by Josh Dean
Kimberly, then forty-five, had recently parted ways with her live-in boyfriend, a man with three children of his own. Together they’d adopted a yellow Lab named Sandy, and because he was the one who’d chosen the breed, and because he had three children who would be heartbroken at the loss of the dog, he got Sandy in the split. The problem was, Sandy was very much Kimberly’s dog. She was the one who’d raised and trained her.
Unrelated to her work at the track, Kimberly has been in thrall to horses for most of her life. After her mother found a book in which she’d drawn in crayon about caring for horses (or how she imagined this to be, based on movies and TV), she bought Kimberly a set of riding lessons. Kimberly loved the sport, bought her first horse at fifteen with a small inheritance, and has ridden in her spare time ever since. At various times she’s owned nearly a dozen horses over the years, and for a period even showed a Congress champion, Eric (A Carolina Star) on the American Quarter Horse circuit.
Sandy would accompany Kimberly every time she went to the stables to ride her quarter horse, Eric, and would run in circles inside the ring as Kimberly and Eric trotted around, often getting so close that the horse would gently nudge the dog out of the way so as to not step on her. The two animals became close, as dog and horse rarely do, and it wasn’t unusual to see Eric grooming Sandy when they were both at rest in his stall.
Needless to say, it was a big blow when Sandy disappeared from Kimberly’s life. Knowing that she was only a year from having an empty nest, and also seeking to assuage the loneliness of a breakup with a guy she once thought she’d marry—and who took their dog!—Kimberly very quickly began looking around for a puppy, specifically an Australian shepherd. Aussies, along with border collies and Welsh corgis, are common around the horse community, for the simple reason that they are energetic and aren’t afraid, and the horses seem to sense that and like them for it.
She’d gotten particularly attached to an Aussie named Gucci, owned by her horse trainer, Keith Miller. Gucci was sweet, smart, and well behaved, with a pretty face that was more expressive than that of other dogs she’d spent time around. Gucci traveled to most shows and was such a barn fixture that she might as well have been the stable’s mascot.
Making the very logical assumption that good dogs come from good breeders, Kimberly located a ranking of top Aussie show dogs and used that as a metric, working backward to find those dogs’ breeders, which are always listed under the dogs’ names in show catalogs and listings. That’s how she ended up at the Web site for Wyndstar Kennels, a lavender-hued outpost featuring a star pulling a rainbow with the distinct look of a Web site designed in the 1990s (a common trait of breeder Web sites, for reasons unclear). There, on Kerry Kirtley’s site, Kimberly glimpsed a face that she would not be able to get out of her mind. Among the shots in the site’s “puppies” section was one of a paint-splattered fluff ball lying in the grass, an unmistakable glint in his eye.
When Kimberly inquired about the puppy in late May, Kerry told her that her he was “show quality,” as opposed to “pet quality,” and wasn’t officially for sale, especially to someone with no history in showing dogs. If Kerry were to give him up, she wanted the puppy to go to a person with a track record of showing dogs, because a breeder is only as good as her pool of champion animals, and when a good one is whelped—a puppy that displays all the hallmarks of show quality—the goal is to pass that dog on to someone who can make it into a champion, furthering the valuable bloodline and thus increasing the value and desirability of future litters. As is often said, “Showing is all about breeding.”
For several weeks after their first correspondence, Kimberly found herself clicking back to this puppy’s photo. He had tan cheeks and what looked like black splotches under both eyes (his “football smudges,” she calls them now); his fur was fluffy and multicolored, and he was undeniably beautiful and unique. Kimberly had no interest in buying a dog she couldn’t meet in person—and this one was an entire continent away—but she found herself back at Kerry’s Web site more and more frequently. If you believe in love at first sight involving two-dimensional images posted on the Internet, this was it, and Kimberly was increasingly certain that this was her dog. “I was looking for that dog that tripped my trigger, that called to me,” Kimberly would later recall. This little blue merle was the one.
