How Will Conformation Shows Survive?
By Dr. Gerry G. Meisels
The signs of a declining sport are all around us. Registrations of purebred dogs have been falling for more than 15 years. A recent magazine editorial called it a continuing dramatic free fall, based on data obtained from AKC in confidence since AKC ceased releasing such information, even to its delegates. The long-term trend of entries at conformation shows is also downward, a decline stemmed somewhat by drawing more entries from the same people through new competitions such as the Grand Championships. Looking around the shows, it seems like the average age of breeder, owner and amateur exhibitors seems to be increasing while younger faces seem to belong disproportionately to aspiring professional handlers. John Lyons, former AKC COO, once told me that he estimated registrations would drop to about 200,000 a year if AKC were to become a boutique registry only for those planning on breeding for conformation exhibition. Considering that there are some 60 million family dogs in the US, and an average dog lifetime of 10 to 12 years, only one in 30 dogs would be purebred and registered with AKC at that point.
Ominous signs these are, indeed. Are we enthusiasts being marginalized or even trivialized? An interesting perspective came my way from a well-respected professional colleague who is not involved in our sport. We were talking about hobbies over lunch and I told him about our 50+ years of breeding and showing our Westies, about conformation dog shows, and about breed standards and their origins and purpose. He listened politely and the look on his face became more and more curious. Finally, he asked how many Westies were actually still used by their owners to hunt down vermin. We had done a little Earthdog at times so I explained how that worked. He became just slightly impatient and said, “No, no, I mean for real as a working function, in the fields, not as a sport.” I really didn’t know for sure, but my best guess was that it was very, very few if any; certainly not any I knew of who were also active in the conformation ring. Then came the punch line: so why do you care whether your dog could do a job that no longer exists? I was stumped – why DO I care? I knew that my immediate reaction – that I love my breed, its temperament, and the beauty of a well-presented Westie in the conformation ring – wouldn’t provide an answer to the core question. Yet it is the same kind of answer that explains many other less popular pursuits.
A month or two later I saw this gentleman again at a meeting. By that time I remembered that he was a lover of Baroque music. During a break, I walked up to him and asked him whether he liked Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. Of course, the answer was an enthusiastic “Yes.” I followed up by asking for whom they were written. He knew very well that Bach wrote them in the early 18th century for the Margrave (Count) of Brandenburg as part of what we today call a job application (Bach didn’t get the job). Music then was written for the nobility that maintained its own small orchestras. Today Bach is still revered, but in the music world as a whole, Baroque music is a minuscule part. For example, among the hundreds of Sirius XM channels there are just two classical channels, a portion of whose programs are baroque music. On your AM and FM radio dials, it’s very hard to find more than one or two classical music stations. The vast majority of the audiences listen to popular music. The vast majority of dogs are pets. Purebred dogs, conformation shows, and baroque music are for those who love them, regardless of popularity or utility. My colleague admires beauty in music; we admire beauty in our dogs, and functionality is part of that beauty.
It is obvious that the popularity of purebred dogs has waned. It’s not just the economy because the registration decline started while we were still in the dot com bubble, although the economy probably contributed to it more recently. It is surely a combination of factors, beginning with the increasing national culture that money spent must result in a real and predictable benefit, and in a fairly short time period at that. We fanciers ourselves have contributed to this decline by making shows and showing more exclusive, elitist, costly, and professionalized, taking them out of the reach of the average family. In many locations, we have closed windows to the public that our shows provided by moving to clusters with weekday shows or to venues far removed from population centers. Is there a way for us to recover, do we even want to recover, and what should we do now?
It is not even very useful to spend much time trying to analyze how we got to the present conditions let alone to point fingers and find someone to blame. Our conditions are what they are. We cannot change the prevailing culture. Pining for a return to what it was like two decades ago is as productive as trying to return to film cameras. Kodak missed that boat. We may very well have missed the canine sport boat ourselves by not responding to changing conditions. My judgment on the first question is that there is no way to turn back the clock.
That makes the second question moot. To answer the third question requires more than one man’s musings. There are three related but different issues: registrations, conformation entries, and support of the purebred dog community. If it were just registrations and entries, it would be relatively simple and one could have each activity plan their own income and expense streams, the “each ship on its own bottom” philosophy. But we need a lot more, we need a voice for purebred dogs, we need assistance to local clubs fighting anti-dog legislation, we need research to meet canine health challenges, we need to provide a counter voice to the animal rights activists, and so forth. Revenues from registrations and income from peripheral sources that exploit commercial opportunities, which are largely dependent on registration numbers, have provided the resources for these needs. If these resources keep shrinking and are offset by raising fees, there is a risk of creating a vicious downward spiral of increasing fees and decreasing numbers of registrations and entries as prices exceed perceived value more and more.
The solution will require issues-oriented leadership. The only logical place from which it can come is AKC. Another business study will not accomplish what is needed. Instead, AKC needs to bring everything it does into alignment with its core mission, establish value-based priorities, and bring its core constituencies into the process. This can be done by conducting a careful, broadly-based, in-depth planning process that focuses on AKC’s mission: “The American Kennel Club is dedicated to upholding the integrity of its Registry, promoting the sport of purebred dogs and breeding for type and function… (AKC) advocates for the purebred dog as a family companion, advances canine health and well-being, works to protect the rights of all dog owners and promotes responsible dog ownership.” Such a planning process would develop alternate assumptions about what the future might hold for our sport, and explore how one would deal best with each of the resulting scenarios. Good planning helps organizations think things through. It is as President Eisenhower once said: “The plan is nothing; planning is everything.”
Short URL: http://caninechronicle.com/?p=30525
Posted by subschron
on Aug 27 2013. Filed under Current Articles, Featured.
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