Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians

by Linda Gray Sexton

Then there was the closing banquet, which was a dressy event, at least as far as the ladies were concerned—a chance to step things up a bit—though many of the guys still arrived in blue jeans and cowboy boots and some even with their Stetsons. The point was that everyone brought some flavor from his or her hometown and so made the mix a bit raucous. This particular year, some inebriated member pitched a cherry tomato at someone at a nearby table who was equally gone, and it took only a minute for a food fight worthy of Animal House to begin, despite the beaded tops and suits. There was always someone with a childlike sense of fun that carried on despite the glares of those older and less flexible in their manners.

  •••

  The last day of the National came, and along with it my class in the obedience ring, Novice B. I was waiting at the entrance, my number attached to my left arm with a rubber band. I checked my pockets again for the liver bait I used to entice Rhiannon to perform, as it was an instant disqualification to bring it into the obedience show ring. She sat patiently by my side. I was overwhelmingly anxious, but she seemed as relaxed as a cat in the sun. My number was called, and we entered. The heeling went smoothly, the down stay was a dream. Everything she did seemed perfect to me. We ended with a score of 195.5, in second place to a dog that was famous across the country for his brilliant obedience performances. I couldn’t have been more delighted. For the first time I considered that maybe we had a chance for a Dog World Award, which were given to dogs competing in obedience who received their three “legs” with no score under 195. Suddenly anything with this incredible dog seemed possible. I was coming to love her more and more as we worked together. I was as bonded to her as she was to me.

  The first day of our club’s Specialty, following the National, brought Rhiannon and me one more challenge in the ring: her second leg for her Companion Dog title. I was more confident this time around, and that confidence proved to be well-founded—even though the male dog lying right beside her on the down leapt up and started wildly humping her. Tolerating the attack, Rhiannon never broke her stay, and we ended in first place with a score of 197.5—the best of all the scores at the Specialty. Rhiannon and I had won High in Trial. And so a dream came to be.

  PART III

  literati dalmatians

  {IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE}

  Rhiannon

  The Theatreworks Puppies

  Ashley

  . . . and eight more

  eight

  I CHOSE LITERATI AS my kennel name, and though most people on the show circuit thought it was a play on the word litter, in reality, it was a merge of the word literary, which referred to my career as an author, and the slang term glitterati, which referred to those glamorous movie stars glittering in the stratosphere of success and public adoration. Everything I wished I could be, and everything I wished one of my dogs would be.

  When 1994 arrived, it seemed an opportune time to breed Rhiannon. Even though she had not achieved all we had hoped, she had many worthy qualities. Perhaps, at a later point in my involvement in the Dal world, I might have been concerned that Rhiannon was not a good candidate for breeding because she had not yet finished her championship. However, Marty encouraged me to go ahead, and so—as we were still on the co-own contract—I sent Rhiannon on an airplane to Minnesota to a well-known stud, “Rob,” who had sired many litters of champions. I was hoping that we would have some very pretty babies, and maybe even some livers, the more rare variety of Dalmatian that is brown-and-white spotted, rather than usual black-and-white. For the week before her time was due, I slept with her in Gabe’s bedroom. He had been moved to Nathaniel’s top bunk until the puppies were weaned at about four weeks old, when they would be moved into the garage.

  I was alone in the house when she went into heavy labor. This wasn’t like Penny’s whelping when I was a young girl, sitting at the sidelines in horror at the show unfolding before me, accompanied by my parents. Here, I was an assistant to the ring mistress, and once again a bitch played the starring role. This time I could see with total amazement just how clearly she knew exactly what to do. The room echoed with grunts as she heaved and shoved and the first whelp appeared. She bent to tear open the sack, away from the pup’s face, and I put my hands into the box to help her. She tolerated my presence easily. It was time to take care of the umbilical cord and I waited for her to begin to gnaw on it, but another pup was coming, fast now, and she didn’t have a chance. I took over the first, trying to tie off the cord with the recommended dental floss, as my whelping book had suggested, but my hands shook and I couldn’t manage it. I was overwhelmed with a sickening swirl in my head, and I thought I would throw up.

