GAWDF Moving Forward,
the Short Term
What on earth is GAWDF? Well, we might just as well call it what it is, the German-American Working Dog Federation, since the vast majority of its trials will actually be illicit German (DVG) trials on American soil. Strange things do happen when short sighted, cognitively challenged dilatants on a mission find themselves in control, and this is a strange new world indeed, akin to Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Glossary
In the long run we are sailing into uncharted waters and the consequences are most likely to be dire, for this is truly a crisis, a tipping point. But in the short term for most trainers nothing at all is going to change since they are USCA members not likely to have FCI IPO aspirations. This covers seventy or eighty percent right off the bat, and when you add in the DVG people this becomes the vast majority, perhaps as high as 95 percent. (There are perhaps a few DVG members who enter USCA trials, or even aspire to the WUSV team, but this is likely a negligibly small number.)
Those primary affected on the local level are trainers who for one reason or another have been using a breed club score book to participate in USCA trials. Most of these people will probably now begrudgingly join USCA in that the $100 surcharge is, by some strange coincidence, exactly the USCA annual dues. In purely financial terms, USCA seems to be the "winner" in all of this.
The whole idea of the smaller breed clubs issuing score books when they hold at most one or two trials a year has always been sort of silly. For one thing, these clubs are in many instances marginal and in the event they flicker out the record base will be gone. All of these breed club score books, other than USCA, are now essentially obsolete and pointless, the one possible exception being those entering DVG trials that for some obscure reason prefer a breed club book.
On the world team front the most numerically and historically important venue, the WUSV, will be entirely unchanged, and may take on even more relative importance. (One theoretical exception would be someone with a DVG score book wanting to enter the WUSV qualifier, but that would seem to be about as likely as seeing a unicorn on the golf course.)
As for the FCI IPO championship the qualification trial will remain under control of GAWDF, the only difference being that in the long run seventy or so percent of American trainers will be excluded as USCA members. But for the next year or even two little will change in that those dogs now holding IPO III titles will continue to be eligible. The Malinois people will of course get to more or less openly run it for their own convenience — selecting location, date, judges, helpers and so forth — which was a big part of what this was all about in the first place.
The wild card in all of this is the FCI Utility Dog commission, which ultimately controls their annual IPO championship; the word on the street is that they look with disfavor on an American team excluding USCA members. If they take a hard stand then the GAWDF board will face the humiliating choice of walking back the USCA expulsion or entirely relinquishing any sort of FCI relationship. Either eventuality would leave the current leadership entirely devoid of credibility.
We do seem to be living in interesting times.
Meltdown in America
Glossary
Orginizations and Conflicts
Legacy Lost, the Other Breeds
The Americans