Herald photo by David Rossiter Rhonda Mousseau, from Rhosown Bearded Collies, prepares her bearded collie Dexx for his time in the show ring at the Lethbridge and District Kennel Club Championship Dog Show on the weekend at Exhibition Park. The event also included All Breed Licensed Obedience Trials and All Breed Rally Obedience Trials.

Jamie Woodford
Lethbridge Herald
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Man's best friends were out in fine form this weekend competing for the title of top dog during the Lethbridge and District Kennel Club's annual All Breed Dog Show.
Fur was literally flying at Exhibition Park, while dog handlers washed, groomed, filed, trimmed and trained their dogs to strut their stuff in the ring.
A lot of time, money and preparation go into showing a dog, and all that work paid off for local dog owner/handler Evelyn Sera and her two-year-old poodle, Promise. The pair won Sunday's Best in Show.
Sera has been showing dogs since 1979, but it was her first at-home win for Best in Show.
"So how great is that?" she laughed, minutes after winning.
"It's one of the few sports where you can have the amateurs and the professionals in the ring at the same time. So out in that ring I was up against all the professionals, I was the only owner/handler in the ring," she said
Promise is currently the No. 6 standard poodle in Canada.
"She was a Canadian champion at eight months," beamed Sera. "I bred her, so that makes it even more special.
"(Promise) loves to show, and you can see it when she's in the ring. She loves to get out there and move."
Sera spends between eight and 10 hours preparing Promise for a show.
"Basically give me a day before the show and I can have her ready to go into the show," said Sera. "Then the day of the show, I need another two hours. After the show, it's another hour because we have to break down the coat. We use hairspray to get her coat up, so we've got to brush all that out, otherwise we're going to end up losing it because of breakage."
When Promise isn't getting prepped for a show, "I let her be a dog," said Sera.
Professional dog handler Tracy Tuff from Devon, Alberta was competing with three-year-old Sheltie, Ava.
"She's special a little bit, in her puppy years she ended up being No. 1 in Canada, and No. 1 herding dog, which is pretty cool to do in her puppy years. That doesn't happen very often," Tuff said.
Ava was a champion at just seven months old. She competes almost every weekend, so her preparation is constant.
"Her upkeep is regular baths, and upkeep nails and keeping up with trimming and that sort of thing," said Tuff. "It's less work doing it every weekend believe it or not. In between (shows) it's easier because you're keeping up on it all the time."
Other than Ava's physical appearance, exercise and diet, supplemented with vitamins, are also important to ensure that her coat stays healthy.
Ava is the only dog Tuff is showing this year, and then Ava will begin a new adventure with her new owners in China.
"She goes over to China in April," Tuff said, adding, "It kind of sucks."
"I have a very small breeding program. I don't believe in keeping a lot of dogs. In order to have a successful breed program, you do not need to have 40 dogs. So I try to keep my number to two," she explained. "I have (Ava's) daughter, and I just decided that it's time to move from generation to generation, and these people in China are starting out.
"There's different qualities of show dogs, so in order to make sure that you don't end up being a dog hoarder, you want to really discipline yourself and only keep those one that have that x factor."
President of the kennel club Bill Nykiel noted that the time it takes to prep a show dog depends a lot on the breed.
"There's breeds where they're short coated, and you take a brush to 'em and you're done," he said.
When judges are inspecting a dog they're looking for specific traits in a breed standard.
"So what they're looking for . . . is structure, movement and temperment of the dog," he said.
Breed standard is basically the ideal dog of a particular breed: what it looks like physically, how it should move and what its temperment should be.
"So say if you're looking at a Chow, the judge will have in his head the perfect Chow. Then as dogs walk in, he judges those dogs against the perfect breed standard and picks the one that comes closest to that," Nykiel explained, stressing the ideal dog is strictly the judge's opinion.
"They take the whole dog apart basically, and that's why they get their hands on the dog and the feel for how the dog is structured."
He said breeders are always trying to improve to the breed standard, but there is no real perfect dog.
"There's no such thing as a perfect breed of anything, but every breed is trying to get closer and closer to that breed standard," he said.
"The big thing we always stress is as pretty as the dogs look, for a dog show the No. 1 thing is they're pets first, show dog second."