ecstatic

For 2005, Harley was #2 out of all the dogs in the entire country that competed at the same level we did…

And also, she was #1 out of all Labrador Retrievers competing at that level…

a close call

for a few months now, i’ve been waiting for front & finish magazine to publish the national ratings of all dogs competing in harley’s class. she did really well last year, and had the possibility of being nationally ranked. dogs are rated in a number of ways — by their individual breed (for her, Labrador Retrievers, which I think she could win), by the “group” of dogs their breed is in, and also a cumulative ranking of all dogs regardless of breed. harley did so well, i was hoping that she could be ranked in all 3 of those categories (all dogs, regardless of breed being the most prestigious).

well, today i saw an update on their web magazine that the ratings were finally published. however, i was crushed to see that harley was not, in fact, ranked in all 3 categories like i had hoped, she was only rated in Labradors as #3 dog. this was really disappointing to me until i realized that the magazine only reported her as having 28 points, when she in fact should have 69! so i called the magazine, and found out that they get the show results from the American Kennel Club (AKC) and that AKC had left off the show results for the months October – December, which happens to be when Harley earned most of her points. so, all of the ratings that had been published were completely wrong!

i am glad not to be the woman who thought she had gotten 1st place of all the dogs in the country, only to realize that she didn’t. i guess i am glad that instead i was let down at first, but have hope that things will look better for us when the results are redone. only time will tell…the woman at the magazine said they have gotten tons of phone calls, and plan to recalculate and reprint for their March issue. many of the phone calls were angry ones, i’m sure. i wasn’t so much angry, as just very disappointed when i saw the “results”. i put so much of my time/effort/heart into doing this that it made me very sad to think that it didn’t pay off.