The Learning Curve, Part One
by Mark Threlfall
They showed a large number of dogs and were very well-known people in dogs.
I’ve often said (as have others; this is not an original thought) that you never stop learning about dogs. The day you feel you have nothing more to learn is the day you need to get out of dogs and get yourself a new hobby. Anyone who feels they have all the answers doesn’t understand the questions. My learning about dogs had started about 6 years prior to going to Connecticut. Now, I was in for a crash course.
Dog shows are only part of the equation of the sport. The most important work is done at home, getting the dogs in condition, training them, trimming them and making sure that the vehicles, crates, equipment and associated paraphernalia are all ready to travel to the show. The “show” is just that; the display of the end product of all the work done by the people associated with the dogs. It’s not the cake; it’s the frosting.
I worked for other people in dogs before this. It was always a lot of work, and this new job was like the others, except it was on fast forward. There were more shows to go to, more dogs to take care of, longer hours, more work and less time to do it all in. The worst time of all was getting ready for a big show in a major city.
I remember this all like it was yesterday. It was in the dead of winter which made traveling miserable. But, like all good dog people we were a little deranged and risked life and limb to get our dogs to the show. These shows were part of a big show weekend that attracted exhibitors from all around the country. Why they were attracted to a show in the worst part of winter was beyond me, but that’s the way it was.
Part of the appeal of the weekend was the specialty shows that were held at venues scattered throughout the city, as well as into the suburbs. These were shows held on Friday, independent of the big, all-breed shows held on the weekend. So not only did we have two large shows to contend with, we had a number of specialties to attend as well.
We arrived on Thursday afternoon. We unloaded our dogs and equipment into the public arena that served as the site for the weekend shows as well as sort of unofficial “home base” for the dogs during the specialties.
This was the easiest day of the trip. You simply had to find a good spot, unload the dogs, feed them, exercise them, park the vehicle at a parking lot, (hopefully you could find one within 10 blocks or so) drag your luggage through the streets, check into the hotel, grab something to eat and then head back over to the arena to exercise dogs, finish trimming, bedding the dogs down for the night, et cetera. The dogs typically stayed in the building overnight, as it was too cold to keep them in a vehicle and we couldn’t sneak dozens of dogs through a hotel lobby, up an elevator and into the rooms. Nor could we sleep with that many dogs; they just aren’t very quiet.
That reminds me of another story. I’ll come back to this one in a moment or two.
A couple of years later, we were traveling to some “local” shows that were only about an hour’s travel time from the kennel. On Friday night, on the way to the show, the engine of the large motor home-type vehicle we traveled to shows in started to overheat. We made it to the hotel and after exercising the dogs and feeding them; I investigated the reason for the overheating. I found it; it was a leak in the transmission, which caused it to shift frequently and the engine to overheat. Not having the tools, know-how or the inclination to attempt repairing the transmission, I convinced someone to drive me to a nearby auto parts store and bought up every last can of Automatic Transmission Fluid with some goo additive to stop leaks and topped off the transmission with it.
The next morning we made it to the show without incident. We showed all the dogs and packed everything in to make our way back to the kennel. The next day’s show was about an hour away in the opposite direction.
Continued next month…
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