Kenna had a really good show all around. We took an 8 week class in conformation handling, so I felt better prepared which helped me to relax a bit. Kenna was awesome. I think she's in a bit of a minor fear phase because she was a little jittery when we first arrived. This venue has 2 HUGE fans on the ceiling, and she was visibly disturbed by them at first. She gave me this look like "Holy crap, mom! Did you see the giant, spinning spiders on the ceiling?" but she took her cookies, and then she spotted a little whippet who was willing to be her friend and didn't seem to mind the giant, spinning spiders, so after that she decided the fans were okay after all.
We've been working on her exams because she has trouble standing still for them. Mostly the issue is she just wants to make friends with the judge so she wiggles all over. She also doesn't really like having her groin area felt and often ducks her hind end down when they get there. It's been getting better because I've had different people at work perform exams on her over the past 8 weeks, but new people can still be difficult and unfortunately we don't have a lot of men in the veterinary industry so she doesn't get much practice with exams from men. However, at this show we had male judges both days and she was rock solid for her exams. I was so pleased.
There was one other greyhound entered at the show, an Open Female (older than 18 months), and she won the first day, but on Sunday Kenna finally earned her very first conformation point by winning Best of Breed. I always get so many nice comments on Kenna from other hound people at shows, but this is the first time the judge has also liked her. I was starting to get a bit frustrated, so hopefully this resets that for me and she'll have more luck now that she's getting a little bit older. Sadly, greyhounds take so long to mature... Kili didn't look mature until close to 3.
Saturday afternoon Kenna also made her debut in Rally. We've only been to 3 classes and I don't practice much, so I didn't have a lot of expectations for her at this show except to have fun and experience the ring as that can be a little stressful. But Kenna is a little worker bee. She had a moment of distraction at the start, but then she realized we were playing a game and she was super happy about that. This course was really short and not very technical (it was built for speed because Rally started really late this particular day), and the judge was one of the more lenient ones we have encountered. There were 29 dogs entered, about 5 perfect scores of 100, and one of those was Kenna who earned 3rd place. What a good baby dog! She's so much fun!
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