Still Standing

Still Standing Episode 4 Too Many Shows, Not Enough Dogs

• The Canine Chronicle • Season 1 • Episode 4

Share episode

In Episode 4 Wayne & Kim discuss show entires, attendance, absentees and expenses.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Still Standing, the Dog Show podcast brought to you by the Canine Chronicle, which is celebrating over 50 years of excellence. I'm Wayne Kavanaugh, and with me is Kimberly Meredith. Good morning, Kim.

SPEAKER_00:

Good morning, Wayne.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, it's not, is it? I'm a little stressed. And as you might be able to tell, I just got out of the garage. I don't have the I didn't do any of that. And it's because we're leaving tomorrow. We're packing to go to Florida for the winter, which couldn't come a day sooner. It's a little rushed because of Wayne. You see, I woke up and it was 41 and rainy yesterday. So I said, Nate, we got to get out of here. It's not 20, it's only 41, but that's I no, I don't do that anymore. Too old for that, Kim. So I'm a little stressed, but it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. At least Kim got her makeup done and and did something. I don't know, whatever you do. You look wonderful. How are you doing out there?

SPEAKER_00:

I got I said the dog's got my makeup on and and a blouse, you know, like in my 45-minute window. So it's all the record, too.

SPEAKER_01:

Usually you're 45 minutes old, very proud of you. Anyway, I just got back from California. I think it was five minutes ago, could have been two days ago. I'm exhausted, or as my neighbor, Tommy George to say, I'm exhaustivated. But this is the life of a judge, right? So I don't know how long ago it was, could have been two years ago. I got on a plane and I flew to San Francisco. And Ed Foytik was kind enough to meet me there. And we went to the shows, uh, Del Val, and it's I think a 20-hour drive from San Francisco airport to the show. No traffic, not a car on the road, just kidding. And then we get there and the weather was perfect. And I thought, man, this is great. Eddie Zook was there. My buddy Allison Sunderman was there. Allison Korn Z. I don't know. I think it's Alison. Sorry, Allison, I've known you all my life, but I don't know your last name anymore. I think it's Sunderman. Okay. She was there. Yeah, Eddie. This is gonna be a good podcast. And we had a great time. George Wright was there to tell stories. It was a lot of fun. Then you fly back, you see, after a couple days of judging, and you get home at one in the morning. I say nay, nay. I can't go in, I can't go into our bedroom and wake up the dogs and Cheryl. I have to go in the guest bedroom, and the mattress isn't great. That's because we don't want the guests to stay too long, you know. We always do it that way. Put a cup in, and it works out great every time. Two days you're out of here. So this is where I am, Tim. I'm just trying to get my arms around why we do this and the life choices I've made to become the geological dog shows.

SPEAKER_00:

There, you know, there's no one questioning that more than myself currently about why I'm invested most of my life in this sport and now judging. And I really am now that I've been home for a while, I'm questioning my sanity, seriously.

SPEAKER_01:

Isn't it great? Doing your gardening, river there, sitting on your front porch, all the beautiful trees and flowers you have around there. But you know, we like airports, that's what we like, and we like rental car return places, which are always charming. And you know, the gl the glory and romance that you see in the ring, it's not all scrapped up to be, but we do it because we love it. And I can't think of any other reason it must be because we love it. And we're petty.

SPEAKER_00:

And we don't make any money. I mean, there's no money in it. I mean, you can't support yourself. There's absolutely no way, just like you're saying, long hours, no money, you know. And now that we have owner handler, which I, you know, I'm for anything that the exhibitors like, and I'm very proud of everybody that I mean, sometimes my my owner handler groups are better than my regular groups, you know, depending. So I I get all of that. There's a lot of sleeping in airports, taking two days to get home, all that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the hotel restaurants are another adventure. I thought, how bad can you do a BLT?

SPEAKER_00:

Pretty bad.

SPEAKER_01:

Pretty bad.