For nearly a month, Kimberly and Kerry e-mailed back and forth and occasionally spoke on the phone. Kerry slowly warmed to the idea of parting with the puppy. What ultimately sold her on Kimberly was that she did have at least some experience showing animals. Granted, hers was with horses and not dogs, but the general idea of conformation is the same, so much so that the dog-show world is full of onetime horse people. (The former is also much cheaper than the latter.)
To help ease her concerns about Kimberly’s lack of dog-show history, Kerry offered to co-own the puppy. For a reduced price of a thousand dollars, instead of sixteen hundred (plus shipping and expenses), Kerry would retain a stake, granting her a vote on things like naming and show selection, as well as limited breeding rights in the future—meaning that she could, and would, recall him to California for the occasional love vacation.
With that, Kimberly agreed to buy a puppy she’d never actually seen or touched. Kerry obtained the proper health certificates, packed him into a crate, applied duct tape and zip ties to prevent tampering or theft en route, said good-bye, and booked the ten-week-old blue merle puppy a Delta Airlines flight from Ontario, California, to Philly, with a connecting stop in Atlanta.
Up until the minute he left, in the wee hours of June 19, there was some doubt whether or not the trip would work out, because the maximum temperature at which pets can fly in cargo is eighty-four, and temps were rising back east. Kimberly was scared to death that her new dog wasn’t going to make it out, and the anticipation of it all was driving her nuts. She clicked obsessively on online weather forecasts and then also on the flight tracker, but the flight was fine and the puppy saw his new owner for the first time in a dusty cargo office through the slit openings in his crate. She’d been there, waiting in the office, for more than an hour.
Once Kimberly figured out how to actually liberate the dog from his well-secured crate—luckily she had nail clippers in her purse strong enough to cut the zip ties, and good old-fashioned grit worked on the tape—she stared at that familiar face in three dimensions for the first time as the puppy sized her up and stumbled out into his new world, so many miles from where he’d started the day. The puppy looked no worse for the long trip and, much to Kimberly’s surprise, hadn’t soiled his cage. She expected at least a little mess, if not a nasty coat matted with his waste. Instead both crate and coat were spotless. It was a good omen.
Kimberly hugged the puppy, took him on a short walk, and then held him in her lap in the driver’s seat of her car, where he slept for the hour-long drive home to her town house. A friend who’d come along to keep her company tried to insist that Jack be put back into his crate, because it seemed a little unsafe for Kimberly to drive with a puppy in her lap, one that could pounce on her brake foot at an inopportune moment. But she was having none of it. “I wanted him to bond with me,” Kimberly said. “I wanted to be the person who rescued him from this terrible flight. That’s how I’ve been with him ever since. We’re buddies.”
Choosing a name was going to be important, so Kimberly took some time thinking about her options. Seeing as this was a show dog, his name would have added significance—because it creates an impression and appears in printed catalogs and show programs—but first and foremost the puppy was to be a part of the family, so Kimberly felt the need to get Taylor involved in the process. She threw out Zeus, a little presumptuous and arrogant-sounding—what if he turned out timid and runty, nothing like a Greek god?—and also King, which felt almost rote, but really in her heart she was hoping for Major, as shorthand for He’s Got Major Moves, which she thought made a nice show name. Show dogs have both a fancy formal name (registered with
the AKC and writ in stone; you cannot change it) and a day-to-day name that is the one people actually use. But Taylor insisted on a human name. He said, “He’s a Jack. Let’s call him Jack.”
And so he was. Kimberly named him Jack.
Jack wasn’t actually the first Aussie at the Smith home. Bailey, a sixteen-year-old Ocicat,* had lived there her entire life, and the Oci is the rare breed of cat, oddly enough, that is both doglike and Velcro. It took a few days for Jack to assert his status in the home. He was wary of the cat, which followed him around and acted like a dog, even borrowing and playing fetch with one of his toys, but soon enough Jack was chasing her away and also thumping up against Taylor’s legs in an attempt to push around his sole rival for the master’s attention; it was friendly play, but also a statement of where Jack saw himself in the house pecking order: one step below Kimberly.
Where Kimberly went, Jack went. “He was very quickly my shadow,” she said, and her Velcro dog lived up to the name. “Get an Aussie and never go to the bathroom alone again.”
Within weeks owner and dog had settled into a happy routine. Jack’s days would begin on a pillow on Kimberly’s king-size bed. He slept well on the pillow, “hogging the fan” that spun at bedside, and tended to spend most of the night there, after he and Kimberly had snuggled while watching TV. Then she would say, “Good night, Jack,” and that was his signal that it was time to head for the pillow. They wouldn’t speak again until morning, when the day started anew with a big belly rub.
Once she realized how intelligent her new dog was, Kimberly began to revel in training him. And “good night” was just one of many phrases in Jack’s growing vocabulary. By his first birthday—between agility and handling classes, at-home trick lessons, and basic obedience—he could respond to at least thirty-five words and understood the nuances between such apparently similar commands as “wait” and “stay.” The latter means to sit still and not move until told to do so by his master, who is Kimberly, or someone else he respects, which could be Taylor or Heather. “Wait” is more of a temporal concept; it means Jack needs to sit there for an unspecific amount of time, enough so that Kimberly or Taylor or maybe Summer can complete a task—say, open a door or fill a bowl—at which time he can, as Kimberly says, “self-release.”
A good example of waiting can be seen on a day when it’s too cold out for Kimberly to take Jack on a walk just to pee. For such occasions she has a single long lead tied up outside the back door, just off the kitchen of her two-bedroom town house. Because Summer was younger and not yet totally on board with the housebreaking thing, she got first crack at the yard. In that case Jack would sit and wait his turn to relieve himself outside. If he acted antsy, Kimberly simply said “wait,” and he did.
Kimberly learned not to open her eyes in the morning until she was definitely ready to get up, because without fail the first thing she’d see was Jack’s face, staring in wait for his opportunity to dive in for the “morning cuddle,” a two-part process that starts with the dog snuggling in under her arm before rolling over onto his back for a belly rub. After the cuddle, Kimberly and Jack head downstairs to hit the yard for a morning pee, then breakfast. For most of his life, Jack has eaten Purina One, your run-of-the-mill grocery-store pet food, which “show people would scoff at,” Kimberly says. If it’s a show week, she might up the quality to the more expensive, Heather-approved brands (Taste of the Wild especially) or sprinkle in some supplements or a scoop of yogurt to help settle Jack’s sensitive stomach, which can get seriously aggravated when he’s nervous or excited. If there’s time, and he’s feeling frisky, he might squeeze in a quick morning romp around the house with Summer, a short but wild bout of play Kimberly calls “a rip ’n’ tear.”
Then it’s off to the shower.
Jack has a conflicted relationship with the shower. He loves to be in the room when Kimberly is in it, because he has only limited time with her before work, and a good chunk of it is wasted in the shower. But he also distrusts the sound and sight of that water, since that’s where his baths happen. Most dogs hate baths, and Jack is no exception. Because he can’t ever know when, exactly, he might be asked to enter the steamy, wet, glass box, he waits in the hall until he hears the shower door thud close. Then he enters and parks himself just outside the glass, staring suspiciously at the activity inside. Some extra sense tells Jack when Kimberly’s about to turn off the shower, because every time she’s about to, she looks out and Jack is gone; he’s left the room to avoid the risk of being swept through an open shower door.
During this interlude Jack moves to the bedroom, where he awaits a safe, dry return to the bathroom with no risk of being dragged into the torture box. Once Kimberly is dried and dressed, she sits down on the tub and does her makeup, using a small vanity mirror on the sink. Jack, by now, will return to the room and wedge himself into “this little bitty cubbyhole—a one-foot space between the counter and tub.” And there he lies until the makeup application is complete. So consistent is Jack in his movements that “I could draw you a picture of all of his positions in the morning,” Kimberly said. “Somehow he knows when I take my mascara out. As soon as I take it out, when he appears to be sleeping, he gets up and leaves the room again. He knows that after mascara I blow my hair dry. He’s not afraid of it; it’s just his thing.”* (Summer has no interest in the morning’s minutiae; she’s typically downstairs on the back of the couch, keeping an eye on the yard.)
