Show Dog

Zoe had a short career as a show dog in her younger years. It began in August 1999 at a Washington state kennel club show held on a county fairground, when she was somewhere between twelve and eighteen months old and entirely convinced that the whole event had been arranged for her benefit.

She took second place in her class — twelve to eighteen month old female Smooth Fox Terriers — at that show, and second in the same class at a regional Fox Terrier specialty. She then went on to win her class at the national breed specialty and at its sweepstakes, which is a considerably better outcome than anybody in this household had any right to expect.

What conformation showing actually is

For anyone who has only seen it on television, the basic idea is simpler than it looks. Conformation showing is not a competition between dogs so much as a competition against a written standard. Each breed has one: a description, agreed by the breed's national club, of what a good example of that breed should look like and how it should move. The judge's job is to decide which of the dogs in front of them comes closest to that description on that day.

Dogs are entered in classes, which divide the entry by age, sex and experience — puppy classes, the twelve-to-eighteen-month class Zoe was shown in, an open class, and so on. You compete first against the other dogs in your class. Class winners then compete against each other, and so upward. A specialty is a show restricted to a single breed, run by a breed club rather than an all-breed kennel club, and the national specialty is the largest of these: it is the one show in the year where a serious proportion of the good dogs in the country are in the same ring. Sweepstakes is a separate competition for young dogs run alongside a specialty, judged more on promise than on finished polish.

Which is why a class win at a national specialty and its sweepstakes was, for a pet dog from a household with no kennel and no ambitions, a genuinely nice afternoon.

What a judge is looking for

In a Smooth Fox Terrier the first thing is the outline. The dog should look essentially square standing still: the length of body roughly equal to the height at the shoulder, with a short, level, strong back and no sag or roach in it. The head is long and lean and wedge-shaped, the ears fold forward neatly, and the whole thing is finished by an expression that the standard describes as keen and that the rest of us would describe as looking for trouble.

Then the dog moves, and movement is where opinions get decided. The gait should be straight, driving and effortless, front and rear tracking true, with none of the paddling or crabbing that a badly assembled dog resorts to. And underneath all of it there should be an obvious impression of a small, hard, agile working dog, because that is what the breed was for. The published Smooth Fox Terrier breed reference covers the same ground with rather more authority than we can.

Why we stopped

Two honest reasons.

The first is that showing is a hobby with a fairly steep on-ramp. It means weekends, entry fees, long drives, standing in a muddy field in Washington in a good jacket, and learning to move a dog on a lead in a manner that looks natural and is nothing of the kind. Doing it properly is close to a second job, and we already had one of those.

The second is Zoe. She enjoyed the whole business enormously, but her enthusiasm was not the sort a ring rewards. Asked to stand still and look noble, she would look noble for approximately four seconds and then start assessing the judge's shoes. What she liked was the crowd, the fuss and the peculiar smell of a fairground, and none of that requires a rosette. So she retired at the top, comfortably undefeated in her own opinion, and turned her attention to the destruction of soft toys, which is documented in some detail on the Dead Toys page. Her considered views on human commands are set out on her wisdom page, and a good many of her correspondents appear in the Gallery of Friends.