  Scared, I lay down on the floor. After a minute, my head clear once again, I sat up and helped Rhiannon with the second pup. As I cleared the head out of the sac, she returned to the first and gnawed on the umbilical cord, saving me a second try with the dental floss. And from then on it was teamwork, her delivering, gnawing the cord, and starting to stimulate the pup with her tongue, me at last taking the puppy and rubbing it down briskly until it moved from dusky blue to pink and began to cry. Then I set it on her nipple to suckle until the next whelp arrived.

  The fifth puppy slid out neatly, but Rhiannon nudged it only for a moment with her nose and then turned aside. I didn’t understand at first, but when I grabbed it, I could feel how limp it was inside the sac. I tore the membrane away from the puppy’s face and began rubbing with the towel, hard. The puppy didn’t move. I suctioned its throat with a baby-sized bulb syringe and then did the “puppy shakedown,” a well-known maneuver to breeders and vets, used when a puppy doesn’t first respond. The pup is held up above the head and then swung down to the bottom of your chest, head supported, in an effort to clear the lungs of mucus and whelping fluids. I tried over and over, but the pup did not pink up. After twenty minutes of swinging and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and rubdowns with towels, I laid the pup down, and Rhiannon gave me a knowing look. Into a garbage bag went the little body.

  But six, seven, eight all arrived in fine shape. By the time the afternoon was over and the kids had peeked in the door, I had taken care of cleaning her bed and her body, and Rhiannon was settled on her side, nursing her pups. Nathaniel and Gabe came into the room softly and knelt at the side of the whelping box. I remembered my own morning so long ago with Penny and her litter: my disgust at what now seemed a natural process (perhaps because I had had my own children), and the love that came when my father put the first tiny puppy into my arms. That had been the first in a series of whelpings that never failed to amaze me. This was the second, and I was no less moved. Love came to me in two different ways: for Rhiannon and her travail, and for the helpless pups so dependent on her.

  The boys were speechless at the sight of the pure-white piglets attached to Rhiannon’s side, each decorated with a colored rickrack around the neck so that we could tell them apart. Slowly the boys reached out to touch them as I guarded Rhiannon’s head to make sure she wouldn’t snap as they neared a pup—but she only wagged her tail.

  Over the next eight weeks, the pups grew and grew. At the end of week two they got their spots, and soon their eyes opened. Between weeks three and four they could certainly hear, or at least we thought they could, as this would not be certain until they had the BAER (brain auditory evoked response) test, which would tell us definitively whether they could hear in both ears, one ear, or none. A unilateral would be fine to place in a pet home, but any puppy totally deaf would have to be euthanized, a process I worried about, not only for myself, but especially for my boys. What would it teach them about the disabled: do we put them to sleep? Nevertheless, it was an ethical guideline I had agreed to when I joined the Dalmatian Club of America. Luckily, I did not have to face such a decision with this litter, because all checked out to be bilateral at the time of the BAER test.

  At four weeks, the pups moved from the box in the house to the pen in the garage and stood on their sturdy hind legs to protest being confined. Thei
r cries were persistent and piercing. The boys loved going out after school, sitting in the pen and letting the pups crawl all over them. We took picture after picture, and I worried about whom we would get to buy them. Or even give them away to. Just as my parents had Penny’s pups.

  But I needn’t have worried. In the puppies’ sixth week, the Golden Gate Kennel Club sponsored the biggest dog show of the West Coast, to be held, as always, at the Cow Palace in South San Francisco. It was a “benched show,” like Westminster, and required that all entrants remain on a long backless seat where you had twenty-four inches for each dog to lie on a bed or in a crate and be admired by the public. While those who passed by and ogled the dogs certainly had fun, it was hell for breeders and dogs, with people poking their hands and faces into the dogs’ spaces, with those of us showing our dogs crammed onto the bench because there was nowhere else to sit, with the huge enclosed cow barns unheated. At that time it was a bitch of a show, but one you entered in order to be competitive. The Dalmatian Club of Northern California took up one entire fifty-foot bench.

