The Canadian Lhasa Apso Standard
(a Foot-in-mouth Critique)"Origin and Purpose: Beyond the northern boundary of India, where Mt. Everest stands like a guardian sentinel, the land of Tibet. A country of huge mountains, deep valleys, windswept plateaus, warm summers and cold winters, it is the home of the Lhasa Apso. It is an ancient breed and genealogical tables show them to be in existence as far back as 800 B.C. Having been bred for centuries as a special indoor sentinel, the Lhasa Apso has never lost this characteristic of keen watchfulness.
General Appearance: The Lhasa Apso is a medium small, exotic, very hardy breed with a well developed body, strong loins, good quarters and thighs. The long, straight, hard, dense coat enhances the beauty of the breed and completely covers the dog.
Temperament: Gay and assertive but chary of strangers.
Size: Ideal size for dogs is between 10-11 inches(25.4-27.9cm) with up to 11.5 inches (29.2cm) permissible. Bitches should be slightly smaller. Lhasa Apsos over 11.5 inches (29.2 cm) are to be disqualified. Body length from the point of the shoulder to the point of the buttocks should be slightly longer than the height at the withers. A well balanced type is to be preferred.
Coat and Colour: (a) The adult coat is heavy, straight, hard, not woolly or silky, of good length and dense. The coat should be parted from the nose to the root of the tail. (b) The head should have heavy furnishings with a good fall over the eyes. Good whiskers and beard. In Obedience the hair may be tied back from the eyes. (c) Ears should be heavily furnished. (d) Legs should be well furnished. (e) Tail should be well furnished. (f) Feet should be surrounded with hair. The pads have hair between them which may be trimmed. (g) Forequarters, hindquarters and neck are heavily furnished. (h) All colours and mixtures of colours considered equal.
Head: SKULL narrow, falling away from behind the eyebrow ridges to a marked degree. CRANIUM almost flat, not domed or apple-shaped. Viewed from the front, the top of the cranium in narrower than the width at the level of the eyes. The foreface is straight. MUZZLE: The length from the tip of the nose to the inside corner of the eye to be roughly 1.5 inches or the length from the tip of the nose to the inside corner of the eye to be roughly one-third of the total length from the tip of the nose to the back of the skull. A square muzzle is objectionable. NOSE black. The tip of the nose is level with or very slightly below the lower eye rim when viewed form the front. MOUTH: Bite - reverse scissors (upper incisors just touching the inner face of the lower incisors). Full dentition. Incisors (6) to be in a straight line. Acceptable bite - level (the front incisors of the upper and lower jaw meeting edge to edge). Undesirable bite - overshot, Excessively undershot (more that 1/8 inches / 0.32 cm). The teeth must not show when the mouth is closed. LIPS black. EYES dark brown. Not large and full or small or sunken. The iris should be of reasonable size, no white showing at the base or top of the eye. The eyes are frontally placed in an oval-shaped black rim. EARS pendant. The ears should be well set back on the skull at eye level (not level with the topline of the skull). The leather should hang close to the head and in an adult dog should reach the level of the lower jaw.
NECK: Well set on to the shoulders. Long enough to carry the head well creating an impression of elegance. Slightly arched.
FOREQUARTERS: Shoulders strong, muscular, well laid back. The upper arm should not be "Terrier straight", allowing for the desired width and depth of the chest. LOWER ARM: the forelegs should not be bowed. From the front when the dog is standing, the legs should be straight parallel, elbows well under the body. The forelimbs support a good share of the body weight when the dog is standing, or when moving at a slow pace. The pasterns should be straight and firm when viewed from the front. Slight deviation from the perpendicular when viewed from the side. FEET: Short, round and compact with good pads turning neither in nor out. Ideally, nails are black. In particoloured or light-coloured coats, light nails and pads are permitted. Dewclaws permissible.
BODY: Topline level. Chest well ribbed up, i.e., the ribs should extend well back along the body. The slightly curved ribs should not extend below the elbows. LOIN: too long a loin adds excess length to the back and results in a loss of strength to the forepart of the body. If the loin is too short there will be a loss of flexibility. The loin should be firmly muscled. CROUP: the angle formed by the pelvis and the backbone should not be more than 30 degrees from the horizontal. This angulation gives power for the forward propulsion. ABDOMEN: tucked up to a shallower depth at the loin.
HINDQUARTERS: Strongly muscled and in balance with the forequarters. Hocks, when viewed from the rear at a stance, should be strong, straight, and parallel., turning neither in nor out. When viewed from the side, they should be perpendicular to the ground and not stretched out beyond the rump of the dog. STIFLE BEND: the stifle is moderately bent. FEET: same as in the forequarters.
TAIL: Set high. Carried forward close to the back with the tip draped on either side of the body. The tail should not rise vertically. A kink in the end is permissible. A low carriage of the tail is a serious fault.
GAIT: An easy moving, free-flowing trot is the normal pace of the Lhasa Apso. This trot shows the character of his movement at its best and is what should be aimed for. The pad should be seen as the dog moves away. indicating a strong hind drive which is balanced by a good reach for the forelegs. Moving too quickly in the ring throws the dog off gait and should be avoided.
DISQUALIFICATIONS: Lhasa Apsos over 11.5 inches (29.2 cm) are to be disqualified.:"
Attention! All you good Canadian people who are deadly serious about their dogs, and whose whole day is ruined by an unkind word, should read no further. You kind and gentle souls will only be upset by what follows.
Writing a Standard is not an easy task. No matter what words you use, someone is certain to object or misinterpret. But I do think that we all can agree that a standard is a little off the mark when:
I would like to address these general problem areas first, before moving on to the juicier bits.
- nobody but the people who wrote it knows what it means,
- it is so wordy no-one wants to read it,
- so repetitive that anyone who does want to read it falls asleep halfway through.
To name each and every body part that should be covered by hair, seems just a wee bit redundant, don't you think? Especially after already stating that the "..coat… completely covers the dog", are you worried that someone will affix a hairpiece to the midline? Can you only be sure by telling us, ad nauseam, that there is hair actually GROWING on the legs, the tail, the feet, the head, the forequarters, the hindquarters, the ears? Did we miss anything? Did you mention the belly? How about the scrotum? Missed the chin didn't 'ya! Well of course YOU know that's part of the head, but maybe some dumbell somewhere won't! Z Z Z Z Z Z z z z z z z .
Please. The paragraph on head is too long. Maybe I read too many comic books as a child, but I fall asleep before I can finish a single paragraph that long. I know paper is expensive, but you would have plenty of room for sub-paragraphing if you didn't have to call forth hair on each and every body part.
Can somebody explain to me what this means: "the top of the cranium is narrower than the width at the level of the eyes". The cranium is first described as "almost flat, not domed or apple shaped." From this we must necessarily assume that the upper surface of the cranium is a shallow, 3 dimensional, convexly curved surface. The "top" of such a surface can be none other than a single point. Only if the "top of the cranium" were a perfectly flat surface, could the "top" have any finite dimensions at all! However, in the previous sentence the cranium was described as "almost flat" which means NOT perfectly flat - a contradiction!
While on the subject of contradictions, One item found under Muzzle is "square muzzle is objectionable." This was undoubtedly copied from the earlier English and American standards without much understanding of its lack of meaning. This phrase was used in the 1934 standard to distinguish the Lhasa from the Shih-Tzu , which is supposed to have a "square" muzzle. (an impossibility - see the article on the English Standard) Your Lhasa standard then goes on to request teeth in a straight line. Squared off teeth go with a squared off muzzle. The Shih-Tzu is supposed to have both. The Lhasa standard cannot make up its mind, so it sets up a contradiction. I suppose this has the effect of making every dog a little right and a little wrong, no matter how it's teeth are arranged, but offers a very schizophrenic view of the desired dog. The Australians rejected the most recent English standard for the very same words - "teeth in a straight line" - asserting that this was a feature of the Bulldog, Boxer, Pekinese, Shih-Tzu and other breeds with distorted heads, but not a Lhasa Apso.
That out of the way, I can proceed to real issues. Please read this remembering that what seems like a minimal change in the language may in fact be very great change in the meaning. All the recent revisions of the Lhasa Standards in various countries, have, by their inconsistent language, driven the standards apart from each other, but more importantly, away from the original Lhasa Apso - the one that still lives unchanged in the Himalaya.
The Canadian Standard, like others, has evidently decided to create a new Canadian type rather than keep the old Tibetan model. Sir Lionel Jacobs, one of the first British Lhasa fanciers, stationed with the military government in the Punjab in 1901 writes, "...the back should not be too short; it should be considerably longer than the height at the withers." The U.S. standard asks for a dog "longer than tall". The US club, ALAC, has had a measurement program underway for several years, and has found that the vast majority of Lhasas are from 35% to 45% longer than they are tall. There is a reason for this. A truly small dog would find survival in Tibet very difficult. A small dog was acheived by lowering the legs (on a somewht small dog), leaving the necessary length of body for big lungs and enough mass to produce heat. In fact almost all breeds are slightly longer than tall. If you do not believe this, take a tape measure to your next show and do some measuring. If you make the dog only "slightly" longer than tall, you have discarded one of the distinguishing features of the Lhasa Apso. "Cana-Apso", anyone?
On the other hand, there comes a time when we have to get rid of fossilized language in favor of something more meaningful: i.e.,"falling away behind the eyes". The only vertebrate whose skull "falls away" behind the eyes is a frog. I suppose this phrase had a meaning, known to a few cognoscenti in 1901 when it was written, but we have lost the Rosetta Stone since then, and it is now as intelligible as ancient cuneiform! All our Lhasa standards carry this useless vestigial organ of a phrase, and the best thing all of our Lhasa standards can do is chuck it out, and say what we mean.
Other notions are rather ambiguous to say the least: i.e. "nose tip is level with the bottom of the eye". Depending on the angle at which I view the head, I can make the nose higher, lower. even with, above, below or completely obliterating the eyes. It's all in the line of sight! Try it yourself - you'll see! Same goes for the ears. Depending on the line you draw as horizontal, you can make the ears above, below, or even with the eyes.
Like all the past and present standards throughout the world, the present Canadian Standard has its "silly bits". Aside from these and a few areas where I feel the Canadian Standard has departed significantly from the original Lhasa Apso, it is really very good - much clearer than either the FCI or AKC standards.