EverythingDogBlog - Westminster Begins!

EverythingDogBlog #127: Border Collie from Maine wins First Agility Competition at Westminster

Masters Agility Champion

Kelso (see photos), a 7 year old Border Collie, was half of the winning team at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show last night in the first-ever Westminster Agility* competition. Kelso won on TV, displaying great flexibility in the weave pole part of the course as well as great accuracy and speed overall.

Kelso showing great flexibiity

The human half of Kelso’s team was Delaney Ratner.

Kelso Boder Collie First Agility Winner at Westminster

Best All-American (mixed breed) Dog

The best All-American dog winner was Husky mix Roo!, a 6 year old from San Francisco, with Stacey Campbell. (See photo for an example of grace in motion.)

Roo! Grace in Motion

This was the first time agility was part of the Westminster dog show and also the first time that mixed breed dogs could compete at Westminster.

Agility

225 dogs and handlers competed in two qualifying rounds. For more information and a look at the course diagram itself, check out this Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show Agility webpage.

*From yesterday’s EverythingDogBlog: Agility is similar to an obstacle course for dogs and is the fastest growing of all dog sports. The dog’s person tells or otherwise indicates which obstacles for the dog to take in which order. Dogs run for best times and ‘clean runs’ (no missed obstacles and none taken out of order).

Agility obstacles may include hoops to jump through, tunnels to run through, poles to weave through, broad jumps and high jumps to jump over, an A-frame to run up and down, a teeter-totter to navigate and a ‘table’ to pause on, among others. Each competition has a different course order that the humans can walk through at the last moment but the dogs never see until their turn to run.

Next Up

Tonight is the Dog Writers Association of America's (DWAA's) annual awards banquet (DWAA.org) in NYC and tomorrow and Tuesday is the dog show itself.

The next EverythingDogBlog will be Westminster 101!

Stay tuned here or follow the fun yourself on TV (for more information). Finals are televised each evening. In addition, results will be posted on the Westminster website, as well as breed result videos throughout both days as they occur.   

(This article first appeared on ColumbiaPatch.com. Photos from Westminster Kennel Club.)