29 Breed Notes – July 2020

The past few weeks have seen dog shows falling thick and fast; with breed and general societies now deciding it’s easier for all concerned just to cancel their shows until next year. One of the larger agility clubs announced last week that it has cancelled all its planned events (more than 12 shows, many held over 5 days) both indoor and outdoor until Easter 2021 – and social distancing etc would be far easier at an agility show than a regular dog show.

Bournemouth and Blackpool with their new dates (last weekend of September & the first weekend in October) are still going ahead, with entries for Bournemouth opening last week. Yet news has just come from the Kennel Club to say that they have cancelled Discover Dogs, which was due to be held in London in October.

This weekend, Blackpool issued the following statement:
With these dark times in the world the Committee of Blackpool Championship show decided to apply to The Kennel Club for the dates of 25th – 27th September 2020 to hopefully hold our show. As we wanted to try and put the mojo back into the world of dogs and hopefully give us all something to focus on and look forward to. Hopefully more shows will follow.
This has not been easy, as most of you know this takes a lot of planning and hard work to reschedule a championship show. We have contacted judges, trade stands, Stewards, suppliers and food vendors to see if they are happy to participate in our 2020 show. Whilst most of the judges have confirmed they are willing to join us, some have not been able to due to prior events or appointment’s and most trade stands and food vendors are looking forward to joining us. We do respect and totally understand that some people are not happy to possibly put their selves or elderly family member at risk and we totally understand, but we look forward to seeing you back with us in 2021.
We are still mindful of the situation in the world so we will be putting in place temperature taking on arrival, plenty of hand sanitizer dispensers around the show ground and constant cleaning and sanitising of toilets. As we have a 12 acre show site there is plenty of room for small pop-up tents gazebo’s no larger than 6ft x 6ft and you must bring your own chairs so there will be no cross contamination, so plenty of room for social distancing on site.
Entry will open on Fosse Data Website on Monday 10th August for 3 weeks only, there will be no printed schedules available as this is not cost effective and there are no shows to distribute them. If you don’t have access to a computer don’t worry you can use any entry form and you can call 01254-853526 for class numbers and any other information required.
As of today we have received 10,273 visits in an eighteen day period on our website, as we only receive between 50/60 visits a month normally, we are quite took back by the enormity of these amount of visits.
We now have a big ask of our fellow societies, exhibitors and friends to make all this possible to happen we need your help on the days of the show, we all need to pull together as ‘The World of Pedigree dogs’ needs to work as a team to pull us forward into the future, if you can help this would be gratefully received you can make contact with the secretary by email:- secretary@blackpooldogshow.com
Please rather than ask questions on Facebook or other media sites, PLEASE visit our website where you will be kept fully informed of what is happening. Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

There are only three remaining Championship shows ‘left standing’ this year, SKC (rescheduled to the end of November) BUBA & LKA. They are all presumably waiting to see how events further unfold before they make any announcements as to whether they are proceeding with their shows or not.

It is impossible, without the benefit of either hindsight or a crystal ball, to know or predict what the best course of action is. Like all politicians, governments, organisations and businesses are finding out, the Kennel Club and by default show societies are themselves in the position of ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’. Everyone realises that we are all going to have to accept and adapt to a ‘new normal’, but no-one is quite sure at the moment exactly what that is and how it’s going to work.

Anji Marfleet