Judging the Whippet

This article was originally published in Showsight Magazine, March 2014 issue.

Judging the Whippet

The most wonderful thing in the world for a Whippet judge is to place your hands on the neck of a fit and correct Whippet and feel the taut muscle sing beneath your fingertips.

Slide your hand onto smooth shoulder blades lying tightly against the body. Run your hand across the broad back and loin—the spine is slightly visible (not prominent), and from the quality of the muscle, you know this is a flexible back and croup.

Onto the thigh—the muscle is thicker but not bulgy. Now, very important—continue to the second thigh, and find the same tight muscle there, with good width, not narrow.

Ahh. Heaven can wait. This fit, flexible Whippet is the ultimate pleasure.

Often, judges who are new to the breed have trouble understanding the topline. It is a gentle arch over the loin, not over the back. What we are looking for above all is a flexible body.

A Whippet running full speed, in the double suspension gallop, will pass continually through concave-convex movements. In other words, the body has to be flexible enough to look like a horseshoe when the legs meet beneath the body and a hammock when the legs are fully extended. A rigid, high spine will prevent this movement.

That’s why I view a strongly arched topline as a serious fault, while less arch is not as serious. The Whippet standard instructs that the dog is built for speed and work. Aspects of incorrect structure that would impede speed are the most serious.

Feet are very important. “No foot, no dog” is an old saying from horse breeders. A glance at a Whippet foot will tell you all you need to know. No need to pick it up or handle it.

“Feet more hare than cat, but both are acceptable,” the standard says. Whippets have good feet. Flat, splayed, or soft feet without thick hard pads are very rare in my experience.

“The back is broad, firm, and well-muscled, having length over the loin…. There is a definite tuckup of the underline.” The Whippet underline is strongly pronounced. Sometimes new judges ask if the topline and underline should match—the answer is no.

The topline’s job is flexibility; the underline is a bellows. The ribs are extremely deep at the brisket to protect powerful lungs, and then each back rib is sculptured successively shorter.

The standard requires “length over the loin” because all that deep chest is going to be pushed up into the loin during the concave moment.

Whippets whose ribs remain approximately the same length lack breed type; their underline will be more similar to a Labrador Retriever than a sighthound. This lack of a pronounced underline will diminish the Whippet’s speed and therefore is a serious fault.

Yet, judges reward many Whippets with this fault because their long bodies are able to move with lots of reach and drive. Whippet breeders sometimes cringe when a novice judge urges us to look at the wonderful movement on the dog they put up—if the dog achieved the movement by having a tubular shape or a loose body.

Check the standard—shape comes first. We don’t want to get a virtue (lots of reach and drive) by means of a fault (lack of underline). It is possible to have “symmetry of outline” and “powerful gait” both, together, perfectly harmonized in a beautiful dog.