643 — Bo Bengtson on Whippets and His Newest Book

Host Laura Reeves is joined by Bo Bengtson, legendary breeder, judge and author of The Whippet: An Authoritative Look at the Breed’s Past, Present and Future. Questions for Bo: [caption id="attachment_12997" align="alignleft" width="490"] Bo Bengtson judging the American Whippet Club National Specialty.[/caption] 1) This is your fourth edition of the quintessential book, “The Whippet,” first published in 1985. What made you want to update it again? What will readers find that is new? I guess it's pretty unusual for a dog book that was published that long ago to be reprinted, but it was last published in a much enlarged edition in 2010 and so much has happened in Whippets in the last 15 years! Whippets have become one of the most popular breeds at many shows: Crufts in England has had about 400 for the last few years, only Labs and Goldens have more... I have judged a show with 250 Whippets in Sweden, they have a Sighthound show in Germany that has 235 Whippets as a top figure, and it has become amazingly popular in many countries where you wouldn't necessarily expect it: the big shows in e.g. Poland all have more than 100 exhibits NOW.  The 2024 FCI World Dog Show was held in Croatia last month and there were 171 Whippets entered, which is fairly typical figure for the World Shows. And there are over 6,000 entries from the Czech Republic alone to the Internet's Whippet  Archive, so that's probably the  next big Whippet country!  USA doesn't have the biggest registration figures, but the American Whippet Club holds a National Specialty in April every year that is the largest in the world, sometimes with more than 600 Whippets present and over 1,200 entries.  I made a point of including all countries that have affected the world population in some way. Did you know that there is a world class Whippet breeder in South Korea that often wins in Europe and works with American bloodllines? I read parts of that 1985 book recently … It's not a bad little book for its time and a lot of the content is in later editions also, but it's fairly typical of breed books then, both in scope and size. Not many photos and all black and white, but I'll always remember how proud I was to get into Foyles Bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London and seeing my book on the shelf there! To get back to the new book, I'm so grateful that Denise Flaim convinced me to update it! The book is available both on Amazon and via Denise's RevodanaPublishing.com —they did a beautiful job: the book is much bigger than I expected — I don't know why I didn't expect that because I know that we added a lot of text and about 200 photos of winners from the last 15 years. Anyway, it weighs about 3.25 pounds, covers 530 pages, and when I took an advance copy to the National specialty in Tennessee in April, one reader actually started to cry because it was so beautiful!!  2) Share with our listeners some of the fascinating breed history you have gathered over the years, from its humble beginnings hunting hares, to its popularity as “the poor man’s greyhound,” to today. Well, of course the Whippet became popularly known as the favorite dog of the poor mining families in the North of England in the 1800s. There was organized racing with considerable sums to the winners, so of course the dogs were really well taken care of and in fact fed much better than the people. What's really amazing is how many people turned out to watch the races: there are some grainy black and white films still in existence from the late 1800s, and they prove beyond a doubt that there were thousands of spectators, many thousands. But what I've found was that the Whippet had friends much higher up on the social ladder as well. Gertrude, the Lady Decies, was socially very prominent and owned several champion Whippets, including the two first brindle champions. She was primarily a cat fancier, breeder and exhibitor but she showed the dogs herself, in post-Victorian voluminous skirts and cartwheel hat. And there was also Sir Edmund Chaytor, Bart., who was a frequent exhibitor with Lady Chaytor and helped reorganize the Whippet Club after the first World War.  There are even some royal connections: in Kitty Kelly's biography of the British royal family there is a previously unknown photo of Queen Mary with three of her sons, dating from perhaps 1910, which has a very good-looking Whippet in it: I have not been able to find out the name of the dog, but Queen Maud of Norway, who was born in England and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was often photographed with her Whippets. So I think that the Whippets has gotten a somewhat unfair rap for appealing only to one particular segment of society while in reality it was appealing both to high and low.   3) Talk about the Whippet internationally and the cooperation amongst breeders that has made it one of the deepest in quality globally. There are differences between the standards in U.K. and in the U.S., but they are not greater than that a really good dog can win in both countries. The days when you almost needed an English Champion to win in the U.S. are long since gone, and the English added some American blood since then, which was quite successful, but mostly they import from Continental Europe these day – and Europe is full of fantastic Whippets of part English and part American breeding these days … The Europeans are almost more American than we  are in the U.S. — and they LOVE American imports!  I must give shout-out to Italy, which has some wonderful Whippets and probably five or six word-class breeders, and Holland, who has a long history in the breed and currently houses Europe's probably most successful stud dog,  — who was born in South Africa of part British and part American background. The most successful breeder in England actually lives in Holland!   4) What other factors can you identify that account for the depth and breadth of quality in the breed? I mentioned the Internet's Whippet Breed Archive earlier; it has more than 372,500 pedigrees online — I just checked! — many of them illustrated. It's an incredibly important tool for both novices and longtime fanciers like me, and everybody uses it. You can find statistics, both current and from the past, about things like population, color distribution, health, and the most popular sires, and you can even make up mock pedigrees for planned litters. I really think the success of the Whippet Breed Archive has been the success of the whole breed world-wide! And there are so many different competitive outlets for Whippets, which probably accounts for much of the activity in the breed and explains why we lose so few new fanciers. You can focus on conformation, of course, but there are also field activities that you can participate in: racing or coursing, and we always have a couple of days of field activities during our national specialties, and sometimes there are the same dogs who participate. There were 200 entries in the coursing alone at the 2024 National, and 50 of them were conformation champions! And at the National Specialty there are invariably special classes for those who are racing or coursing qualified, and a special award to the winner of Best Performance Dog. Then you can of course participate in obedience or rally, like hundreds did at our last national specialty. And there are always well-filled Versatility and Triathlon classes!   5) What are Whippet breeders doing that the rest of the purebred dog fancy could learn from?  The fact that we have a really great, large and strong National Specialty is really important, I think. The Whippet people more or less take over a hotel or motel in a different part of the country in April every year, and beyond national specialty judging there is so much going on that there is no way you can participate in everything: there's racing and coursing, Breeder's Sweepstakes, Veteran's Sweepstakes, Futurity, Top 20, health testing, judges education, parades of Honors and Rescues … and probably even more that I've forgotten, like obedience, agility and rally. … It gives people something to focus on; I'm really sorry for the breeds that don't have a great National Specialty. And it probably helps that we are as a group generally NICE! There are some exceptions, of course, but when I hear what goes on in some other breeds I am so grateful that I'm in Whippets! I doubt that anybody would refuse to let their stud dog be used on some bitches because they just happen to be owned by the “wrong” people, and if someone would like to buy a promising show puppy from another kennel, just let them. There is the usual grumbling about the wrong winners, of course, but I bet there's less rancor and bad feelings in Whippets than in most breeds. We really try to be happy for each other when somebody is winning, even if it isn't what we would have done if we were judging, 6) Can you identify and talk about three quintessential, iconic “lines” or families or kennels of Whippets, either