Many people train their dogs to the extent of teaching them how to sit but Cole Ferreira has trained his dogs to the next level. Starting at young age Cole Ferreira, senior, has competed in dog shows after being introduced to the hobby by his fa-ther. “I started [dog shows] when I was young because my dad did it when he was young so he got me into it. We’ve always had dogs we started off with bea-gles but then we moved into bigger dogs. We just breed them and we raise them. And we travel the country and do dog shows.” Ferreira, said.

“…it’s the kind of stuff that people don’t realize judges look for at Westminster.”

The American Kennel Club (AKC) holds competitions known as conforma-tion, in which the dog is judged based on appearance and structure. “So lets say we have a litter of puppies, then we’ll raise that dog and we’ll pick out of the litter which ones the most structur-ally correct. The AKC has standards that they want their breed, like how the head should look how the body should look and basically you look for that. And you get like trained to look for that, I guess going to dog shows and it’s kind the stuff that people don’t realize judges look for at Westminster.” The AKC also holds competitions known as juniors that Ferreira competes in. “I also compete in juniors. Which there’s regular breed where you’re judg-ing how good the dog looks and there’s juniors where you’re judging how good you can show. And I competed in that too. Last year I was a lot more competitive than I am this year just because like it’s a lot of work, it’s every weekend. Last year I was for a short while third in the country for it, I traveled around a lot.” Ferreira doesn’t plan on taking com-peting in dog shows farther than a hobby in the future.“I don’t want to do it as a profession, you can there are people that do that and get people to pay them to show their dogs but it’s like not a very stable pro-fession. So I want to be a vet and spe-cialize in marine mammals but I de nitely think it could be a thing that I get my kid involved with and I would probably own a show dog when I get older it depends what happens.”