| Morning Steve,
Sure. To begin at the beginning---
A breeder is the Artist and the koi judge is the critic.
A breeder is ruled by soundness of the creation, hopefully health above fashion and in the case of the Japanese breeder, the image of a carp- strong, powerful and enduring. As you know, the carp is a very meaningful creature in myth and symbolism. So a nishikigoi is meant to be first and foremost a carp. A fancy colorful version, but a carp. The first and maybe the second round of culling weed out the deformed and the weak. From there, if it is sellable, it is kept. Today more than yesteryear, anything sellable is kept. And the critics (judges), on the otherhand, are required to enforce the standards and are at times at odds with this marketing trend.
The amateur judge once judged koi strictly on a point system. This gave us winning koi and therefore statements about ‘the ideal’ based on a check list of points. The honored fish was one that was technically most correct but maybe rather unspectacular. And worse- the fish that was amazing in one major aspect, but maybe weak due to the check list totals, was loosing to an overall ‘lesser’ fish. So subjectivity was allowed into the judging process to help get the final result right and also not to suppress the breeder’s evolution of varieties.
Additionally, a breeder is typically keeping the top 2%- 10% of his spawn. So siblings are ‘competing for their survival’ within that culling process. But at the show, one breeder’s top 10% are competing for their ‘survival’ against another breeder’s top 10%. This is a different type of ‘culling process’. So naturally criteria are different.
In the case of confirmation, a judge is dealing with expanded criteria. There is an overlap between breeder definitions and judging definitions due to a standard created specifically around the koi show. Still fundamentally the basic re-enforcement of kesson and Ketson is accomplished at both the breeding level and the awards level. And important thing as the whole point to retain strength and vigor in line bred animals. But there is more than this in the show definition of ‘body’.
Confirmation, in the koi show world, is about how a koi moves as much as how a koi looks. It is about missing parts, about ‘change’ as a fish goes under new it’s owner’s care, about health issues and about overall impression.
Confirmation to the breeder is about health, lack of birth defects and I’m sorry to say this- if the buyer will notice minor faults and flaws or if they will likely go un-noticed.
Finally in the case of breeders, they are not considering three fish competing against each other but rather a line in the sand as to what is an acceptable carp body and what is not. The very last tategoi in a breeder’s batch of ‘keepers’ is his least favorite. But it is still a tategoi. Judges are only interested in 1, 2 and 3! Naturally this places details of conformation in a more intensive and expanded light.
A long ramble with a lot of side points, but I hope you get the idea?
JR
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