Editorial: February 7, 2025

This week we celebrate the return of the premier dog show and second-oldest continuous sporting event in the United States, second only to the Kentucky Derby. Through world wars and pandemics, we find ourselves back to basics: The Westminster Kennel Club and Madison Square Garden are reunited at long last. The club also faced a venue that was modernized to accommodate the public, which took away space from the benching area that not only affected the dog show, but also the National Horse Show, the circus, the Melrose Games and other sporting events that required more space. This club, like many others, lost its venue, but never lost its vision of keeping Westminster and its tradition alive. It wasn't an easy journey back to the ancestral home of the Westminster Kennel Club. With new fresh leadership, captained by club president Donald Sturz and a committee of like-minded members, Westminster worked tirelessly to bring the show back and has done so in spectacular fashion. Here we are in the present day: Daytime breed judging, agility and obedience will be held at the very spacious and modern Javits Center. (Javits also serves as the home to Meet the Breeds; these two events are without question the best and most-attended live events we have with the public.) The evening group and Best in Show judging are back at Madison Square Garden. New York is happy and pleased to have them back home. 
As we celebrate this great return, we must also contemplate where the conformation part of our sport is going and the problems it faces. We have over the years isolated ourselves by creating more and more dog shows that are clustered in one venue, leaving the areas in which they were originally held without any exposure to our sport. These long “weekends” of three, four and five events have outpriced and oversaturated the event being offered. There are so many shows that they are not even referred to by their kennel-club names, but by “the Wednesday show” or “the Thursday show,” etc. To keep interest, we have created two shows in one day, shows within shows, the Owner-Handled series, Grand Championships that now include different colors and squares, cheap to the point of almost embarrassing championship points and judges moved along at such a fast pace to keep up with the amount of dog shows that one wonders where does it all end. In this issue, longtime Dalmatian breeder, judge, delegate, founder of the National Animal Interest Alliance (NAIA) and former director of the American Kennel Club Patti Strand writes of the present state of our sport.