TO RANT OR NOT TO RANT

We had promised you (or threatened you with. We confuse the two.) an editorial. Those of you my age may remember the great Gilda Radner, one of the original Saturday Night Live cast members. One of Ms Radner’s memorable creations was the elderly, hard of hearing, Emily Litella, who would frequently do editorial rants on such malaprops as endangered feces, eagle rights, and flea elections in China. When confronted with her misunderstanding of the subject (it’s endangered species, not feces), Ms Litella would smile sweetly and say, “Never Mind“.

Well, we find ourself in a similar circumstance. After receiving a couple of e-mails about a proposed $25 annual activity fee to be imposed on every AKC dog participating in sanctioned shows, we began writing a rant. Once we had a first draft we decided to wait a day until we could verify the facts with AKC. After a couple of e-mails and a long telephone conversation with Dennis Sprung, AKC’s President, we are happy to report that no such fee has been proposed. The fee had been discussed as part of a “conceptual plan” to support a project currently known as the “Future Program”, which has as its primary purpose the collection and preservation of frozen semen from top dogs to support future breeding programs.

It’s encouraging that AKC has such ambitious and forward thinking discussions going on. We all, as part of the AKC constituency, should allow our elected representatives the freedom to exchange ideas and discuss new concepts. As fashionable as the term “transparency” is we have often counseled clients that “no one should be allowed to watch the making of sausage”. Dennis Sprung, like us, is well aware that this not the time to be raising fees on dog show fanicers. So if some starts to rant about the evil proposed fee, tell them it is not true. They just might say, “Never mind!”