by Josh Dean
The five-day Wildwood cluster was, then, actually five separate events, meaning that a dog entered all five days could win five purple Best of Breed ribbons—or lose five times and get nothing.
It’s common practice to enter a particular dog in all the events and then pick and choose which ones to actually compete in. Experienced owners and handlers, for instance, tend to know which judges favor which types of dogs, so if you have a slighter dalmatian and you know that Saturday’s judge has a particular fetish for larger dogs, you might opt to skip that day.
Being new to the game, Kimberly Smith tended to follow the lead of Heather Bremmer, her handler, and so she sent her new champion Australian shepherd, the twenty-month-old Jack, off to the Jersey Shore, unsure of how many times she’d actually have him shown. He was entered all five days—the fees of seventy-five dollars a day must be paid at least eighteen days in advance, so on Heather’s advice she hedged her bets—and for sure she planned to let him show Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. But if he were to struggle those days, she was unlikely to throw him to the wolves over the weekend, when the field would swell with the entries of owner-handlers whose day jobs preclude participation during the week. Momentum would dictate events.
Heather Bremmer and her husband and handling partner, Kevin Bednar, tend to arrive at a location just about the time it opens, so they always have prime real estate as near as possible to the show rings. Once a beachhead has been established, Kevin—who carries at least two hundred pounds on his square-shouldered, six-foot frame—will begin the manual labor. He’ll roll in the crates and kennels and assemble them so that the smaller boxes, for the smaller breeds like corgis, sit atop the jumbo boxes, which house big dogs like the Bernese mountain dogs, bullmastiffs, and Akitas. Next he’ll set up two or three grooming tables, plug in the generators that power the industrial cool-air hair dryers, and make sure each crate has a towel and a water bowl.
All around them other owners and handlers do the same, so that within hours the convention center is transformed into a warren of crates and tables and supply boxes—a quick-rising temporary dog town with all the supplies necessary to feed and house a thousand animals, most of whom will also sleep on-site in their crates.
The actual competition rings don’t open until 8:00 A.M., but by 6:30 in the morning of the first show, everyone will be showered and dressed and at work bathing and blow-drying the first breeds on the schedule.
Depending on the size of a show, Heather and Kevin will have at least ten and sometimes twenty or more dogs in their care. To make their lives easier, they specialize in working, sporting, and herding dogs—dogs like Jack the Aussie; Rita, a Chesapeake Bay retriever; and Tanner, a Bernese mountain dog, plus assorted other golden retrievers, corgis, and mastiffs. These breeds require pretty minimal grooming, as compared to Malteses or especially poodles, which have such outlandish and time-intensive hairstyles that poodle handlers work exclusively with that breed. These specialists arrive early and toil furiously, with the help of trusty assistants, on however many poodles they have in their care, and they aren’t distracted by other dogs that might have to be shown in the meantime, as breeds are scattered across the day. A complete poodle grooming can take upwards of two hours, and you’ll rarely find poodles competing first thing in the morning; organizers aren’t that cruel.
The most famous poodle handler in all the land—in fact, the world—is Kaz Hosaka, an immaculately coiffed Japanese man who moved to America at age nineteen speaking no English and who now handles anywhere from five to twenty-five poodles, including, for 2010, Walker, the nation’s top-ranked toy poodle. Walker, like many of the country’s best dogs, handlers, and owners, was in Wildwood for his last tune-up before the Super Bowl of dog shows, the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York City. Both judges and crowds love poodles, toy and standard, and if you can get past the ridiculous hair, it’s not hard to see why: More than almost any other breed, poodles exude an air of confidence in the ring. You don’t want to give too much credit to an animal’s awareness of what’s going on at a dog show, but it’s easy to watch poodles trot around and think they are very consciously performing for the crowds.
It certainly seems as if good show dogs know what’s expected of them. To see Kimberly Smith’s dog, Jack, under normal conditions is to see an animal that takes great joy in tackling life. If he’s not sleeping, he’s playing, and he radiates energy to such a degree that his hair almost stands on end. But once Heather snaps on his show lead—a gold choke collar at the end of a thin piece of blue kangaroo leather decorated with silver and blue glass beads—Jack transforms into something else: a willing, almost subservient participant in a game he seems to enjoy. That is, when he’s focused.