SPEAKER_00:

What's the Iron Press Lunch Meat?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and you know, when it's been in the refrigerator long enough, it gets a slime on it. The turkey is a little bit. Yeah, it's very nice. Anyway, the show was terrific because I mean, well, it's a nice, it's a nice little fairgrounds. And these days, I don't know how they can do it because we're gonna talk about numbers from the last two weekends. I just don't know how clubs can do it. We try to keep our expense, we do keep our expenses and fees down to a minimum to help them. But a dog jumped on my, I just had this beautiful new sport jacket, uh, tailored and dry cleaned. And I got a footprint right on, which is fine, right? Dog jumped up. But they're thinking, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm thinking, don't worry about that. Oh my god, it's the 30 bucks to clean. You just took a chunk out of my feet from your dirty dog's foot, is what you did. Anyway, it's okay now, because the entry was beautiful, the weather was gorgeous, and that really makes a show. And the details that club does, the little things, they really are marvelous and much appreciated by the judges, all of us. So a fine time was had. Here's the part, Kim. It was the biggest show in America that whole weekend. Broke a thousand. That's all it takes.

SPEAKER_00:

So amazing.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh let's see. 1,077 on Saturday, 987 on 1,077 on Saturday, and 997 on Sunday. The biggest show in the country. And it drops off pretty quickly from there. So out of the, let's see how many shows there were. I've got to sign my little cheat sheet over here in case you're wondering what I'm looking at. There was 27 shows, just Saturday and Sunday. I'm not taking an off of Thursday mess and Friday and Monday. It's just Saturday and Sunday. So there were 27 shows. The average entry for those shows, the average was somewhere I wrote it down. Oh, it was 552.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Average.

SPEAKER_01:

We had, let's see, one show at 280. Well, I'll go down the list. Oklahoma, 350, California, uh 1077, Washington, 662, New England, or maybe that's Nebraska, it is, 289, New Mexico, 283, Illinois, 599, South Dakota, 366, and at 378. That was two today. Don't confuse those numbers. 582 in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, almost at a grand at 863. Texas had 773, Georgia, 642, Virginia, I think that is, at 551, and New Jersey at 304, rounding at the pack for an average of under 600 dogs. It's been the trend. I I posted this another one. I did this this whole, it's not a it's a pain to do, but get her through it. And last week was about the same. If you strip out the top two shows to get and just leave those two as outliers, then you're in the 400s. Every weekend. This is I didn't I didn't just pull out a bad weekend. This is every weekend. There's always about 20 shows, 30 shows a weekend, depending, usually around 24, 25. You can look on the AK. If someone said, is there a spreadsheet to show this? Look on the AKC calendar of events. And the month, and it'll say 14 all breeds, 15 all breeds, it'll tell you how many on every weekend. So it's not hard to compute. You just have to go through and say how many dogs competed. Which was another story, right? Absentees. I write a lot of ABSs in my book. How about you, Kim? A lot of absentees.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, I think that with the downward trend of entries that people enter, hoping there might be majors. Maybe their dog is sitting on a major. Um, and I mean, I hear this from exhibitors all the time. I mean, you know, it used to be that uh, you know, you always had the exhibitor that would stand outside the ring if there was a major in dogs or a major in bitches. Hey Charlie, did you hear there's only a major in girls today, you know? To let the judge know. Of course. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you know, those days now, I'm telling you, it people there were majors, and now there are very few. And so people are spending not only the entry fees, which are you know, some of them now are up to$45,$40. You're entering a dog hoping for a major and not getting any. So, you know, you're getting a lot of absentees, and you can kind of look at your judges' book and see, oh yeah, they you know, they entered and there's no major. So it it's it's hard, it's really hard.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and then it's not fun because you know, you get just shy of a major in Goldens, and three show up because they all need the major, right? Right. And that just is a challenging day for everybody, but it really points out the this is a lot of dog shows, right? Uh, that was in one day, all the ones I read off. But it is regional, California, you know, certain areas they just don't have too many shows, although there were too close together that particular weekend. There are shows that weren't all that far away in California. But typically, it's hard to find shows out there. And you're driving a long distance, but that's you know, part of the geography. When you live in the Midwest, we have a concentration of shows: Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Ohio. There's a lot of dog shows there. And there's a lot of quality there, too, right now, in all groups. Then you have the East Coast, which has always had quality, but they have so many shows now that I mean, look, a 304-dog show in uh New Jersey, in Massachusetts, 863, Pennsylvania, 582. That was unheard of 20 years ago. And it's just it's just becoming one of those things that we should be more concerned than we are about. Are there too many shows? In my mind, absolutely, especially in certain areas. With the caveat that certain regions, that's not the issue necessarily. The other issue, like you said, is the money. You pay to go to these shows, the major's not there, you're not gonna go. You're not going there for the camaraderie, you're not going there to sit around and talk about your breed all day. You get there at 9:15 for your 9:30 judging, and you're gone at 9.45 and you're home on the couch. So no one's staying around to embrace all that and try to learn from each other. We're only learning how to go find the majors and go find the points. And I love it when you give a dog winners, it's really a quality dog, and they say, it just finished them. And it just feels great that you were able to be there for that. But it's rare. There weren't a whole lot of majors at these at the bigger shows. There weren't a whole lot of majors. Now, at the end of the day, the seven dogs standing there, usually top notch, no matter where you are.

SPEAKER_00:

You'll have hopefully, hopefully your breed judges underneath you. You know, you're actually best of the show is probably one of the easiest things to judge because everything in there is absolute quality, and it's you know, all boils down to showmanship. It all depends on in the nuances of those particular reads. You know, here's another interesting problem to segue back for just a minute on the expense of shows and then not getting majors and not being able to go. I believe, and I may be wrong, that your motor parking is not refundable.

SPEAKER_01:

So I think that's some shows, it might be all shows. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh yeah, it'd be interesting to find out what percentage of the shows. So, say you're you know, you're an owner handler and you have you either three dogs, you know, you've got one in burby, one in puppy, you've got a special baby, and so you're gonna take your motorhome because you've got more than one dog. Do you get your motorhome parking back? I don't know what that answer is, but that's another big added expense to people.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. How about the gas to get there? Or if you're staying in a hotel all night, it's really expensive these days to show dogs. You know, it always was though. And I guess it's just a matter of it's never been an inexpensive sport. You know, we look at these prices and go, wow, but adjusted for inflation. I don't know how that compares to 1970. But I do know that you only went on Saturday and Sunday. And when you're going trying to go to five-day shows, the owner handlers just aren't there till Saturday and Sunday. For every reason you can, you know, all the magic, all the typical reasons. They've got to work, they can't afford it the five days, and don't really want to be there for five days. So it's we've got a lot going on. And I don't want to keep beating these numbers every week, but I'm gonna run them through the end of the year because it's never been over 600. And last year we were around the 600s, 640 almost every weekend. And there's another thing that you know, counting these dogs and entries is another adventure. So when you're talking about a thousand dogs, if 20% of them are entry or are absent, which seems like it's about the number, in some shows. I did this calculation a couple last year, and it was almost 30%. So apparently if you do it on Sunday, it's always gonna be 30%. Yeah, yeah, easy. Yeah, but 20 to 30 percent. So now you're talking about that thousand dog show has got 800. When the there's a there's an interesting difference in nomenclature that I don't know if the sport needs to understand or understands, but I think it's important. Uh the AKC publishes the number of entries per year as their fuel gauge for the sports dealing. So they'll say 1.5 million entries a year. Wow, that sounds great. But when you have almost 2,000 shows and dogs are entered at five shows here and five shows there in case the major breaks or they're chasing a record, so they're multiple entered. How many individual dogs is that? It's not even close to 1.5 million. Not even close. Right. Yeah. So we need to know how many dogs are competing in the sport and trend that for 10 years. And I'll bet it's frightening. I just don't know what's gonna go on in the future. I'm really concerned. I've never I've always been worried about it, a little concerned. Now I'm like, man, this is a it's a big deal. You know, I've got my son, he's so interested in this, and he loves it. What do I tell him it's gonna look like in 20 years? He'll only be 50 something.

SPEAKER_00:

What's it gonna look like in five years? I mean, you know, the the trend is is slipping quickly, very quickly. And you've got a lot of judges. Most of your we have very few Albre judges. I don't know what the count is now currently, and we have a couple that are approaching being Albreed, and I'm sure, but they're old. They're old, they're sick, a lot of them. A lot of them are.

SPEAKER_01:

Not like us, Kim. We are young and vibrant, Samet.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, hardly, hardly at all. I'm gonna include both of us in this group, okay? But it's like, you know, you don't, the judges are tired, you know, and you truly do it for the love. We've talked about this because you know, the travel and the you don't make any money, and you know, you're a lot of times you're just judging mediocre dogs all day long. You're just a ribbon dispenser, and we've had a couple judges quit, you know, early in their career because they're just tired of it. And so, where you know, what is the answer to me, and is when you have all the facts and figures, and you've worked really hard on it. Is the answer to these clubs? Look, you have to buddy up with somebody and make, you know, to make it a four-day cluster, whatever. And and I hate five-day clusters myself. I they're exhausting for the dogs, the handlers, the judges. I mean, at the end of the fifth day, you don't care if you ever judge another box, you're so tired, right? It takes days to and oh, then you get stranded on the way home and you spend the night at the Denver Airport hotel, you know. So is the answer, and and I'm anxious to hear your take on this. Is the answer to say if you can't hit X number of entries, you know, by you know, two years from now, you you're gone. I mean, you're you're gonna have to start eliminating, or people are gonna have to buddy up. I mean, I don't see any other viable answers. Do you?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't think there's any one answer. Uh, I think it's a it's a the issue needs to be studied in depth by the AKC rather than doing, they have all the data that I have to data mine and dig for. They have it. And they need to get serious about putting some committees together to figure out what's going on here, or hire statisticians and even epidemiologists to see what's going on in the in the culture and the and how things are where people are moving or what that means. Yeah. Um I go back to limited registration because I think we spayed neutered the entire purebred dog population. If you go from 1994 to now, that's when the registrations went from 1.4 million to about 400 and some thousand now. And I just got the financials, they're publicly available if you ask and find them. And boy, it's not looking good. It's not looking good at all. So we spated everything into oblivion, which opened up this great audience for golden doodle people. Now they can sell them because we're not breeding anything. And we don't have enough dogs to be shown. We're not getting people involved in the sport. Number shows, yes, I think that's something that needs to be looked at seriously. Distance between shows, that needs to be expanded tremendously, in my opinion. But I don't want the small shows to go away. I think they're important for their community. Maybe you make them an open show. And you say, you can give out all the single points you want, no matter what is. If 50 Beagles come, it's still three points or five points, but it's not a major. So for a major, you can't go to an open show, you got to go to a regular show. I don't know. There's a million thoughts like that that run through my head, but I think the two-level thing is gonna have to happen someday. Or or just figure out what we really need. Because I can tell you that there are weekends that really impress. So the people are there. When they all come together for a 5,000 dog show, it proves that if you had one great event, people go. And Orlando's coming up. There's gonna be five, six thousand dogs a day there. But there's not gonna be any shows anywhere else. I'm not saying we can only we have to make everyone go to Florida, but there's gotta be some serious study, not just a couple of people going through ah, no, I'm talking about serious study about the cost analysis of putting on a show, how the clubs can be helped by the American Chemical Club because they need the money to pay us and to put on these events and to rent these fairgrounds. That's gonna come back to them in registrations if they do it right. But someone's got to figure that out. Someone's got to figure out the distance and the number of shows, how that applies geographically. Maybe that distance is different for different parts of the country, but something's gonna have to pull it all together. And it's it's almost too late. This should have been done 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, 15 or so, exactly. I mean, and the 200-mile limit, I don't know who originally came up with that, but that's insane.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, so you know, I know someone who lost a breed at eight o'clock in the morning at one show and went best in show at the same day at a different show. Four-hour drive, not a big deal. Judging was at one o'clock, lost a breed at eight, got there at one, not a problem, went best and show. So that's craziness. That's just stupid. And that's gotta be fixed. So there's so much to really laying out the numbers like this shows one thing. We are spread really thin in a lot of geographic areas. Again, I know the people are gonna say, hey, not in my area, and they're right, that's true. Fine, some people say it's only about the cost. I don't know about that because they all go to Montgomery and they all go to Hatboro and they all go to Orlando, but I think that's a serious factor for the owner handler, and we need them. We all were one, right? I still am. Yeah. So we've got to make sure it can be affordable for these people. What can we do to encourage that? So it's a big giant study. It almost requires a department alone, or uh boy, I'd say a delegate committee if they can have enough time to meet with enough expertise, not just student council election, who's the most popular, people with that expertise that can make it happen.

