A dog show is definitely a sport in its original sense, similar to a divertisement. And it’s a sport in terms of being a competition. But in contemporary usage, a sport has is an athletic competition of skills requiring training. Beauty pageants don’t meet that last connotation.
The Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs can trace their continuous existence to the founding of the National League in 1875, making all three organizations older than the dog show.
It is as much a sport for the people who watch dog shows as swimsuits are, since they merited their own Sports Illustrated issue every year.
Aren’t the Cincinnati Reds older than both of those teams? I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Reds are the oldest baseball team. Here it is.
The Reds website lists a date of 1869 as the founding of the team. May 4th, 1869 is listed as the date of their first game.
But the Reds of 1869 were kicked out of the National League and went bankrupt in 1880. A second Reds organization was reorganized in 1881 and didn’t rejoin the National League until 1889. The Cubs and Braves franchises have been continuous.
Dog shows are only the most visible of a whole raft of contests which involve breeding animals or plants and then vying for first prize based on being closest to a “standard” that you try to attain. Koi, dahlias, rabbits, chickens, irises, cats, roses, you name it. The rules are similar for them all. They are not athletic contests involving dogs (there are those too and they are not similar to dog shows), they are contests based on appearance. I don’t think they are nearly as much like human beauty contests as they are like each other. They are their own thing.
If you’ve never attended a bird show, you don’t know what you’ve been missing.
Parrots competing against others of their type, canaries competing both for type and for song, and bird breeders discussing the size of Jim Miller’s cock.
“We’ve got contests for which dogs are the fastest, contests for which dogs fight the best, even contests for which dogs are best at bending sheep to their will.”
I have to confess that I have always enjoyed all those kinds of things. Never been to any bird show except poultry. My grandmother and I used to go to the Cow Palace dog show every year when I was a child (one of the few remaining “benched” shows where the dogs are parked there for three days in a shared indoor space – now it is all RV’s).
I’ve even ended up at some Rabbit Shows. If you’re not interested in Rabbits that much, amazingly boring.
I went to a cat show once in Philadelphia. Bought lunch at a concession stand and nearly swallowed a ball of white cat (I assume) fur that was in my macaroni salad.
That was circa 1988, and I still think of it when I eat macaroni salad.
One of the nice things about attending a dog show is you can say “bitch” and nobody flinches.
Dog shows are arguably more of a sport than hot dog-eating contests.
No they’re not.
Eating competitions might be a stupid sport, but they’re physical competitions. Dog shows aren’t.
Put it this way: If a dog show is a sport, then who are the athletes?
If a dog show is a sport, then is a rose show also a sport?
And if a rose show is a sport, then who are the athletes, there?
And yes, I can accept non-human athletes. Horse-racing, for instance, is a sport, and Sports Illustrated one year named American Pharaoh as their “Sportsman of the Year”. But I have a very hard time accepting a rose bush as an athlete. And when a competition consists of a poodle being judged the same way as the rose bush, I have a similarly hard time accepting the poodle as an athlete.
When the commentators call a dog show sport, they’re just being good soldiers. Kind of like when Bart Connor screeches “Un-real!” or the Olympic crew goes on and on about “gold medal contention”. They weren’t hired for their etymology expertise.
You didn’t mention which channel this was on, but ESPN stands for “Entertainment Sports Programming Network”…needless to say, that first word means that it covers a pretty wide net. I’ve seen the College Cheerleading Championships, spelling bees, poker tournaments, a primetime drama (Playmakers), a game show (Boardwalk And Baseball), and a cartoon about a soccer team, so animals primping around and doing simple tricks definitely falls under its umbrella. (I dimly remember it airing the Westminster Dog Show once or twice.)
Nitpick, but ESPN hasn’t stood for that in over 30 years.