Guest post by Diane in MN
Dog Show Weekend
On Memorial Day weekend (late May, for anyone outside the US), we took Teddy to his first show ON GRASS. He hadn’t exactly been in a lot of indoor shows—his career started the first week of January, when he turned six months old, but even if there were shows in the Upper Midwest in winter, you wouldn’t risk going into the ditch to take a puppy to them—but even youngsters who know the routine at an indoor show can get a little crazed in an outdoor ring, and decide that the grass under their feet means that they’re there to have a good time. Or they can get overwhelmed by the whole atmosphere and forget they have a brain. Training inside or even in the back yard can’t replicate the real thing.
Good stand in the back yard--what about at a show?
We had a good taste of that on the Saturday. It had rained on the way to the fairgrounds where the show was being held, and looked like starting up again at any time after we arrived. Teddy and I were waiting under the tent* for the breed in front of us to finish, because we’d be first in the ring** when Danes were judged. Because of the possible rain, it was more crowded than usual under the tent, but he was fine with the traffic and the other dogs until someone knocked over a grooming table behind him. The table went down with a reverberant crash, and Teddy, who is sensitive to noise, decided that escape was his best option and tried to take a flying leap away from it. He didn’t go far because I was holding him close to his collar, but a dog the size of a year-old Great Dane, even a smallish one, doesn’t need to go to the end of a leash to cover some ground. Teddy ended up hitting a ring gate*** hard enough to knock it over and complete the job of freaking himself out. He hadn’t managed to pull me down on top of him, so I could get him extricated from the ring gate, set it back up, and begin trying to calm him down. And he did stop shaking: this was good. And then someone let their dog knock the table over again. “%$#*&@#! TABLE,” I muttered (or at least didn’t shout), and hauled my now pretty paranoid puppy over to the other side of the entrance to our ring.
At that point I wasn’t expecting too much from him. I was mainly hoping that he wouldn’t fixate on the idea that tents are scary and sensible puppies should stay out of them, and/or that ring gates are scary and sensible puppies should go nowhere near them. Going in for his class, he would have to line up along the ring gate under the tent, and come back under the tent to be examined after circling the ring. I would have a hard time getting him to do that if he was convinced that monsters might be lurking there. So I was encouraged that he walked into the ring and got in line (although not beautifully), and was willing to come back under the tent and stand for examination (although he leaned hard against my leg the whole time). He even stopped tucking his tail when he did his down and back^. He was recovering, and considering everything, he did very well.
While we were chatting with friends after Teddy had shown, I had a bright idea and asked Nina if she’d like to handle him on Sunday. Nina is a junior member of our working dog club and at twelve years old is a better handler than I am. She is used to big dogs—she put a championship on her Mastiff herself—and likes Teddy, and she agreed to take him in. Sunday was still cool but sunny, and we had a corner ring so the entrance wasn’t too far under the tent, a plus if Teddy remembered the dangers posed by grooming tables and resisted going in. We arrived early enough^^ for Nina to work with Teddy for a little while, and he was relaxed and comfortable with her. He likes kids, which helped. (It also helped that she was relaxed too. I am a nervous handler and probably never send calm, confident feelings down the lead to my dog.) He walked under the tent with no hesitation—and that was quite a relief—and Nina did a great job with him and won the class.
And the issue of showing on grass? Well, I guess Teddy had enough other things to think about, because leaping about and trying to gallop never entered his mind.
Of course I forgot my camera on Sunday, so I can’t show you pictures of this weekend. Instead, here’s Teddy a couple of weeks later with Nina at another outdoor show:
Stacked and ready for examination.
Completing the gaiting pattern.
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* Outdoor shows generally have rings set up on either side of a big tent, with the ring entrance under the tent and sufficient tent overlap to provide a space for the dogs to stand and be examined out of rain or strong sun. The space underneath the tent is usually available for crating and grooming and is where exhibitors wait to go in the ring, so it can get pretty crowded.
** At conformation shows in the US, class dogs (non-champions) are judged separately by sex, starting with puppies and moving up to the mature dogs. Males are judged first, then females. So the first dogs in the ring for a given breed are the puppy boys.
*** Ring gates look like expandable wooden baby gates and are the fencing used to mark off the rings. They aren’t designed to withstand 120 pounds of dog crashing into them.
^ The down and back is one of the movement patterns that judges use to assess a dog’s structure and gait. When a dog moves around the ring in a circle, the judge is watching his side movement; on a down and back, the judge is looking at front and rear movement.
^^ This generally means TOO EARLY. Short-coated dogs that don’t need much grooming are frequently scheduled first, and most shows start at 8:00 a.m. This is a miserable hour of the morning to start anything, and it’s that much worse if you have to get there a half hour before you show.
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