Becoming: You Don’t Even Know What You Don’t Know
BY JACQUELINE FOGEL continued
for the Mayor of Milwaukee, I invent- ed a budget reduction formula to be used to mathematically calculate how much city department budgets could be reduced depending upon a series of variables calculated for each depart- ment. The variables included things like “vital to health and safety” (think police and fire); size of recent budget increas- es, ratio of support staff to production workers and a few other variables that my innocent 27-year old brain thought were important to efficiently run a city. Eight years later, after the formula made headlines for the Mayor and won him international accolades, it was scrapped entirely because Milwaukee runs on a strong mayoral system of government. In that kind of a system, politics was the most—well, only—important variable. If a department’s work, or its leader could contribute to the mayor’s re-elec- tion, then it was really important. That’s why the Department of City Develop- ment always got whatever it wanted. The department head was a huge sup- porter of the mayor and he offered up hundreds of his employees to work in mayoral campaigns. On the other hand, the police department was headed by an arch enemy, so they had to play a dif- ferent kind of hard-ball, public-relations brand of politics to get the funding they wanted and it was never easy. I consider myself a master breeder. It has taken me 49 years to get where I am now. The first 20 were spent mostly dabbling, but the past 29 years have been seriously devoted to my trade. I have loved almost every minute of this journey. I have loved working with the master breeders and groomers. I have loved working with the professionals in theriogenology and genetics and training. It has become a life-long learn- ing process. I know my eagerness to learn, advance and work hard towards a goal was enhanced by earning both a
bachelors and a masters degree. Higher education teaches people how to focus and work hard to achieve a goal. It broadens your exposure to all of the dis- ciplines you know you can never really understand and it teaches you how to be patient in your own field. It teaches you that there will always be some people who know more than you do and there are an awful lot of people who know less. It is humbling and expanding all at the same time. So back to my young protégé. Well, he’s gone. Packed up in the middle of the night, left me his three dogs and disappeared. I was told he unfriended and blocked me on my social media accounts and unfriended or blocked the other important people in my life. He also left me with a lot of unfinished jobs he said he would do and a staff that had to immediately cover for his assigned hours. We will survive his abrupt departure, but it was a really poor way to leave a group of people who just wanted to welcome him in as part of their team. It was what a young person with little real-world experience does. He did not want to have the difficult conversation with me. He didn’t want to tell me that forcing him to live on- site in a newly remodeled apartment, and work long hours as a groomer and a trainer and take care of four-week old puppies and work as an assistant at local dog shows was what he had in mind. He wanted to be me. He wanted to have all of my knowledge and all of my skills and all of my relationships—you know, the stuff I spent 30 years acquiring— and he wasn’t happy that it didn’t all come to him in three months. He didn’t like working so hard at menial labor like taking care of other people’s dogs. He wanted to show a beautiful dog at the Nationals and Westminster and win big. He wanted the 5% of glamor that’s attached to this trade, without putting
in the 95% hard damn work. He wanted to be my equal without investing much of his own labor. And in case you didn’t catch it ear- lier, this young man left all three of his dogs behind, though he did take the Westie puppy he got from a different friend. Now I don’t know about too many others, but the real dog people I know would never let themselves be separated from their dogs without a fight. If, as he said on more than one occasion, these dogs were the most important thing in his life, then how could he simply leave them without so much as a conversation? He had the only daughter I had access to out of my BIS winning bitch who died of pyome- tra three weeks earlier. I must admit I am truly happy to have her back and wonder about the grand plan in the uni- verse when this sort of thing happens. I am disappointed, but I am not dev- astated. And I really don’t care one bit about social media. I am disappointed that my breed does not have a young protégé living with me after all. To a rare breed, this is a blow to the future. There are a few young people coming up who are progressing much more cautiously in the breeding and exhibiting of this breed and I think the breed will be in good hands with these real dog people. There are also some foreign exhibitors who are reaching out to learn about the basics of this breed. I don’t know how to reconcile the young people today with the reality of our trade. I know 30 years sounds like a long time to them and they think they should be able to speed things up with technology. But all technology has brought to this trade is more work to do and things to learn. It certainly has not sped up the breeding or training pro- cess. Perhaps we need to remind young people that it is the journey that is fun and meaningful. They must learn to find joy in things that cannot be rushed. Puppies won’t grow faster because you have a smart phone with dozens of apps, and you won’t become a good handler by just watching videos of great handlers. It’s the joy we get from spend- ing time with our dogs and the other people in our lives who love their dogs as much as we love our own that has become important to us. It takes time to know what you don’t know, and even longer to figure out how to fix that. It takes time, our most precious commod- ity and one I don’t want to waste with people who don’t understand or want to commit.
“PERHAPS WE NEED TO REMIND YOUNG PEOPLE THAT
IT IS THE JOURNEY THAT IS FUN AND MEANINGFUL. THEY MUST LEARN TO FIND JOY IN THINGS THAT CANNOT BE RUSHED. 102 • S how S ight M agazine , J une 2018
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