Onpoint Vizslas - Conformation

While the field is my first love, conformation is another area that I feel is important and enjoyable. When I speak of a dog's conformation we are not referring necessarily to a show title. Either due to little competition or poor competition, some dogs who have earned Championship status have in fact themselves poor conformation. On the other hand, a dog may not be a show champion but may have superior conformation; the owner simply wasn't interested in pursuing this or was too busy field trialing to make it into the ring. When discussing conformation, I am referring to such things as how a dog moves, its colour, its size, its depth of chest and shape of head to name just a few. Although many Onpoint bred dogs are currently being shown or are show Champions, it must be emphasized that here at Onpoint, we do not follow the "in trends." We attempt to remain true to the written breed standard of the CKC to the best of our ability.

On a purely cosmetic level, we prefer the darker rust colour as seen on the Western coast although we do have the Eastern lighter rust colour as well. This is a matter of personal preference, both are acceptable under the standard. We choose breeding stock with little or no white although this is a fault that surfaces in most bloodlines.

We are not going to claim that all dogs produced by us are "show quality". No breeder can. However, there are certain areas that we place great emphasis on particularly since all of our dogs are working field/hunting dogs. We like to see good movement; a dog that single tracks and is not out at the elbows. We also attempt to produce dogs with good deep chest dropping down to the elbows. The Vizsla needs this depth of chest in order to have good lung capacity for running.

Our Vizslas must have good bone - it seems to be that some breeders are moving toward the finer bone Vizsla. While in the ring this maybe fine, I have found out over the years that these finer boned dogs have a harder time withstanding the physical demands a hunting/field dog is put through. In terms of size, we prefer our Vizsla bitches to be about 22" and our dogs to be 23". There are larger Vizslas out there but we find dogs of this size have more endurance in the field than some of the larger dogs. Again, this is just our intrepretation of the CKC standard.