and the bite. Look at the line from head to shoulders to hips. And watch the gait, which can best be judged when the dogs are seen in profile trotting around in a large circle with their handlers.

“I’ve been to a lot of seminars and shows, and had a lot of wonderful breeders teach me. I’ve seen great representatives of their breeds through the years,” said Ms Laurans.

“I look for that glide and the way they lift the tail. I look to see whether a certain dog is a nice mover. How is he feeling or reacting; I see the nuances. After I pull him out to go round the clock, I’m watching him coming and going. I look at the profile. Certain breeds have a certain foot pattern when they move. I watch the legs, and the head — is it high and proud, or low to the ground.”

Working Group

Goes First

Of the 2,500 dogs that will be competing in this year’s Westminster show, there will be 165 separate breeds divided into seven groups. The groups will be judged in the following order — working, terrier, toy, and nonsporting (Monday night) and sporting, hound, and herding, followed by Best In Show (Tuesday night).

In previous Westminster assignments, Pat Laurans has judged a number of breeds, Junior Showmanship Preliminaries and finals. In 1996, she judged the herding group. But when she learned in January 2006 that her working group assignment would be the first group to go on the two-day schedule, she was delighted.

“That’s great! Going first means that afterwards I can relax and watch the show.”

Breeds included in the working group are Akita, Alaskan malamute, Bernese mountain dog, Black Russian terrier, bullmastiff, Great Dane, Rottweiler, Samoyed, St Bernard, Great Pyrenees, Doberman, boxer, Newfoundland, Old English sheepdog, collie, Siberian husky, and standard schnauzer. Generally intelligent and powerful, working dogs are bred to perform a variety of tasks. These include guarding homes and livestock, serving as draft animals, and as police, military, and service dogs.

Over the 130 years that the Westminster Dog Show has been in existence, breeds from the working group have won Best In Show at Westminster 15 times. The most recent was in 2004 when a handsome black Newfoundland named Champion Darbydale’s All Rise Pouch Cove took the prize. The boxer is the working breed that has won most often.

Lisa Peterson, a Newtown Bee columnist who works for the American Kennel Club (AKC) in New York City and resides in Newtown, has known Ms Laurans for a long time.

“She’s a longtime dog person with a good eye for dogs. She understands structure and movement. She is very fair, judging the dog on that day. She is involved in AKC as a delegate, chairman of the Parent Club Committees that are guardians of each breed. She’s a champion for all the breeds,” Ms Peterson said.

When Ms Laurans was asked how she is able to choose the best dog out of so many champions in their respective categories, Ms Laurans answered, “I love all the groups.”

But she won’t go out onto the floor at Madison Square Garden during the day when the breed groups are being judged.

“I prefer that all the dogs who make it into the group competition are a surprise. I don’t know which dogs will be there until I get into the ring. In fact, I might never have seen that dog before in my life,” she said.

A Lifelong Love Of Dogs

Pat Laurans is an internationally recognized judge of champion dogs. Licensed in 1982, she has judged throughout the United States and Canada, in Australia, England, Ireland, Japan, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela.

She has been “into dogs since 1963,” having begun as an exhibitor of Doberman Pinschers, after which she established her own line of Laurwyn German wirehaired pointers. She has been an AKC delegate for 24 years and was elected to AKC’s Board of Directors in 1996.

Born in Fall River, R.I., she grew up in Providence. After spending years playing with her neighbors’ dogs, her first dog at age 7 was a Dalmatian named Beau that she selected because of her solid black ears.

“The amusing thing is now the breed standard says there should be spots on a Dalmatian’s ears,” Ms Laurans noted.

Judging dogs has been a full time occupation since she retired in 1995 from her job as a guidance counselor at Brookfield High School.

She particularly recalls the summer of 1963, 43 years ago, when she owned her first Doberman with Terry Hundt who also lives in Newtown.

“We trained with J. Monroe Stebbins in Kent, and I started going to shows and watching the handlers. After a serious car accident, I was forced to sit in the audience since I couldn’t participate,” she said.

That was when she began observing the greatest examples of the breed standards and learned to look for the cues she uses today as a show judge.

“I watch for showmanship and how they are doing on that particular day. In most groups, each dog is bred for a certain task. For example, in the herding group there are dogs bred to move livestock and cattle, dogs bred to move sheep, and dogs like Shelties bred to move chickens.

“They are built for their jobs. The Nordic breeds like the malamute and the Newfoundland are built for harsh weather as rescue dogs.”

Over the years, attending the Westminster show as a breed or group judge has been a top priority. She remembers one very bad winter a decade or so ago when driving into the city in the middle of February was particularly difficult.

“There was this horrible snowstorm and we had an awful time getting there. We parked somewhere on a sidewalk and walked blocks to get to the garden. It was a pilgrimage. You simply do not miss Westminster.”