"The phone calls started when the puppies were about four months old: "I don't think this puppy likes me," complained one puppy buyer. "He's really being stubborn," worried another.

Elizabeth Moattar provided the explanation every Ridgeback breeder gives newbies who first encounter that classic Ridgeback dismissiveness, the I've-got-better-things-to-do cold shoulder. "I gave them the old, 'It's a Ridgeback. It's OK.'"

But it wasn't. "He was really acting strangely," Elizabeth remembers of one of the male puppies. "He just could not get the cue that he had to sit down on his mat and be quiet. He was really whiny and howly. He could not settle himself down, no matter what we did."

A friend of Elizabeth's who bred Whippets had a litter around the same time. She was arranging for BAER testing for her puppies, and suggested Elizabeth bring her dogs.

Elizabeth's brood bitch and the sire had normal hearing. So did the bitch puppy she had kept out of the litter. But, sure enough, the male puppy was deaf."

"With Gunnar at five and a half months, we were off to our first training seminar. The instructor, a Bloodhound handler, introduced us to intensity trails, or puppy trails. Basically, the pup is restrained in harness, watching while the person drops a hat or glove, and runs away, calling and cajoling the pup the whole way. When the person is out of sight, the handler brings the pup up to the article, gives the working command while pointing to the article. This really helped to bring out the excitement of the hunt for Gunnar, and everyone laughed that I looked like a little rag doll on the end of a 20-foot line trying to keep up.

After the second day, the instructor took me to aside and asked if I realized how well my dog was doing. He said, 'You know, Gunnar is the first Ridgeback I ever met, let alone saw as a trailing dog, but you've got yourself one heck of a trailing dog.'"

"Depending on your fourth-grade reading habits, you may have heard of Flat Stanley.

In the 1964 children's book by Jeff Brown, Stanley Lambchop is flattened by a bulletin board that hangs over his bed. The advantage to being two-dimensional, he discovers, is that he can slide under doors and travel via envelope.

Some 30 years later, a third-grade schoolteacher in Ontario, Canada, launched the Flat Stanley Project. Her students made Flat Stanleys, logged their experiences with him in a journal, and then mailed both off to other children across the world. They, in turn, hosted the paper cut-out and recorded their adventures with him before shipping him out yet again to another corner of the world.

And so, your intrepid Ridgeback Register publishers thought: If Flat Stanley, why not Flat Ridgeback?"

Didn't travel to the hinterlands to attend this year's national specialty? No worries! As always, our extensive coverage of the annual Rhodesian Ridgeback Club of the United States blockbuster show brings you all the color, all the commentary and all the winners. 

"As a judge, it is the greatest honor to be selected to judge a national specialty show. I did not take this responsibility lightly. I have judged national specialties in numerous breeds, and this national far exceeded my expectations."  

"I was now in helpless mode: There was nothing I could do but make rounds to the two clinics before work, during lunch and after work to check on my remaining 'babies.'To see those once robust puppies reduced to skeletons and hides, struggling to breathe, unable to keep food down, vomiting one minute and diarrhea the next, was hard to fathom. Their little trusting faces stared at me, wanting and needing love and affection. I couldn't give it unless fully sheathed and even then limited because of IV lines. Both clinics gave me carte blanche to enter their treatment areas, showing me where gloves, gowns and booties were located."

"In a nod to the deliciously satirical but dearly departed Spy magazine, The Ridgeback Register has done our own pairings of Ridgebackers ... and the celebrities who resemble them."

"From the historical records, we have these words of Madya Foljambe, hunting lion and other big game on safari in Kenya in the 1920s with Sydney Waller: