The Combined Danish and Nordic Winner Show In Herning, Denmark

By Nada Kajander

November is the time for the combined Danish and Nordic Winner shows in Herning, Denmark. I traveled there with a friend and client of mine plus six dogs.

Needless to say, we had a busy schedule planned for this event!

We love Denmark because it’s perfectly flat, has beautiful roads with almost no speed limits, the people there are very friendly and easygoing AND, last but not least, almost everyone speaks English! For myself Danish is no problem since I know Swedish, which is a very similar language, but for other Finns this is a huge relief.

The negative side of a trip to Denmark is that for all of us (in Finland) it’s quite far away. We have to first take an overnight ferry to Sweden and then drive for 7 hours through the country to get to either another ferry or a beautiful huge bridge.

Here we come to the next problem. Denmark consists of three separate islands that are joined together by beautiful, incredibly long bridges. Of course, this is a wonderful thing since swimming would be very difficult! The ferrys take too long BUT everything has a price and so do the bridges. They are very expensive to cross.

The dog shows in Denmark are very similar to what we are used to in Finland and the nearby countries. The entries close approximately a month before the show, we get the schedule and the ring numbers in advance either by mail or e-mail and we get written critiques on every dog presented in the ring.

The Winner shows in Herning were two one-day-shows starting with the Danish Winner 2012 on Saturday. A total of over 5000 dogs were entered each day and a panel of close to 70 judges from at least 15 different countries were present. At these shows we compete for the official titles in best junior (both sexes) and in BOB and BOS. The same goes for the Nordic Winner show that is held each year but travels through the countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

Herning is a fabulous place for dog shows since the showground is huge and consists of many separate halls. This time the show committee had chosen to give a lot of space to the exhibitors so everything was spread widely apart. For me, this was a disaster since I had breeds in four different halls and the rings were far, far apart. It did not help either that the Danish system of scheduling is not based on time, but on the number of dogs. Well, we made it but it required a lot of running and checking and counting and running and checking and counting, again and again.

All this stress and physical activity, of course, made one hungry. I must say that food at the show is not the best in Denmark. They offered sausage, sausage, and mainly sausage! This is a very, very sad place for someone not liking sausage.

Even though I love Denmark, one thing in particular bothers me a lot. For some weird reason the people of this this beautiful country, or at least the politicians, have banned a huge bunch of FCI-recognized breeds. Among these are the Kangal, the American Staffordshire Terrier, all the Russian Ovtcharkas and some breeds that never even existed in Denmark. To me it seems very odd that a country that does not allow certain breeds can organize International “all breed” shows under FCI. I was told that this list will grow with new breeds (the Rottweiler is next in line!) and that Sweden is about to follow their example. I really hope this is not true since it must be obvious to anyone that there are well-behaved dogs and badly behaved dogs in virtually every breed. If they are going to ban certain breeds because of poor behavior, then how do we ban mixed breeds with the same problems?

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Posted by admin on Nov 29 2012. Filed under Featured, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.