We ended our rain walk early to get home for the dog agility on tv. The Westminster AKC Biggest, Fanciest Dog Show of all had agility for the very first time. We raced home and dried off and waited for the basketball game to be done and the agility to start. It took a while to dry off. Good thing for basketball overtime. Once you're walking in the rain, when it starts raining hard and you're soaked through, then you might as well just keep walking.
Two of our friends were the winners of 16" and 24"! They had awesome runs. I was pretty sure they would win. They got to fly all the way to New York City in the snow to compete. Hooray for Dashy and Roo!
I'm not sure how this event worked exactly. Ashley and Stacey had beautiful runs, but some of the other runs were less inspired. Dogs couldn't find the backside of a jump right off the a-frame, a lot of off courses, a lot of slow runs. Some of the runs were a little bit sad. They reminded me of Otterpop when she didn't want anyone to see her. Did they get scared in the finals with the tv cameras and crowds? I saw Carrie in a pantsuit smiling at everyone going to the line, maybe telling them don't be scared of the big hair lady in a blue dress who will come and stick her mic in your face at the ending, when you sit in the big black chair. Or was there some kind of scoring that involved sending a variety of breeds into the finals? There was incredible dog diversity in the finals, I think this is an AKC thing, Afghans and Malteses and a naked dog with little hair wristbands, but they didn't all look to me like dogs that would be in a final round to win a big silver cup. There was a need for speed at the Westminster.
It was dry though, in the agility building of the Westminster Dog Show of New York. Dry and heated and everyone wearing matching Purina Dog Food shirts, running on the fake turf. Maybe they rode in cabs. Here in our drought, it's raining, a drop in the bucket but rain nonetheless, the inside of my car smells like moldering dog again, the special car smell of winter.
So do I drive in the rain out to Turlock, 2 hours for agility in the rain, smelling the smell of wet dogs? Or stay home and just walk in our forest instead?
4 comments:
sometimes I wish I had the kind of cable you need to watch special dog shows like this, and sometimes I'm GLAD I do not have it. Today I feel glad, better to just take your word for it.
RRR
They did a lottery draw for entries, and anyone above novice level could enter (my understanding from what I've read, anyway.)
The lottery is an okay idea, but I'm hoping they limit entries to dogs that are in the highest category next year (masters? I don't run AKC, I don't know their tiers)
It was an Excellent/Masters only trial.
The convoluted part that nobody really understands is how they picked the dogs who ran in the third round that was televised. I understand that the top three cumulative dogs in each height were automatically granted a finals position regardless of breed, but after that I'm kind of up in the air as to how they calculated it. I mean, the Golden Retriever who ran at the top of the 24" group (at 20") was the one and only 20" Excellent Preferred dog. He qualified in Std with a time in the 60s if I recall correctly, so not fast. He had double-digit time faults in JWW with a R called. WHY did they think that dog would make good television? I have no idea how they picked any of the dogs under the top 3, and I think that's what's most annoying. Don't call it a "Championship" event if you aren't going to take the top placing dogs into the finals.
I'm glad we got to see a few awesome runs, but I wasn't so sure it was worth sitting through the rest to see what I could have watched on YouTube. But YAY for agility on t.v., I guess. Right? Hopefully next year they'll do it better. At least the feedback from the non-agility public seems to have been positive, and I suppose that's what matters the most.
I had the same thought of slow, sad looking runs. AKC took top %'s of each breed, thus you could compete with a slow Scottie with ETS.
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