  I had entered Rhiannon three months earlier, before the autumn deadline, even though I had hoped she would be pregnant by then. Now, though I wouldn’t show her, I could use my place on the bench to advertise the puppies. I took my best photos of them, made a glossy collage on a piece of eighteen-by-twenty-four–inch poster board, and put that in the space where Rhiannon was supposed to sit. By the end of the day I had seven deposits, all from puppy buyers, to the annoyance of other breeders on the bench who hadn’t thought of such a trick and who were trying to sell their puppies by handing out their business cards. My method was such a resounding success that in future years, they prohibited the display of any kind of photos advertising your dogs on the bench because they felt it unfair. Jim brought the kids to the show, and I relinquished my seat happily so Nathaniel and Gabe could sit on the bench for a while, each grinning proudly

  The puppies grew. I invited other breeders to help me evaluate the puppies, stacking them up on the grooming table and taking pictures, and then I decided which were show puppies and which were not. I chose the black-and-white girl with the yellow rickrack and Marty chose the liver girl to place with someone else in a co-own. All I knew was that I was glad that person wasn’t me. I entertained prospective buyers like royalty, serving coffee and displaying the offspring, Rhiannon, and the pedigree. All homes were carefully screened and put through rigorous scrutiny before I would place a puppy.

  However, to keep one of the puppies for myself was out of the question. I couldn’t have another dog in the house. We already had Rhiannon and Tia, and Jim called a halt to raising a kingdom of dogs, even though I wanted to have the yellow puppy join the household. I needed to find a show home, just what I had originally been for Marty and Stu, where the new owners would allow me to co-own and show the puppy.

  And find them I did—Pat and John Maciejewski. Pat had been in show business for a while, supervising her daughter’s bid for professional song and dance. She and John were keenly interested in getting involved in another kind of show world. I told them there were no guarantees; the pup could turn out to be too colorful, or to have a lousy tail set and never do a thing in the breed ring. But I had a good feeling about this one, even though I was still a novice. She was beautiful, with ears marked in perfect symmetry, a dot right in the middle of each and just rimmed with black. Her top line was solid, her feet tight, and Rob had overcome Rhiannon’s propensity for too much color. The Maciejewskis bought her and named her Literati’s Show Biz Wiz, or “Ashley.” She made a beautiful pair with their German shorthaired pointer, Max, with whom John liked to go pheasant hunting.

  I did begin showing her, and she did begin winning. She held herself like a queen, upright and proud, with presence. My instinct had been correct. The success made me feel as if I had finally grown up within the breed. People sometimes recognized me for my kennel name and my face and spoke to me with respect. The hobby had turned into something more, and I had learned that persistence pays off.

  The Maciejewskis and I traveled all around the North and Southwest, sometimes with Dawn and sometimes without, showing Ashley to great success. Eventually Pat and John bought a huge, beautiful RV so that they could have a home away from home and became known for arriving at the show grounds with a loud honk on their horn, something the “Dalmatian Police” decreed obnoxious. Later, Ashley, Max, and the two puppies they kept from Ashley’s first litter, Butler and Seren, would sleep up on the wide and deep dashboard, baking in the sunny warmth, despite my fears of a car crash. When Dawn traveled with us, we were once again sleeping in the same bed—this time the small and cramped pullout couch in the RV’s living area.

  Eventually, the Maciejewskis, totally smitten with the show world, asked if they could try their hand in the ring. Of course, I said yes, wanting them to experience what I had, and having less and less time to travel away from the family because of my growing sons and my writing. Pat and John loved the show circuit and eventually decided to have their own kennel name, taken from Ashley’s moniker, Show Biz.

