National Dog Show returns without spectators
UPPER PROVIDENCE » The pandemic won’t stop the Kennel Club of Philadelphia’s National Dog Show from going on this year, but there will be some significant changes — chiefly, no spectators will be allowed.
Organizers are concerned that some loyal followers may show up at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center at Oaks anyway.
“We’re anticipating some people making the drive, only because they’ve been able to do it for 18 years,” noted President of the Kennel Club of Philadelphia, Wayne Ferguson. “Some people may not read a newspaper or get caught up on social media and we’re hoping not to turn too many away who will just automatically show up.”
With a focus on state and local health and safety issues and under the guidance of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners and the Montgomery County Department of Health, a single, two-day show will be held on Nov. 14 and 15 at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center at Oaks.
As it has since 2002, the holiday mainstay will air Thanksgiving Day (noon to 2 p.m. in all time
zones), Nov. 26, following the telecast of NBC’s “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”
“We wanted to do the show right from the start. It was a matter of gaining the respect and the OK from the Montgomery County Board of Health,” Ferguson said. “There are 67 counties in the state and only eight of them have Board of Health bureaus, so they are totally in charge of what happens in those counties. Valerie Arkoosh, the Montgomery County Commissioner, is just wonderful and really did a great job in analyzing our safety procedures and making sure we followed their recommendations, which we are, and they gave us permission, which we’re absolutely (grateful for). It’s a quarantine state.”
The Kennel Club suggested holding the event without spectators.
“The Commissioners were delighted to hear that,” Ferguson said. “And we also have no vendors, and we reduced the show significantly … we only have 600 dogs, and we usually have 2,100 or 2,200, so that really reduces the people in the building. We’ll only have between 250 and 300 people in the building at one time, which gives us lots of social distancing because the building is 240,000 square feet. We’ll give out masks and a bottle of sanitizer to everyone that enters and we’ll have Medcor nurses to take temperatures at the door for everyone. We’re going to be pretty safe.”
In recent years, the club has conducted two separate dog shows during the big Philadelphia weekend, but this year the club will conduct just one show divided over those two days. Four groups will be judged on Saturday, with the remaining three plus Best In Show set for Sunday.
With 537 entries the focus will be on a variety of breeds, Ferguson pointed out.
“The good news is that we have 172 breeds represented, out of 200 breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club, and to have172 with an entry that size is remarkable. This is probably one of the only times when we limited each breed to only five dogs. The very popular breeds would have sent us 35 Labradors, 45 German shepherds, and so on,” he explained. “But limiting each breed to five dogs we were able to attract not so much the popular breeds, like the saluki, but more of the unpopular breeds.”
Among the new breeds this year are the Dogo Argentino, Barbet and the Belgian Laekenois, Ferguson allowed.
“We designed the entry to attract breeds where there will be just a few thousand in the country rather than a few hundred thousand. We wanted the show on television to represent as many breeds as possible.”
Dogs are judged against a string of qualities that the AKC has established as the precise characteristics that perfectly distinguish a particular breed.
When a dog wins the dog show on Saturday it becomes an instant celebrity because so many people watch the show on Thanksgiving day and that dog is celebrated during the last 15 minutes of the show, when there are typically more than 20 million people watching.
Thor the Bulldog made history at the National Dog Show in 2019, becoming the first bulldog to win Best in Show this century.
The history of show dogs winning Philadelphians’ hearts dates back to the late 1800s, when, according to nds.nationaldogshow.com, The Kennel Club of Philadelphia (KCP) and its predecessor clubs began presenting dog shows. The Philadelphia club, which predated the American Kennel Club (AKC) and was organized in 1884, went through several changes of name in the years spanning the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, eventually reorganizing and forming the present-day Kennel Club of Philadelphia. The KCP hosted its first dog show in 1912, was elected a member of the AKC in February 1913, was sidelined for a time during the Great Depression, resumed in 1933 and has appeared annually ever since.
Of the more than 3,000 dog shows held in the country each year, only a few allow visitors to personally experience the uniqueness of a purebred show dog up close in what are referred to as “benched shows.”
Normally, Philadelphia is one of three benched shows in the country, but this year benched shows are nonexistent due to the pandemic.
“Unfortunately, we’re not benching this year because we’re not encouraging people to stick around,” Ferguson noted. “But the production will look very similar to other years because we can only show one dog at a time on television.”
The “audience” will be made up of cutouts in place of people, provided through donations to the AKC Disaster Relief Fund.
According to akcreunite.org, the AKC Pet Disaster Relief helps local Emergency Management provide animal care services immediately following a disaster. Once donated, AKC Pet Disaster Relief equipment will become the property of the municipality to deploy whenever a disaster is declared. They will assume insurance requirements, as well as proper storage and maintenance of the trailer and its contents.
“It’s a good cause and The Kennel Club of Philadelphia has donated about $150,00 to the cause in the last couple of years and sponsored about 12 trailers around Pennsylvania and New Jersey,” Ferguson said.