Thanks guys.
Great idea on the carpeting.
I was offered use of a grooming table, but I was afraid one of the dogs might jump off and get hurt. I also had an 8x3 folding shop table in the car, but ended up using it for samples, forms and such.
I was shooting RAW as well, and by the end of the day the downloading was taking a while even with "don't download dupes" set. Apparently, Lightroom has to look at all the files anyway. I was rotating two 16GB cards through the camera and computer.
I figure it wasn't bad for the first event. There were only a total of 23 dogs around, but I have a big one in September with an average of 300+ dogs registered each year. A couple more smaller events between now and then to get the kinks out.