For dogs, Westminster show’s move is a breath of fresh air

“I would go to Westminster, wherever it was,” said Heiken, of Norristown, Pennsylvania, “but this dog loves to be outside. … It’s a huge plus for us.”

Until now, the Westminster show had been in Manhattan since its 1877 founding and was held in an open-air venue only in its first few years. This year, it’s in tents at the historic Lyndhurst estate in Tarrytown, New York. Judging begins Saturday toward the coveted best in show prize, to be awarded Sunday night.

There’s relatively little crossover between the fast-paced agility ring and the traditional competition where dogs trot before a judge, but a cocker spaniel named Elvis was going for both. “He’s just a really remarkable dog,” says owner Sheryl Gadol of East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

Westminster added the agility contest in 2014, reflecting the growing popularity of a dynamic sport open to both purebred and mixed-breed dogs. Some are mixes made especially for sports prowess, such as Crime, a 10-year-old border collie-Staffordshire bull terrier mix.

“He is a ‘go big or go home’ type of dog,” says owner Debbie Lazaro of Howell, New Jersey (an attorney, she names all her dogs after legal terms).

Certain breeds tend to excel in agility, hence the 59 border collies that entered Friday’s contest. But it also drew some lesser-seen breeds like a mudi, a Hungarian herding dog. Kim Seiter, an agility trainer from Oak Ridge, New Jersey, was at Westminster for the first time with her dog Komoly, hoping to showcase the “super-cool, really fun, smart, hard-working” breed.