Jack loves a challenge, and this clearly is one. It probably takes every ounce of composure to suppress his urge to jump up and kiss the judge or to romp with a ring full of his peers, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him when he’s at his best in the ring. He follows Heather’s direction, eyes locked on her hand, and when it’s time to move, he moves smoothly, with no hitches. Some of this is learned, sure—and both Kimberly and Heather would tell you that Jack was still a puppy and has learning to do—but there also seemed to be something less tangible at work here. Could it be talent?
Kimberly wasn’t able to take off from work, so she missed the first day of the Wildwood cluster. Jack was no worse for it. He was selected Best of Breed out of twelve champion Australian shepherds, beating a solid field of competitors, including a black dog named Shocka (full registered name: Ch* Heatherhill Shock N Awe) that won the breed at Crufts, the world’s largest dog show, held mid-March every year in England, as well as a sturdily built red dog named Striker (Ch Schaefer Vinelake Impulsive) who had beaten him back-to-back days at some recent shows in Westchester County, New York.
The losses to Striker, Kimberly felt, were indicative of a potential problem for which no handler can correct. Striker is a solid, blocky animal, with “more bone” than Jack, who has a lithe and athletic build that would seem to be an asset for an animal designed to be agile while herding around uncooperative flocks of sheep. But individual preference for size is a bias you can’t overcome, and much to the frustration of Kimberly and Heather—who runs into this issue in all the breeds—some judges just prefer it. Once you’ve learned that about a judge, the strategy is simple: You do your best to avoid him or her.
To beat Striker, then, was a nice start to the weekend. “I’m a pessimist,” Kimberly said when informed of the result. “I always expect him to lose.” While this was a common refrain for her, she, like any owner, wanted very much for her dog to win.
Heather and Kevin’s team was off to a good start. Tanner, who had finished 2009 as the number-one-ranked Bernese mountain dog in America, also won his breed, as did Rita the Chessie, Trader the Akita, and Benny the bloodhound, who really only had to show up and not fall over in the ring, considering he was the only bloodhound entered.
Technically a judge doesn’t have to reward a dog just for showing up; if he decides that dog just isn’t deserving of a ribbon, he can withhold it, and this rare event is just about the biggest humiliation any owner can experience and should probably be taken as a sign that your dog—and, by proxy, you—might want to look for another hobby. Benny had no such issues; he is 145 pounds of droopy, bloodshot eyes and sagging, drool-laden jowls, the sixth-ranked bloodhound in America and a few generations removed from Ch Quiet Creek’s Stand By Me, the bloodhound that played the part of Hubert in the movie Best in Show. Benny enjoyed a few minutes of his own in the spotlight the previous Thanksgiving when he and Kevin won the breed and placed fourth in the Hound Group at the National Dog Show, held in Philadelphia and aired to a national audience on NBC.
Less popular breeds quite often end up with little or no competition, so anyone looking to create champions and be competitive almost immediately could do worse than to pick a rarer breed like the puli or pharaoh hound or komondor, all of which dwell ne
ar the bottom of the list of most popular breeds, published annually by the AKC. As of this writing, the breed in dead last was the English foxhound, a hunting dog that looks very much like an overgrown beagle. Considering that the beagle is ranked fifth, this could be surprising until you realize two things: (a) There just aren’t many English foxhounds in the United States; it’s primarily a British dog owned by foppish men in jaunty caps and red coats. And (b) unlike beagles, which adapt to both country and city, foxhounds, say the breed club, “do best with acreage,” which pretty much rules out city folk.
By the morning of day two, Kimberly and Jack had been apart for nearly forty-eight hours, and because Jack has a tendency to get overexcited and is difficult to bring back from that state, Heather asked Kimberly to arrive early enough that her dog could get their joyous reunion out of his system so that Heather could steer him back in the general direction of composure by ring time.
