Fun with Figures

I am not a mathematician. I just play one on the pages of Dog News …

Everyone is saying there are too many AKC shows and that the entries are so low, but I wanted to find out for myself. I spent a few evenings adding up recent AKC figures, which are available to anyone on the Internet, and comparing them with those from past years. (The AKC Events Calendar allows you to get details of any AKC show that's been held since 2015 up to December 2026 — which is of course a blank, since no events have been approved that far ahead of time.)

Before I go any further, I have to point out how amazing it is that all this information is available to anyone who cares to look. We often criticize AKC for not sharing many of the important figures with the fancy, but is ANY national kennel club as open about their show activities as AKC? I doubt it. Sometimes it's actually too much information: The reality can be hiding in plain sight behind a nearly impenetrable mass of figures. And you have to go way down on the results page to find the number of entries and the number of competitors at a show, below even the results for “Misc Breeds.”

Eventually I had several pages full of dates, clubs and entries — both the number of dogs entered in a show and the actual number present in competition. (Someone who saw what I was doing asked if I really had typed all those figures myself, pages and pages of them, and got very quiet when I said that of course I had …) I picked a random recent month, September, and checked each show held that month, comparing it with the same month of the last “normal” year, 2019. (There were far fewer shows in 2020, for obvious reasons.) I chose September because when I started this project, in early November, it was the most recent month from which there were complete figures of all the shows. (And October was thrown off this year by the huge and in every respect unique Morris & Essex KC show, which isn’t held every year anyway.)

According to AKC, there were fewer all-breed shows in September 2021 than in September 2019: 144 compared with 170. (For good measure I checked last year also: Despite Covid-19 restrictions, there were actually 69 events in 12 different states in September 2020 that AKC listed as all-breed shows.) And while due to the larger number of shows the total number of entries for the whole month was higher two years ago, the September shows of 2021 were bigger on the average than they were in 2019: There were 109,936 entries during September 2021 and 123,988 during the same month in 2019 (88,037 dogs in competition in 2021 versus 102,490 in September 2019.) If I have counted right, that averages 763 dogs entered per show (611 dogs in competition) in September 2021, and 716 entered per show (562 dogs in competition) two years ago.

One thing that surprised me was the difference between the number of dogs entered and the number of dogs that actually competed. I had expected that maybe 10 percent of the entered dogs were absent, but that is obviously way too low a figure. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that so many dogs are entered but absent. On the one hand more entries provide more money for the clubs, even if the dogs don't turn up; on the other hand, nobody knows how many will be absent, so you have make arrangements for them all anyway.

Since the above figures are for just one month of the year, they are not necessarily conclusive. I also checked the number of shows listed in the AKC Events Calendar for the entire years of 2021 and 2019. Obviously there have been fewer shows in the recent past than a couple of years ago, but following are the 2021 numbers of shows listed by AKC as all-breed shows, followed by those from 2019 in parenthesis: January 2021 – 29 shows (2019 – 113 shows), February 2012 – 2 shows only; I know that's weird, but that's what it says; I frankly don't remember much about last February except that Westminster was NOT being held (2019 – 72 shows), March 2021 – 59 shows (2019 – 140 shows), April 2021 -105 shows (2019 – 125 shows), May 2021 – 127 shows (2019 – 187 shows), June 2021 – 110 shows (2019 – 190 shows), July 2021 – 157 shows (2019 – 139 shows), August 2021 – 170 shows (2019 – 153 shows), September 2021 – 121 shows (2019 – 204 shows), October 2021 – 172 shows (2019 – 155 shows), November 2021 – 130 shows (2019 – 136 shows), and December 2021 – 69 shows (2019 – 51 shows). Total 1,251 shows during 2021 and 1,677 during the last “normal” year. As you can see, the number of shows has increased since shows went back to “normal.” There have even been more shows in a few recent months than there were two years ago, but the annual total is at a low not seen since the 1990s.

It's no surprise, but Saturday is easily the busiest day of the week for AKC dog shows. On any average Saturday there are at least 10 AKC all-breed shows held somewhere in the country; sometimes fewer and fairly often quite a lot more. On most Saturdays of the year there are about 10,000 dogs entered at AKC shows around the country: That might be a good, round figure to keep in mind when you want to explain to your non-doggy friends how big the sport of dog shows really is.

Even I am not crazy enough to copy entry figures from all the 1,500 to 1,600 (or even more) events that AKC lists as all-breed shows during a year these days. Exactly how many shows there were during the last couple of years you would only be able to find out by going through the AKC Annual Statistics for 2020 and 2019, which is available on the Internet. But show-giving clubs are listed alphabetically, and you would have to go through several pages and many fine-printed columns of type … and you still wouldn't be able to get any reliable totals, because you know what I found? I don't know if this is sensational or not, although I think it is, and I don't even know if the majority of the knowledgeable AKC employees agree with it, but the fact is that AKC obviously considers all-breed shows and group shows as one and the same in this context!

