Page 33 - WUT Magazine

If you would start today, would you become a judge or not?
Starting today, I think I’d still have had the interest to learn judging, in the case if the situation around me would be the same that I had in my time, when I got the mentor who taught me very e ectively to see a dog in function and in type, and to understand what I really had to do while judging a dog. The problem of today is that many people like to become the judges just to take a certain position, to have a little bit more power in the breed; also many of them have the interest to bring their own breeding up or to sell their puppies for better prices.
When we were young, we were more friends, and were helping each other. When I started in the breeds, not many people had cars, and it was not always allowed to use trains to travel with dogs, so it was not easy. I started in Great Danes, – or German Dogge, this name is better than Great Danes, – and if we had to go somewhere by train with such a big dog, it was a drama. So breeding was more
“local”, more in the circle where you lived. We had no possibility to say, “No I’ll go for mating to Hamburg, to Paris or to Rome”, which is much easier today. Therefore, at that time all of us – the breeders and the exhibitors, – were like the circle of people with the same in- terest: to breed nice, successful, healthy dogs. Such a situation au- tomatically kept us closer to each other, because it often happened that today you needed your friend’s help, and tomorrow your friend needed your help. This kind of relations between dog people is what that we’re losing in modern times.
Hassi Assenmacher-Feyel (Germany), FCI judge
For me, Horst Kliebenstein is one of the best judges of our time.
He is a highly esteemed and popular colleague, who has strongly shaped the national and international cynology. His brilliant expertise, his kindness, honesty, consistency, helpfulness, loyalty and humanity are unique, and he is never aloof.
I wish him a great many sunshiny years with his wife Ulla, his children and granddaughter and, of course, a lot of pleasure and fun in judging.
Ümit Özkanal (Turkey), FCI judge, President of the Turkish Kennel Club
It was October 2011 when I first met Horst at my show in Eskisehir, Turkey. We spent 3 days together judging and hunting with Turkish group X dogs. On the last day, he told me that his opinion on Turkey and Turkish people had enormously changed. He is one of the best judges of the FCI, and I, like everybody, respect his judgement and his personality.
W U T Magazine. 2017 /#1
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