When Jack sees Kimberly after an absence, his eyes go a little wide, his head dips, and then he begins to vibrate, from back to front. These vibrations become tremors, which become earthquakes, until Jack’s fifty-five-pound form is practically levitating. Because he was on the grooming table when she arrived in Wildwood and thus had a choke collar around his neck, connecting him to a pole, Jack couldn’t really move very far, but that didn’t stop his body from spasming around until he was released from the lead and could jump up and onto his mother for a good hug.
Hugging was a new thing for Jack. He loves affection and will jump up and paw at you repeatedly, as well as propel himself up and into your midsection over and over until you stoop down to his level and apply pats and rubs. But the full-on paws-around-the-neck hug was something he picked up from his new roommate, Summer, a young Australian shepherd that Kimberly had recently purchased from MontRose Aussies in New York State to be his home companion as well as perhaps a future paramour should their respective traits prove to be a good match. Summer was a big hugger, and after a few weeks of watching her stand up and hug his favorite human, Jack began to imitate her. It was, for a time, one of his favorite things to do.
Heather looked sternly at both Kimberly and Jack and directed him back to the grooming table. At shows, Heather is in charge and everyone knows it. Being five foot three and not much over a hundred pounds, and looking more like the kind of person you’d find at the front of a kindergarten classroom than one you’d see reprimanding a rottweiler, Heather is easily outweighed by many of the animals at the show, but like any good handler she has the aura of an alpha dog. Many times a day, I would witness her silence a barking dog simply by saying its name once in a brusque manner, and sometimes just by staring it down.
Heather has a particular fetish for presentation, and she likes for Kevin’s outfits to color-coordinate with hers. For Thursday it was turquoise. Kevin wore a turquoise shirt and turquoise accents in his tie, while Heather chose a turquoise blazer and a black skirt. On the spectrum of conservative to flashy, the two fall somewhere in the middle. You’ll see some handlers in sequins and others in off-the-rack suits sized for a much larger person, a fashion faux pas that is sometimes a result of poor taste but often an unfortunate byproduct of the need for dress pants you can jog in.
“So we won yesterday,” Kimberly said, beaming a little, as Heather put her blazer aside and replaced it with a black fleece she wears while grooming.
“He was a nightmare,” Heather answered. Jack’s handler was finding her star Australian shepherd to be an unfamiliar challenge. Some days she put on the lead and he was calm and focused; other times he seemed totally uninterested in playing along. On these days it took all her tricks to bring him in line. She felt that he still needed more experience. “I think if he did a whole month with us, it would make a huge difference,” she said.
Because Kimberly wasn’t able to afford a full-time handling plan on her own—which could be two thousand dollars per month or more—Jack was on an erratic schedule, and it seemed to Heather that one reason he tends to be unruly the first day of a show is that he forgets how to act like a show dog. Every time, she theorized, Jack had to work through his excitement anew. If you’re a dog who loves dogs and people—let’s face it, who loves stimulation of any kind—a dog show is pretty overwhelming, and so it’s easy to see how Jack could lose his composure so easily.
Still, he had the win, due partly to his presence of mind that day and partly to his beautiful appearance. Aesthetically, Jack doesn’t have many flaws. As a type of Australian shepherd known as blue merle, he has an exotic look, with black, gray, brown, and blue patches on his otherwise ivory white coat, but even those spots aren’t really so random. He does have what’s known as a “rose ear,” a condition in which one of his ears perks up ever so slightly instead of folding perfectly over in a mirror image of the one on the other side. Unfortunately, it’s his left ear, and the left side is the “show side,” or the side that faces the judge when the animals are standing still in the ring.
It’s a weak muscle that causes the rose ear, though, and the issue is quite easily corrected. If this very minor flaw is recognized early enough, a breeder can painlessly glue the ear when the dog is two months old, and the problem takes care of itself in a few weeks. Since Jack is older, Heather’s method, which she picked up from an e-mail that Kerry sent to Kimberly (including photos), was to apply some thick tape from one ear to the other, under his chin, for an hour or so before showtime in the hope that the ear would stay down for a while. Tape, however, poses problems. Most isn’t strong enough to withstand Jack’s violent attempts to shake it off, and the kinds that are strong enough—duct tape certainly is—pull out tufts of hair, leaving bare spots.