That's difficult to believe, I know, but the list is clearly titled ALL BREED SHOWS even though it clearly includes a large number of shows that were NOT open for all breeds: shows that were limited to dogs of either Sporting, Hound, Working, Terrier, Toy, Non-Sporting or Herding breeds. (Grammatically, of course, there should be a hyphen: ALL-BREED SHOWS. Technically, AKC could possibly get away with saying they mean all – as in “every” – breed shows, as in specialties, but that's obviously not what's meant here. There is even a list titled TOP ALL BREED SHOWS that is headed by Evansville KC and Louisville KC in Kentucky, and they are certainly all-breed shows.)

The distinction between all-breed shows and group shows matters, because if AKC includes Group shows in their all-breed totals (presumably hundreds of them; we don't know exactly how many), there are not nearly as many shows where all breeds can be entered as previously thought. And since Group shows in general are smaller than most all-breed shows, the average all-breed show entry must be larger than we believed earlier also.

That's the good news. The disappointing news is that the AKC Annual Reports from 2019 and 2020 have so far not been published, at least not any that are publicly available on the Internet. There are Annual Reports in a tidy row for every year from 2006 to 2018, and they are of course fascinating … but the last two years' Annual Reports are not available. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

Since the September figures that I assembled only apply to what are really AKC all-breed shows (I made a point of not including entries from Group shows), those figures aren't comparable to what AKC publishes, since their entry figure totals obviously include both all-breed and group shows.

The earlier yearly figures, from 2018 back to 2006, are comparable, however. They clearly indicate that the figures published are entries, not dogs in competition. Here's what they tell you:

2018: 1,653 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,279,087 entries = 773 entries average

2017: 1,650 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,286,123 entries = 779 entries average

2016: 1,618 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,314,969 entries = 812 entries average

2015: 1,599 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,326,737 entries = 829 entries average

2014: 1,610 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,356,066 entries = 842 entries average

2013: 1,614 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,386,727 entries = 859 entries average

2012: 1,604 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,435,266 entries = 903 entries average

2011: 1,589 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,455,971 entries = 916 entries average

2010: 1,586 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,473,751 entries = 929 entries average

2009: 1,548 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,516,098 entries = 979 entries average

2008: 1,534 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,641,004 entries = 1,069 entries average

2007: 1,548 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,698,840 entries = 1,097 entries average

2006: 1,519 “all-breed” dog shows with 1,710,525 entries = 1,126 entries average

So the number of shows has increased at the same time as the total number of entries has decreased … In 15 years, we have lost a few hundred entries per average show (763 in 2021, 1,126 in 2006) — and that's although the most recent figures are only for shows that really are open to all breeds, while the “old” figures refer to combined totals of all-breed and group shows. Not a pretty picture, is it?

What about the years before 2006? We have to turn to AKC’s excellent book “Dogs – The First 125 Years of the American Kennel Club” for that. This little volume, published in 2009, includes some interesting tables that aren't comparable with AKC's Annual Reports either, since the figures in the book refer to “Dogs in Competition,” not to dogs entered. Furthermore there is only a lump sum given for how many dogs competed in “Shows,” with no further details of how many of them were competing in all-breed, group or specialty shows.

However, it's clear that a peak was reached in 2003, when 1,554,668 dogs competed at AKC shows — more than any other year. From 1981 onward there were at least 1,000,000 dogs shown per year; there were more than 500,000 for the first time in 1969, more than 250,000 from 1961 onward. The first year that the number of “Dogs in Competition” at “Shows” was recorded was 1951, when 167,687 dogs were shown.

The annual number of all-breed shows (for the longest time AKC did not allow Group shows, and specialty shows for individual breeds have always been recorded separately) has been published for every year since the AKC was founded in 1884. There were only 11 all-breed shows that year; there were more than 100 all-breed shows for the first time in 1923, more than 200 in 1938, more than 500 in 1965 and more than 1,000 beginning in 1985. The year 2006 was the first year that the number of what AKC then listed as All-Breed Shows exceeded 1,500. At that time AKC was allowing the formation of Group clubs that held shows for their breeds.

I think it was Pat Trotter who said a long time ago that eventually there will be a dog show somewhere every single day of the year … We're getting pretty close to that. It's just too bad that most of the shows are too small to really offer a chance to “compare breeding stock” in most breeds.

When you are assembling this many figures, even if most of them are copied from AKC's own records, it's easy to make a mistake. It's happened to better people than me, and although I have made every effort to double-check all numbers, I cannot promise that every figure is correct. It won't affect the general picture, however, which is honestly pretty depressing. It has been proven that if you organize a really GREAT dog show, the exhibitors will come: Morris & Essex Kennel Club got 4,456 entries for their show in New Jersey on October 6 — on a Wednesday! Every dog show can't be M&EKC, of course, but wouldn't it help to focus more on the quality of the dog shows than on how many of them there can be?