These things happen daily, without fail—before and after work. Kimberly finds it all endearing. When she arrives home from work, Jack is inevitably there, in the window, and by the time Kimberly has opened the door from the garage, he’s there, too—with a toy in his mouth. “When he gets excited and all wiggly, he likes to have something in his mouth,” she explains. “If he’s not at the door, I know he’s gone to get a toy.”
Jack’s favorite toy of all is the Frisbee; it’s blue and the size of a dinner plate, and though he loves to chase it, that’s not really critical to his enjoyment of its tasty, tooth-bitten plastic. He’s just as happy to pick it up and carry it around, and many mornings the first thing Jack thinks when he wakes up is not, “Damn, I have to pee,” it’s, “Where’s the Frisbee!?” If Jack looks stressed, a good first guess at the cause is this missing disk.
After the Frisbee his favorites come and go. For a while it was his chicken—a squeaky toy with rubber legs that stretch and pull. Like many of his toys, it’s actually for children. Jack is less hard on his toys than your average dog, so Kimberly can shop for them most anywhere; her universe of options is so much larger than the pet store. She finds yard sales to be particularly fertile ground; that’s where she discovered a little purple gorilla that Jack carefully chewed for over a year until it finally came unstuffed. It took him a full two years to chew the legs off his favorite stool—a stool she used to teach him to do handstands—and it still lives on in his collection, somewhere in the basement. For a time he was partial to a rubber bug, and there was always room in his heart for his ball and the duck—“all noisy things,” Kimberly says. “The only thing he likes that doesn’t make noise is his Frisbee.”
Naturally, Jack loves new toys, and they enter and leave his life with some regularity. He recognizes the color and shape of bags from the high-end pet store where Kimberly shops, and he wiggles with exaggerated frenzy when one enters the house. For Easter she made him a basket, as well as ones for Summer and Taylor, who likes to say to her, “You love Jack more than me.” To which Kimberly replies, “I love all of my children equally.” (For the record, of all the children, Jack unpacked his basket most carefully, taking the time to check out and play with each new toy before tearing into the next.)
Like all Aussies, Jack loves a challenge, and learning words—and the tasks that go with them—is a challenge, so his vocabulary is ever-growing. One of his favorite games is to retrieve toys by name (say “rope” as opposed to “duck”). He loves it when Kimberly says, “Get your duck,” and he will search
the house high and low until he finds the correct toy and then bring it back and drop it at her feet. Sometimes the toy isn’t on the floor where he’s looking, and Kimberly will say, “Look upstairs” (if he’s downstairs), and Jack does just that. It feels at times as if she can actually speak to him.
Jack can spin clockwise (that’s “Turn around, Jack!”) or counterclockwise (“Jack, twirl!”) and maybe his coolest trick is the modified handstand, which he can’t quite do to full extension—you know, using a wall—but which he’s now capable of doing on anything up to the height of a hassock that Kimberly keeps in the living room. The handstand evolved from a popular dog-agility drill known as “targeting,” wherein a dog has to locate and touch an object (most often a light-switch cover, though no one knows why this is) with either a paw or, in the more advanced version, a nose. Jack can now target with both front and rear legs. (Rear targeting, by the way, is pretty advanced stuff and is the way Kimberly taught him the handstand—he targeted with his rear legs on increasingly tall objects, starting with a pillow.)
He also loves to jump, almost as much as he loves his Frisbee, so a favorite game of his is for Kimberly to order him to “table-sit,” which is pretty self-explanatory and is a standard part of an agility test. Then she’ll put her hand (which now stands in for the light-switch cover) in the air at shoulder or head height and say, “Jack, touch.” And Jack will jump up and touch her hand with his nose, then hop back on the table and do it again.
It is occasionally tiring to own a dog as smart as Jack.
“Sometimes he comes to me with this look, like, ‘Okay, let’s work,’” Kimberly says with an exhale. Really he means, “Let’s do tricks for treats.” If Kimberly doesn’t immediately bite, he’ll bait her, by putting all four of his feet on a stool or by doing a handstand on an ottoman, or even by putting a single back leg up on a wall as if demonstrating, “Hey, I might do one on this wall!”
