by Josh Dean
Kimberly was actively looking for a financial backer so that she could elevate Jack to such status, to help him rise above Trader the Akita or Benny the bloodhound or a group of golden retrievers known as the Golden Girls, to reach the level of Kevin’s top dog, Rita the Chesapeake Bay retriever, and Tanner, Heather’s A-number-one client dog and Jack’s big black teddy bear of a buddy.
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BERNESE MOUNTAIN DOG
Ch Blumoon Tanzenite V Blackrock—or Tanner to those who know and love him—was America’s top-ranked Bernese mountain dog by the end of 2009. He was four years old then and a hundred-plus pounds of black, brown, and white fur, a gentle, mild-mannered beast who loves nothing more than to stand on his rear legs and throw his prodigious body into you for hugs. If you sit, Tanner will sit—and then lean into you. If you are giving him love and happen to be distracted—say, you’ve started up a conversation—he will tap you in the back or on the shoulder with a gigantic paw until you’ve resumed paying attention to him. Even for a breed known for temperament, his is exceptional, causing Heather to often declare, “Tanner should be the spokesdog for the breed.”
This gentle, affectionate nature is very much in the breed standard for Berners, which were first bred in the Alps to pull farmers’ carts down from the mountains to market. It’s a job that required strength and patience, but also the wherewithal to regularly encounter strangers along the way. Similarly bearish dogs, like the Great Pyrenees and the kuvasz, aren’t quite so docile, mainly because they were bred to guard flocks of sheep. In that capacity a friendly nature is sort of counterproductive.
Tanner belongs to Dawn Cox, a boisterous and athletic-looking woman who, like her dog, is both physically impressive (in her case tall and buxom) and tremendously friendly. A lifelong lover and breeder of Bernese, she got her first dog when she was thirteen, after her father took her to a local kennel and she was awestruck by the large and friendly black dogs. “I’d never seen anything so beautiful,” she recalls. Unable to afford a puppy, she was told that several retired show dogs were available for adoption at no cost. So Dawn and her father picked out and took home a seven-year-old named Birdie, and, except for a break for college, Dawn has been breeding dogs ever since.
She and her husband, Newell, have two kids, a twenty-three-year-old son, Andrew, and a twenty-year-old daughter, Meredith, a two-time Pennsylvania Class AA high-school-basketball Player of the Year in 2005 and 2006 who went on to star in the sport at Georgetown University. For more than twenty years, Dawn has been breeding Berners, and puppies from each litter are named for every letter in the alphabet, counting upward. When Dawn finished A through Z, she started over again with AA. “The next one is KK,” she said in the early days of 2010. “I’m wondering what happens when I get to triple-K—that wouldn’t be so good.”
Tanner, though, is her pride and joy, her first dog ever to reach number one in the breed, a feat that surprised everyone considering that 2009, the year he did it, was supposed to be more of a warm-up for 2010.
In fact, it could have happened even more quickly. Tanner finished at fourteen months and would have done it sooner, but, Dawn reports, “We had to break for surgery.” One day before his first birthday, Tanner was more sluggish than usual. Dawn took him to the vet, who ordered an X-ray, noticed a blockage, and cut him open on the spot, removing this mysterious clump from his digestive tract. After surgery he showed Dawn what he’d taken out and said, “Recognize this?”
“Yep,” she told him. “That’s the pool cover.”
Tanner and his Bernese buddies have a knack for eating inedible things. “They’re big chewers,” she said, “and sometimes I think they’re chewing on something like a stuffed animal or a shoe and they just think, ‘Hmm, it’s in my mouth—I may as well swallow this.’”*
Dawn couldn’t have gotten Tanner to the top of the breed without the help of his backer, Georgeann Reeve, another Bernese breeder and friend who retired from a career in the air force and now lives on a ranch in western Virginia with her husband, also retired from the military. In return for her investment, Reeve receives not only joy and pride but also breeding rights. A top dog’s sperm is a valuable commodity and, thanks to cryogenics, is a gift that keeps on giving. Tanner had sired eight litters already, most the old-fashioned way, but he’s also had his little guys—his “pupsicles,” Dawn calls them—frozen.
