Titles, Titles, Titles!

The American Kennel Club has truly been catering to the competitive nature of dog people. There are more opportunities than ever before to compete with your dog and earn bragging rites and titles.

As of January 1, 2018, there are 44 possible prefix titles and 125 suffix titles available through the AKC alone! Dobermans are not eligible to earn all 169 of these titles, as some are available only to certain breeds or groups of dogs (e.g. Coonhound shows, field trials, carting, earth dog trials, etc.) There are an additional 14 titles that are parent club approved by the AKC for Dobermans (Schutzhund, Working Dog, etc), 3 Flyball titles, 6 Barn Hunt titles, and 30 titles possible with North America Diving Dogs (Dock Diving). And then… there are is a plethora of titles available through other organizations (CKC, UKC, USDAA, DOCNA, ASCA, NADAC to name a few). It is no wonder there is some difficulty sorting out the alphabet soup fore and aft of our dogs’ registered names.

No matter how far and wide you search, though, you will not find BIS, BISS, MBPIS, BOB, AOM, RBIS and the like listed as titles anywhere. These abbreviations represent wins that a dog has achieved and are not bestowed upon an animal by anyone other than the proud owner. There are no set requirements nor any set number of dogs defeated to claim these wins. You could, in theory, win a breed, specialty, group, puppy group or even best in show and be the only entry. This is one reason why we do not permit listing these acronyms as titles on a dog’s name. If they are important to you, we ask that you include the win in the verbiage of your ad, or we can spell out the wins before your dog’s name.

Of interest to those of you who enjoy competing with your dogs and earning titles is the fact that the AKC has a specific sequence as to how titles are listed. Suffix titles should always be organized in the order in which the AKC recognized each event. The exception is rally titles because though they are newer, they still fall under the obedience category. Lower iterations of a performance title are typically dropped in favor of higher iterations. (For example, CD is dropped in favor of CDX) to keep the string shorter.

Order of prefix titles should be listed as follows:

• Conformation
• Obedience
• Tracking
• Agility
• Barn Hunt

Order of suffix titles should be listed as follows:

• Obedience
• Rally
• Tracking
• Hunt Test
• Agility Standard
• Agility Jumpers
• Agility Fast
• Barn Hunt

Club titles (for example a BH, SchH, WAC, ROM) would follow the AKC titles. Then titles from other organizations follow.

We do our best here to follow the AKC sequencing when listing titles, but some may slip past us, particularly in this issue where we have dogs with so many titles that we are seeing acronyms in our sleep!

Our breed boasts many very accomplished dogs, including 3 Triple Champions, 13 Champion OTCH, 32 Champion MACH, 1 OTCH MACH, 21 Champion UDT, 10 Champion IPO3, 2 Champion ONYX, 4 Champion RATCH, 1 MACH RATCH, and 3 Ryan Award recipients. The Doberman Pinscher is truly a versatile breed, and it makes my heart sing to watch them in action doing activities they love.

Bringing you the BEST in Dobermans.