Kimberly had come up with an ingenious solution. She researched magnets online until she found a set strong enough to stay together when stuck one on either side of a hyper dog’s ear but weak enough that they’re easily pulled apart by humans and don’t actually hurt the dog. She wrapped two dime-size magnets in electrical tape, and connected them to another pair using speaker wire, which is both pliable and strong, and covered the whole thing in more black tape. It’s a surprisingly tidy contraption, and with Jack’s thick white ruff,* you can hardly tell he’s wearing them. Kimberly thought that the next step was to dip the ear holders in liquid rubber, and Heather had told her more than once that she should sell a more refined version at dog shows to owners of other breeds that tend to suffer from rose ear: Rottweilers, for instance.
Kimberly reached into a box and picked up the latest issue of the Canine Chronicle. The Chronicle is a glossy, oversize monthly magazine with a smattering of editorial hidden inside hundreds of pages of vanity ads promoting top show dogs, including, in this edition, a two-pager for Tanner and another for Rita. Virtually every inch of the Chronicle is for sale, including the cover, on which appeared the nation’s top-ranked boxer, Scarlett, who was also the fifth-ranked dog among all breeds in all the land. She was in Wildwood for the weekend.*
When Kimberly boasted that Jack had beaten a former Crufts winner, Heather smacked her lightly on the arm with a grooming brush. “I keep telling you, you have a good dog,” she said. “He’s crazy, though. He saw somebody yesterday who looks like you”—indicating me, a human he’d previously met only once—“and he went nuts.”
“He remembers people,” Kimberly said.
Heather pointed to some new styling she was trying on his rear. To help even a slight slope in his “top line”—that’s his back, which is supposed to be as close as possible to level, even though very few dogs have this—Heather had fluffed up his fur using water, hair spray, and a blow dryer. The effect is a less extreme version of what teenage girls once did to their bangs in the 1980s. Kimberly laughed. “I’ll have to call him ‘poufy butt.’”
It’s worth nothing that, technically, much of the grooming you see at a dog show is in violation of rules. Technically, a dog should appear in the ring au naturel. You can wash and brush him, but—technically—you’re not to apply powd
er, thickener, hair spray, dye, or any other product that can artificially alter a dog’s appearance. But stroll around the handling area of a dog show and you will see all these things in open use. By the time a bichon is through grooming, he will have swollen in size by a third, with the use of enough hair spray to style the cast of Jersey Shore. Most black dogs have had any nonblack spots, however tiny, blacked in with dye (in the case of fur), makeup (for snouts and whiskers), and even markers (for touch-ups—all of which you’ll find among the hundreds of canine beauty-modification products you can buy from concessionaires on site at any dog show. Products of this sort were being deployed on every table in the building.
So, you know—technicalities.
Not to pick on all-white breeds, but to look at a dog ring full of Samoyeds or bichons frises as an abject amateur is to be thoroughly baffled. They look identical—white and fluffy and . . . well, mostly white and fluffy. I have no idea how a judge can tell them apart, let alone which is best.
In the case of Aussies, a typical ring offers great variation. There are four recognized color patterns, the most common known as the black tri. These dogs are mostly black with some white and red around their necks and faces, and they often have white circles around their eyes that look like reverse panda masks. Red tris have a similar look, only in place of all that black the dogs have a rusty red coat. Jack, as previously discussed, is what’s known as a blue merle—a striking pattern that is haphazardly spotted in gray, black, brown, and white, with gray and white being the most dominant colors. The final type is the red merle, which has the same type of pattern as the blue, only instead of gray patches it has red. Truly, it’s rare to find even two tris that you couldn’t tell apart, even though their markings are fairly consistent, but you will never have issues distinguishing any two merles. Such apparent randomness as you see in their coats is typically a quality we associate with mutts, but you don’t have to know anything about Australian shepherds to know that when you see a beautiful merle, like Jack, you are looking at a special kind of animal.