That’s probably a good thing, because as much as Tanner loved the ladies, he wasn’t yet an accomplished lothario. “He’s really not the most successful stud dog,” Heather told me, and explained that he tends to think he’s tied with a female (“tied” being locked in the mating position, the only way a pregnancy can be naturally achieved) when he actually isn’t. It’s not that Tanner isn’t interested per se—if you want to get him excited, and I use the term relatively, because excited for a Berner is something like sleepy as compared to asleep—you stand to the side, hold some sort of food, and say in an animated voice, “Tanner, where’s your girlfriend?” This is a surefire way to get him to look wherever necessary. He will immediately perk up his ears and pay attention.
Second banana in the truck was Rita (Ch Cabinridge’s Mega Margarita), a mild-mannered but strong-willed four-year-old Chesapeake Bay retriever owned by Cindy Meyer, a school administrator from Allentown. As Tanner was to Heather, Rita was to Kevin: the dog atop his priority list. Meyer got her first Chessie as a pet with her late husband in the latter 1990s and, at the urging of some friends, stayed afterward at puppy kindergarten to participate in a handling class. “I told them, I’m not handling my dog. It’s a pet,” she explained. “Next thing I know, I’m in the ring showing my dog. Then it gets addictive.”
Rita entered her life in 2006, shortly after her first dog had died of cancer. Cindy handled Rita, then only a year and a half, for a friend at the breed’s National Specialty Show* and was surprised and thrilled when her friend offered to let her keep the dog. Over the next six months, Rita matured into a spectacular specimen, and when Cindy realized that her full-time job made it impossible to show her as widely as was necessary to find and win the majors she still needed for her championship, she decided to hire a handler. But only until the dog was finished.
Heather and Kevin worked hard for Rita, chasing points all the way to South Carolina, where they finally found a field large enough to win a major, and on the way home Heather called and asked, “Now what?” Cindy’s reply was, “What do you mean? I have a finished champion. I’m done.”
Heather told her that she and Kevin saw great potential in Rita and asked if Cindy would be willing to let them try her out against the breed’s specials. Cindy agreed, and Heather’s hunch was right. Within a few months, not only was Kevin winning breed competitions, he’d begun to win group placements. At that point, heading into 2008, Cindy decided she wanted to see her dog at Westminster. So Kevin entered Rita, and while she didn’t win any ribbons, she made the cut out of a large field, and once again on the drive home Heather called again with a familiar question: Now what?
Kevin felt he could make Rita a top-ten Chessie. Cindy thought he was crazy. But winning was fun, so she gave him permission to try. And Kevin fulfilled his prophecy. Rita was a top-ten dog for 2009. At which point it took very little pressure to keep Cindy hooked. She signed a contract for 2010, and Rita (and her crate full of well-chewed plush animals) was a fixture in the camp.
The rest of the menagerie varied by week but usually included an Akita named Trader, several Welsh corgis, a couple golden retrievers, a Rhodesian ridgeback, and numerous Bernese mountain dogs, not to mention their human mothers and fathers who make camp in the margins around the grooming tables, filling the day’s many lulls with conversation and gossip and snacks. A dog show is at least as social for the humans as it is for the dogs.
Every dog requires some grooming, so even though Heather and Kevin choose to work only with breeds on the low-maintenance side of the spectrum, Heather never sends a dog into the ring without at least a
little primping. Jack, having a fluffy coat and large expanses of white, requires about ten to fifteen minutes of hair spraying, blow drying, and chalking of his legs and feet.
Once she’s finished touching up a dog, Heather typically hands it off to the owner, if present, and asks him or her to await her arrival at ringside. This is because she is showing many dogs in a day—sometimes ten herself, with another ten on Kevin’s schedule. So once Jack was sufficiently sprayed and brushed and poufed, he was handed off to Kimberly, who took him to the ring—and that’s where I found her in White Plains. She was, like a proud mother, excited that I’d taken an interest in Jack, and she told me that she’d already thought of the headline for his first dog-magazine advertisement, should she decide to buy one to start building him a reputation as a show dog to watch.
