2015 Ohio State Fair Jr Dog Show

I’ve been helping with the dog show for many years now. 4-H kids from all over the state train and prepare to participate in the event. Adult and youth volunteers work very hard to run the 5 day dog show. We’re exhausted by the end and so are the dogs!

The event started on Saturday with agility. 100+ kids and dogs participated, most doing all 3 activities. In the first picture, you can see the huge audience – for most of the day there was a 100′ x 20′ section of people packed into a set of bleachers to watch the kids and dogs. More watched from the opposite side.  The agility day is video taped for “The Ohio Channel” and can then be viewed online or some cable channels. I’ve had agility class students tell me they watched the kids on tv!

The biggest ring – used for Team Obedience. Usually they wear matching clothing. Adorable.

Sunday was mostly a day off – in the evening the other building had to be prepared with rings built (wooden fences) and mats filling an area 40′ x 200′? long. Huge!  We sometimes run as many as 5 full sized rings or if those are split we sometimes have up to 10 rings at a time!

Monday we had showmanship and a dog care project (workbook and presentation). Tuesday was beginning levels of obedience. Wednesday was advanced obedience. Thursday was drill team/freestyle. We had rally on all four of those days. And there were various other classes interspersed (therapy dogs, assistance dogs, team obedience, brace obedience…). Hundreds and hundreds of entries!

Some days I did time keeping, gate stewarding, building rings, paperwork running, Canine Good Citizen testing. Lots of different but important tasks to make the event run as smooth as possible. I see many of the kids year after year and it’s adorable to watch them grow up, work with their dogs, and share what they have learned with others. It’s so weird to ‘know’ some of them yet only see them this one week of the year. We can talk about what happened in past years of showing, how things went this year, their goals for next year.

Now I have our county fair event and then most of our 4-H responsibilities are over for this year. This week has been extra challenging – in addition to the state fair we are prepping to move the training center to an even bigger location. There is a lot of physical work that needs to happen in order to prepare the new space and move all our supplies. But there is also a lot that has to happen with class scheduling, lesson plans, and other organizational things. This has been my third week of mostly leaving before 7 and getting home after 10. Tonight I was home ‘early’ at 8:30!