Best Of Breed

Alisa has participated in the Brussels Dog Show, 21-22 June 2008 at the age of 9 months and she did great! She got Excellent in marks and won Best Junior of Breed and Best of Breed.

When we were getting a puppy we were not looking for a show dog. But while she was growing and turning into such a beauty I got this thought that it seemed such a shame not to show her off. I was also really curios to hear a judge's opinion about her.

The problem was that I knew nothing about shows or about handling. After reading a lot on the internet I got completely scared how complicated the whole thing seemed to be, so I decided that I couldn't do it myself in the short time we had. So we started to look for someone who could train and handle her at the show or at least give me a crash course how to do it. Turned out to be quite a task, we couldn't find anyone suitable until we got very lucky getting in touch with a dog club specializing in this who advised us to contact this nice couple. They, from pure enthusiasm, helped us to train Alisa and later decided to handle her as well at the show. They truly did an amazing job with her. Alisa is a smart and easily trained dog but she was still only 9 months old and at that point we only had 2 weeks before the show. Alisa had just 3 lessons with them, an hour each, and I learned a lot from them, so between each session I did a lot of training on my own. Of course Alisa tried to "help" us her own way by going in "heat" just a few days before the show. It complicated things a bit and made us more nervous, but everything went fine.

Our biggest fear was that Alisa would make a blast at the dog show with her barking, so we prepared for the worst and as usual we were wrong. She behaved amazingly nice! She was a bit shy in the beginning when we entered the building, with her tail hanging low because there were so many big dogs around. But I just kept walking slowly with her and 20 minutes later she was just her normal smiley, happy self again with curled tail. Alisa did just amazing in the ring, behaving so good and natural, like she's been doing this kind of thing all the time!

Though when it was time to go on show in the main ring we had been there for several hours and by now she was very tired and had no interest whatsoever to win neither "Best Junior of Show" nor "Best in Group".

I'm very grateful to Natalie and Michel for all their help and guidance they gave to us. It turned out to be a very interesting and exciting day for all of us. Even though we had a very long day and were totally exhausted at the end, it was a great experience which I really loved.