“‘He’s Got Major Moves’—that’s the headline,” she said, smiling wide. “I wanted to call him that, Major—but he’s too frisky to be a Major.” When she chose Wyndstar’s Honorable Mention instead, Kerry didn’t immediately cotton to it, considering that this was an animal attached to high hopes. “Let’s hope he doesn’t live up to his name,” she said.
With only ten total dogs entered—evenly divided between males and females—it wasn’t enough for a major, not that Jack needed the points. He’d been finished since late 2009 and would have been finished sooner, Kimberly told me, if they hadn’t had to wait around for his final major win. He got his first thirteen points in two months, then waited another two for a major to arrive. Because dogs have to be registered three weeks in advance, which includes a nonrefundable fee, Kimberly “lost a lot of money” seeking out those final points. She just kept paying and withdrawing when the entry was revealed to be too small, because it’s considered bad etiquette for a dog awaiting his final major to show up and take points from newer dogs with owners who need them. There are dogs with fifty points that aren’t finished, she said. These would be rude dogs. (Or rude owners.)
Jack comes from good stock. His father, Honor—hence the “Honorable” in Jack’s name—was ranked the number-twelve Aussie in America after just three months of showing. And Jack is Honor’s first AKC champion. Though Kimberly was new to the game, she was excited about his chances but had no experience of her own on which to base expectations. “Heather thinks he could be one of the top Aussies in America,” she told me. “She wants to take him to Canada.” (To pursue his Canadian championship, which can often be accomplished in a week or less.)
Because Kimberly didn’t have the means to pay for a campaign, which involves weekly showing, she was working on Kerry—trying to talk Jack’s breeder into helping pay his way. And Kerry was considering the notion, depending on results. Wins, more than anything, would dictate her willingness to spend money to promote him.
Heather came by and took Jack into the ring, and, as she would at nearly every show going forward, Kimberly had butterflies, she told me.
Out in the ring, Heather kept Jack’s focus by waving a hand in front of his face. In that hand was a piece of liver (or something tasty), and this “baiting” is how you get a dog’s attention. Heather’s preferred bait is what she calls “cookies,” actually a leathery dog treat known as Purina Carvers. For certain dogs she uses hot dogs torn into chunks. Some handlers will store these treats in their own mouths to keep the dog’s focus up and to keep the treats wet and tasty. Heather, who is a meticulous woman, does not.
Truthfully, particularly attentive dogs don’t even need treats; handlers will sometimes use an empty hand formed into a fist, and Heather often does just that with Jack, who seems to get reward enough from the satisfaction of playing along. Many dogs, however, require food. With one mastiff Heather had to stuff several pockets full of liver or he’d lie down and quit on her in the middle of a judge’s evaluation.
Kimberly pointed at the row of dogs, all standing in the same precise manner—“foursquare” is one way to describe a good stack—facing the judge. She said that one unique thing about show dogs is that they don’t sit, and once you’re aware of this, it’s very obvious. If you look around the room at dogs waiting to show, they are almost invariably standing, because this is paramount among their skills and because even undercarriages are groomed, and lying down could muss a coat. To keep larger, lazier dogs from taking a load off while being groomed or waiting—Tanner was often guilty of this, the big lug—Heather sometimes puts an empty water can underneath their bellies.
Not being at all attuned to the minutiae of a dog show, I didn’t yet follow what was happening, and a few minutes after Jack and Heather walked into the ring, it was over. Jack had lost. “I don’t see it, but that’s okay,” Kimberly said, biting her lip a little after a red merle took the Best of Breed ribbon. The merle, she said, had “more bone,” and she lamented that this trend was gaining popularity among breeders and also judges. “But they’re herding dogs. They need to be agile and turn on a dime. When was the last time you saw a big, heavy herding dog?”
She wasn’t even a half year into showing, but, Kimberly said, “I’ve gotten to like winning. So it’s a little disappointing to get nothing in a small show like this.” She felt a bit better when the Aussie who beat Jack finished second in a strong Herding Group that included a number of 2009’s top dogs, including a Cardigan Welsh corgi, a border collie, and the eventual winner, a bearded collie named Roy who looked like an old wizard. “It’s the beginning of the year,” Kimberly said with a wry smile. “It’s a long year.”