  Jim had a new job, and increasingly it took him away from home. When Ashley completed her championship in 1996, a feat I had never been able to pull off with Rhiannon, I got many calls from those who wanted to congratulate me on my first homebred champion. Eventually Pat and John would put the handler Andy Linton on her, a professional now often seen winning at Westminster, and they began to “special” her. Taking her from one championship ring to another, we sought the coveted Best-of-Breed and Group wins and did receive a fair number of them. We persevered for a while, but winning had apparently given Ashley too much confidence and she began to get cocky, holding her tail up over her back too high, and thus she became less competitive. We retired her with regret—learning that even a terrific dog can change—and decided to breed her. It was time for another litter for Literati.

  nine

  IN JUNE OF 1997, we paired Ashley up with Dawn Mauel’s very successful Group winner, Davenport. Ironically, Davenport was a son of Jack, Ashley’s former nemesis in the ring. Pat and John and I arranged to co-own the litter. This time, however, I was there for the breeding, holding Ashley’s muzzle even as she protested his entry.

  Just as we had with Rhiannon’s pregnancy, Jim and I, and John and Pat, were anxious to see whether she was pregnant—as my parents had been with Penny, though for an entirely different reason. Sure enough, it turned out she was in whelp. John and Pat didn’t feel comfortable delivering a litter, so when her time came, I arrived on the scene better prepared than I had been with Rhiannon, feeling confident.

  And it all went off easily. Mostly. Except for the fact that Ashley didn’t want to stay in the whelping box and kept disappearing under the bed until I dragged her out so that she didn’t deliver in a dark place where I couldn’t see what was going on. Apart from some moderate amount of other assistance, Ashley did most of the work, just as her mother had. There, however, all resemblance to Super-Mom Rhiannon ceased.

  Ashley was a terrible mother. Day after day, she deserted the whelping box to stand and howl at the baby gate that had been installed at the doorway to the room to keep her from escaping. She dug up the wall-to-wall carpeting in front of the door when she was left alone with the puppies. I credited all this to the fact that she’d been outrageously spoiled by Pat and John and was just trying to get out of the guest bedroom to be with everyone downstairs, rather than attending to her new family.

  But at least she was willing to nurse them. They grew and grew and were the prettiest babies I’d yet had. They tromped on their rickrack and wrestled with each other, and I was delighted to see many of them had open markings when their spots came in. I didn’t spend as much time with them as I had with Rhiannon’s. I leaned on Pat for the day-to-day cleaning and handling, and she was good at it. I felt totally relaxed and didn’t worry about how we would sell them.

  The litter was growing up fast. The girl with the purple rickra
ck seemed a little off to me. Sometimes she growled when you held her, or sometimes she shied away and trembled with fear. Due to this sort of odd behavior, I began to suspect that she was deaf, even though I’d never had any experience before with a deaf puppy. At seven weeks, the BAER test confirmed that she couldn’t hear in either ear, and I knew I faced the terrible decision. Pat, despite having agreed to the DCA ethical guidelines, greeted any suggestion of euthanasia with tears. Once again, I saw how breeding could be cruel, in imitation of the ways in which life was cruel. The day we took the puppy to the vet’s office, Pat went with John and me, but she refused to come into the building. She paced the parking lot, smoking, and when we emerged, both John and me in tears, she fainted. We scooped her up off the blacktop and put her into the car. It took her a long time to recover.

  It would be over twenty years before I would reconsider that decision to put an innocent pup to sleep, and decide—as a personal choice, for myself alone—that I would never do it again, providing the puppy had a sound temperament and could be placed in an appropriate home. But it is only recently that the argument over whether to put a “deafie” to sleep has begun to reverberate within DCA, and only now do some breeders admit that they are divided over what to do when a BAER test turns up a “flat line” in both ears.

  We had no trouble selling the rest—partially because we kept so many of them. Despite the common wisdom that two pups would bond onto each other rather than onto their new families, Pat and John chose both a liver boy and a liver girl. The male pup with the green rickrack had caught my eye increasingly, and at last I convinced Jim to let me keep a third dog. This pup was handsome, with open markings and very black ears, and he liked to cuddle in my lap. I found myself handling him a lot, perhaps more than the other pups, and grew attached to him early on.