Judging a field trial is not all that difficult, IMO.
If a person has a firm grasp of the rules, a sound understanding of what it means to hunt in a productive manner and knows what it means to be steady to wing and shot... Those are absolute prerequisites that require experience, preferably from hunting and training your own dogs. A judge must be willing to pay absolutely close attention to each and every dog under judgement and be continually evaluating the performance that is unfolding. Lastly, a judge has to have a pretty thick skin and a level of confidence in their decision making process.
Remember I said there is only one winner in a field trial. There are folks that do not handle losing all that well and, honestly, many of them do not last in the field trial game...because you lose a lot more than you win and that can be tough on the ego. The best of the field trialers I have known take those losses as incentive to work harder, train harder...get a better dog, whatever it takes... and generally to find a way to raise their game.
The most important thing about judging is that you are judging the performance of the DOG. You should be watching the dog(s) and basically only see the back of the handler's head. Who the handler is, should not matter. What the handler does can either help or hurt the dog's performance, but you are not judging the handler...just the dog. IMO, when field trials are about the dogs, they are usually pretty right. When they are about the people... not so much.
RayG
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