Poet, Stanley Kunitz, says of gardens, “The way to see a garden is by circling it, by walking through it” (The Wild Braid, 2005). That is because art conceals and reveals at the same time. “You don’t see the garden as a whole from any point,” Kunitz argues, “but you begin to know it by making a tour around it. Then it becomes a garden in the mind, and you become the instrument that defines it …” (p. 79).
In my experience that is equally true of Scottish Terriers. You don’t truly see and know the Scottie as a whole from any point but if you’re patient, if you stay with this breed long enough to circle around it, to walk into and through it with intimacy and loyalty, you discover both what is revealed as well as what is concealed in these dogs of Scotland.
Kunitz’ insight is the story of the evolution in my own editorial voice in Great Scots Magazine. Scottish Terrier ownership, like marriage, always begins with infatuation and euphoria and superlatives. We’re high on our dogs in our beginning stage, it’s true, but we scarcely yet know the Scottish Terrier. We only know them as one knows a garden after initial glance. I’m certain my critics within the breed establishment wish I and my magazine’s pages had stayed at that honeymoon stage where my journalism began fourteen years ago. But just as seeing a garden from only one angle falsifies the garden, so the giddiness of first ownership is a superficial picture of the modern Scottish Terrier. Indeed, there is but one picture more false: the photo of the show-winning show dog as breed perfection. There is radical ignorance and criminal negligence in judging the ‘garden’ of the Scottish Terrier by cursory appearance. And those who sell and buy Scotties based upon poses of perfection curse our dogs.
Circling our breed requires history, both personal and collective, and walking through this canine ‘garden’ means getting one’s hands dirty with Scottie genetic diseases, problems, and the traditions which created them. We designed this dog in our image, made him handsome but not healthy. And just as the gardener is responsible for the layout, the health, the productivity and the problems in his garden so we are accountable for the modern Scottish Terrier whom we made handsome by our line-breeding but a health-risk and short-lived.
Judges who make pronouncement upon breed ‘perfection’ based upon atypical, one-dimensional, solely appearance-based assessment, and those whose selective breeding is influenced by such parodies of true breed assessment, in truth know little of the breed. The modern Scottish Terrier, the contemporary poster-dog for the National Institutes of Health’s genetic bladder cancer research because our Scotties are 20 times more at risk for bladder cancer than any other dog, is broken and we broke him with our trivial pursuits. The Scottish Terrier needs friends of deeper connection than the superficial, friends who reject quick, shallow appraisal of perfection in this ‘garden.’
For too long we’ve abdicated the Scottish Terrier to showring culture to trivialize our dogs’ function as well as our breed’s health and well-being. The Scottie’s future depends upon a new breed of friends who will circle slowly, walk through lingeringly and intimately and compassionately, and who will thereby become true defining instruments to fire the old ‘gardener’ if necessary or at least the old practices as needed to cultivate in the Scottish Terrier authentic “well-bred” perfection that embodies life and health, not mere show.
Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine
