Bruno, our six-months-old lagotto Romagnolo puppy, participated in his first-ever dog show this past weekend. While it was a true debut for Bruno, it was the first experience for all of us as well. In my teens, I used to take my Dobermann to shows, but (a) it was long time ago, (b) it was in a different country, and (c) I didn’t really know what I was doing, so whatever points my dog got, the credit goes entirely to him. This time, we had help from an experienced handler, Nicole, who directed Bruno, and most importantly us, at every step – from which category to register in to where to sit to avoid distracting Bruno while he was at the ring. By the way, this is yet another example of the fact popularized by Cesar Millan that dog training, and working with dogs in general, is really mostly education of their human owners.
“Grooming is a huge part of showing a lagotto,” Nicole told us even before our first meting. Although this breed is an ancestor of poodles, the official breed description – the standard – is quite explicit in that a lagotto should not look like one. With their curly hair, lagotti look deceptively scruffy. This look, called rustico, is in fact quite difficult to achieve. The coat cannot be too long, because otherwise it would mat (lagotti don’t shed – one of the reasons why we chose this breed). It cannot be too short either, because the dog should look as if it’s ready to work – hunt for truffles in a thick forest undergrowth, which is the breed’s official specialty.
A couple of weeks before the show, Nicole asked me to send her photos of Bruno to evaluate his current coat length and whether we should have him groomed. Her verdict was, “Don’t touch it! I’ll give him a trim myself right before the show.” When we met on Thursday evening, she gave Bruno a haircut using a pair of long, frighteningly sharp, curved scissors. Watching her do it dismissed any doubts in my mind about a hypothetical possibility of learning how to groom a dog myself. There is just no way I would be able to control Bruno’s wiggling and at the same time take very decisive cuts with the scissors to shape his silhouette, no matter how thoroughly I understood what it should look like from every angle. I am familiar with sculpting (modelling, to be precise), but unlike with clay, there is no going back after a chunk of hair falls off under a snap of the scissors. Achieving the “column legs”, the “carrot tail” and the “round head” with the hair on the ears “trimmed to the leather at the tips of ears” is not a mean feat. It took Nicole almost an hour just to transform Bruno from a wookiee into a lagotto.
A side note: I’ve been learning lot’s of useless fascinating facts since we got a dog. For example, I’ve learned that in written English, according to the Associated Press guidelines, parts of the breed names that are derived from proper nouns – names of places, surnames – should be capitalized, while the other words should not be (e.g., German shepherd, lagotto Romagnolo, etc.) The American Kennel Club says that all words in a breed name should be capitalized, but I say they are biased. I had no idea, until I decided to write this! My excuse is that English is my second language. I find this almost as fascinating as why “whiskey” is sometimes spelled with an “e” and sometimes without – but that is a totally different story.
