Julie,
Bandido was Rowdy's buddy and he passed away too early a few years ago. But when he was young, he was one of the best moving dogs I'd ever seen. He and Rowdy gave children cart rides at the Meet The Breeds event that was part of the 2005 AKC/Eukanuba Invitational in Tampa, Florida. Here's a picture of them just prior to us being awarded a Best In Show for the booth. That's Rowdy on the left and Bandido on the right.



Bandido stayed with us frequently and my favorite memory is he and Rowdy laying in the hallway outside of the studio with their butts touching. Two intact male Rottweilers that truly loved each other.

Preston, in the Conformation ring, judges look at how the dogs move to validate what they see stucturally when the dogs are standing stacked. A dog can be hand-stacked into an almost perfect position but when they move, you can't hide things like a straight front, too much rear angulation, poor shoulder layback, a rear that is cow-hocked, etc. When the dog moves, it shows you how sound it is physically. The shot of Dot, Julie's Whippet, is misleading because trotting is something they are asked to do in the show ring. Whippets are not trotters. They RUN!! Very fast. And they do so by using their backs as if they were hinged and galloping. They run like Cheetahs. They are built for short bursts of blinding speed. While Rottweilers can run, they don't cover ground like Whippets do. But they trot nice and they trot effortlessly and they should be able to trot all day long.

As Julie says, judges need to know how different breeds should move. But regardless of the breed, the ones that move smoothly -- as someone once described a famous Kenyan Marathoner: "as water flows" -- are generally the ones that are put together the best. When I judge Rotties, I judge on profile -- how the dog looks freestanding from the side -- and movement both down & back (to see how true they move front and rear) and from the side. Yes, I look at heads and yes I care about the cosmetics (color, pigment, coat texture, length of tail, etc.) but what I see from the profile of the dog tells me everything I need to know about type and when I look at the dog's movement, I can see whether or not that dog could do the job for which the breed was created.

Jim