Agility is also an event that exhibits some clear cultural differences with conformation, said Stacey Campbell, owner of Roo!—the exclamation point is part of the name—a mixed-breed dog that will be one of 225 canines competing in the agility portion at Westminster.
"I tend to think agility is a little more laid back than conformation," said Campbell. "It's a totally different show."
While agility is designed to be inclusive of any dog that can run and jump, conformation dog owners, said Westminster judge Dougherty, tend to take pride in their dogs' exclusiveness.
"There's a little amount of snob appeal," said Dougherty. "And part of that is rightly so, because generations of people have worked very hard to maintain the purity and level of consistency in the breed."
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Then, of course, there is the difference in costs involved. Agility dogs are expensive to train and show, but they're nowhere near as costly to manage as conformation dogs.
"I don't even want to know how much I spend," said Aryn Hervel, owner of Crush, another mixed-breed agility dog competing at Westminster.
Hervel said that she spends $120 to $150 every six weeks, or about $1,000 to $1,300 per year, on agility classes for her former shelter dog, and has spent as much as $2,000 over the last 10 years on agility training equipment.
That's in addition to the cost of frequent weekend trips to agility shows near her home in the San Francisco Bay area. Hervel said that each trip costs her around $70, including gas and the event entry fee.
Training a top agility dog pales in comparison to the cost of cultivating a world-class conformation dog, however. The price of a purebred puppy with the makings of a promising show dog can run in the neighborhood of $5,000, said Westminster judge Dougherty.
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