Plato Was Wrong

I think I understand how dog shows work. Each dog, of each different breed, is compared to the ideal of its breed. This being a vale of sorrow, each dog falls short, and the dog with the least imperfection is judged the winner. In the last dog show I watched, the beagle was the winner, and boy was that one happy dog!

I don't mean to say that dog show judges are incompetent, but surely it's impossible to say just how the best dogs of each breed fail to live up to their breed standards. There are thousands of perfectly good German Shepherds in the world, and am I supposed to believe that the best German Shepherd of them all, the one selected to appear in the Westminster Kennel Club show, was distinguishable in any meaningful way from the perfect German Shepherd?

Am I supposed to believe that this was the case for every dog in the show (with the possible exception of the beagle) and that every dog in the show was not only unsatisfactory, but detectably so?

That's the key point, because while we're all well equipped to say how even the most beautiful people fall short, and notice the mote in our neighbor's eye, that neighbor is usually human. Dogs are more difficult to tell apart, and while there's some evidence that the standards of beauty for humans are inborn (e.g. it is probably not a social construct that we find people between 4 and 7 feet most beautiful) the same is not the case with dogs. I don't believe we were born with perfect Ideas of dog breeds from a previous life. Standards of doggy beauty are set by the WKC, more or less arbitrarily, and unless they are so specific that we can compare any dog with the reference book and find it wanting, dog judging is just a matter of how much the judges like the dog.

It turns out dog shows are just another popularity contest. Kind of puts a bitter gloss on the "standing ovation" that the beagle won, at the expense of the other dogs' feelings, I'm sure.