SPEAKER_00:

So and how many, how many of their people are have the expertise and the background and the longevity in the sport to be able to determine this? I mean, that's another problem. It's like, you know, who are you going to put on that committee? There aren't that many people that are capable of it. And they've also got to be number printers, you know. So, you know, it's interesting because as you know, I'm involved with Whipstock in California, and we were a four-day cluster with a day of specialties, which basically made us a five-day cluster. We were the third largest show in the country for years. First was Louisville, second was Palm Springs, another California wonderful show, and ourselves. And so we are all, I started Whipstock in 2008, and it's now 2025, almost 2026. So for a lot of years, we we had great entries, great shows. We made AKC a lot of money, by the way. And we are old and tired and decided we're oh, we're gonna take it down to two days. It won't be as much work, okay? Well, big surprise. You still have to get your premium list out, and we still have a specialty day. We still have, we used to have like 70 specialties. Now we have like 40 or something or 45. But it's just as much work to put on a two-day show as it is a four-day show. So, but I was really proud of us because this year, 2025, was our first two-day show. We had 1900 entries both days, right around there, uh unheard of in this day and age, right? So now we're gonna go to three days, which is, you know, we should have just left it at four, honestly. Oh, we should have just left it at four and left it alone. But you know, what do you do when your you know, members are old and tired? And we have a lot of new, younger people coming in, which we're very excited about. But I, you know, I I think this there needs to be committee, and there should have been it got ran off the railroad tracks about 15 years ago, probably.

SPEAKER_01:

So the start of what was your community back when in in the heyday? Over 3,000.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, we over the four days, we'd have like 9,000 dogs.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Over the four days.

SPEAKER_01:

There's there's so many things to one thing, and I get emails and messages about the economy, which is certainly true. The cost, it's way expensive. All these things are true. Geographic differences and big spaces out west, not here, not the east coast. All that's true. But one thing is constant. If you go back to, I think the last time I did it was 94. There are twice as many dog shows with half the number of dogs entered per show. I don't know if that's causation or correlation. I can just tell you, twice as many shows, half the number of entries per show. If, like I said, if that's the only answer, it's simple. But I don't think it's the only answer. I think it's more encompassing. And if I'm the AKC, I'm really worried about this, and I'm doing some studies, and I'm bringing in people from the sport, not just the delegates, the people that put on the dog shows, the people that have been out there in the parking lot, parking RV, whatever it takes to bring together the expertise of I am I nominate Tommy Milner for everything. I think he should be involved in all this stuff, right? That guy's got a business background and a great mind, and he knows the sport. So, but somebody like that, and just getting this thing uh done because we have a short future.

SPEAKER_00:

Our own Tom Brady from Canine Chrono Teacher. There you go. There's a you can say here just on the top of my mind that I can you know tick off about five or six people that certainly would be on that committee, whether they have the personal time to do it. But it at this point, uh, I think it's an emergency. You know, it's like you know, we're gonna call an emergency meeting.

SPEAKER_01:

If we don't have the time now, we're gonna have plenty of time in 10 years. That's right. Yeah, I agree. Anyway, I want to wrap this up by saying that in the next podcast, we're gonna talk about big shows and how how wonder this year is proof that it's right there if we know how to do it. That's it for this time. I'm Wayne Kavanaugh.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm Kim Murder.

SPEAKER_01:

There you go. We are still standing. Until next one. Thank you from the Q9 Chronicle and Wayne and Kimberly. We'll see you soon over now.