* * *
BEARDED COLLIE
CHAPTER SIX
Heather and
Jack
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The best handler is invisible. If you don’t notice the handler, it’s a good thing.
—DAVID FREI
* * *
If money were no object and she could bear to part with her surrogate child so often, Kimberly could easily have Jack on the road fifty weeks a year, for a total well in excess of 150 days. The only two weeks a year when the dog-show world hits the pause button are Christmas and New Year’s; otherwise there’s always a place to anchor the RV and set about grooming the menagerie.
Kimberly is a woman of modest means. She’s comfortable enough to drive a late-model Subaru and watch TV on a large, wall-mounted flat-screen, but she doesn’t have the kind of money you’ll find behind the country’s top show dogs, which either have owners who can foot six-figure bills or are owned by multiple interested parties so that the dog is both an animal and an LLC.
When Kimberly writes a check, she feels it. But if she was going to show, she wanted to do it right, and that meant she needed professional help. In the upper echelons of the show world, the majority of dogs are handled by a professional. These handlers bear a whole list of responsibilities: Most basically, they prep the dogs for the ring and then guide them through the process so that they not only endure the experience of being scrutinized—of having their ears poked and their genitals fondled—but actually excel at it. Handlers also feed, bathe, and transport the dogs. In many cases they house them, too, at least for the days immediately before and after shows, but often full-time, as in the case of top dogs such as Sadie—aka Ch Roundtown Mercedes of Maryscot—the Scottish terrier who finished 2009 as the top dog in all the land. In Sadie’s case her “owners” served primarily as financial backers, and during her prime show years she lived exclusively with her Mexican-born handler, Gabriel Rangel, at his home in California. She didn’t return home to live with her owners until she was retired.
Many more dogs, however, are like Jack. They are serious competitors, ranked in their breeds, but they live more normal existences (relatively speaking, of course). Two nights before a show, Kimberly drives an hour north to drop Jack off with Heather and Kevin. The handling ranks are stacked with married couples such as Bill and Taffe McFadden, Michael and Michelle Scott, and Diego and Eve Garcia; it makes sense when you consider that their lifestyle is essentially itinerant. All these people have homes, but they rarely stay
in them. For the better part of a year, they live in motel rooms and RVs, some of them as plush as any you’ll find carting around famous pop stars.
Heather and Kevin were high-school sweethearts who broke up for a spell before reuniting in college at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Heather has been showing dogs since she was a teenager. Before that she showed horses and had the country’s top-ranked pony when she was ten. But being serious about horses was all-consuming, and Heather decided in the eighth grade that she wanted to have more in her life than school and the barn. “I wanted something else,” she says. So she gave up horses, and her mom bought her a dog.
That dog was Griff, a Bernese mountain dog from champion stock, and because she’d grown up showing horses, it seemed only natural for Heather to show her dog. A professional handler named Ross Petruzzo taught her the basics of grooming and handling, and Heather began to show Griff on weekends, enjoying success almost immediately. Griff finished his championship before he was a year old, and he and Heather became regulars in the Best of Breed ring.
Heather treated the new job like a sport, training in the evenings and on weekends and reading everything she could get her hands on. She apprenticed with Petruzzo, and also with Jennifer Schamp. At age sixteen she won Best in Breed at Westminster with Griff, becoming one of the youngest handlers ever to do such a thing. “I thought, ‘This is easy,’” Heather said. “I got really used to winning.”
The teenage Heather became a fixture at Pennsylvania dog shows, and busy handlers like Michelle Ostenmiller (now Michelle Scott, a two-time Westminster winner) and Carol Knox began to use her as a supplemental handler, to take dogs into the ring when they had conflicts, such as two Bernese mountain dogs competing in the same class on the same day. That led to some client work, and once she turned eighteen and was no longer eligible to compete in Junior Showmanship, Heather began to accept payment. Throughout college and then grad school, weekend handling jobs put spending money in her pocket.
