by Josh Dean
With degrees in both elementary education and special education, as well as a master’s in classroom technology, Heather worked as a schoolteacher, handling dogs on weekends and during the summer, but five years into a teaching career she enjoyed, she had a kind of epiphany: It was too much to handle both the kids and the dogs, and when it came down to it, she preferred the latter. “You can always get a teaching job,” Kevin, who was then a salesman for Pepsi, told her. “You should try this while you can.”
Being conscientious, Heather called her mother and stepfather at their vacation condo on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to break the news. “You paid for my education,” she told her stepfather. “I feel guilty telling you this, but I don’t want to teach anymore. I want to pursue my passion. I want to handle dogs—”
Her stepdad cut her off. “You can stop there,” he said. “Your education is your education. You’ll always have it. Your passion is something different. Follow your passion.”
This sounds like a convenient story for a book, but I heard it the same way from both Heather and her mom. And the whole lot of them look smart now. Heather’s handling business took off so precipitously that six months later Kevin, who loved dogs but had no interest in dog handling, quit his job at Pepsi to help out, meaning that Heather’s unconventional passion consumed them both in less than a year. The alternative, Heather explains, was to hire a full-time assistant and to accept that she and Kevin would be living separate lives, a prospect that seemed untenable. “I was going to be on the road all the time. If I didn’t have a husband who was into this, I couldn’t do it.”
Heather and Jack had an immediate and special bond that Kimberly attributes to a certain mysticism that good handlers possess; “It’s a kind of magic that Heather has,” she told me.
German dog trainers have a term to describe the ability of a dog to pick up on our mood. The word is Gefühlsinn, and it means, more or less, “a feeling for feelings.” The dog-show personality Pat Hastings, a retired handler who now judges and travels the world giving seminars, told me that it is absolutely true that the dog’s comfort level relates to the handler’s and that the lead is a kind of wire that transmits that energy from one animal to the other. A dog can feel his handler’s tension going down the lead and can also smell it, in the form of adrenaline. “When we are nervous, our dogs can sniff it on us,” she told me and said that, “one way to help counteract this is to carry breath mints and pop one when you walk into the ring.”*
Heather may be small, but dogs—even big ones—respect her. “It was always large dogs,” her mom, Sue Bremmer, told me. “She gravitated to large dogs, and large dogs took to her. As tiny as she is, they just know.” Sue recalls taking Heather to a weekend clinic put on by the handler George Alston. She remembers there being “at least a hundred people there,” along with Heather and her dog, Griff, who was still a puppy. Heather was given the clinic’s Best in Show award, and Alston approached Sue at the end and told her that “your daughter has the best hands I have ever seen on a child.” He told her that Heather could work for him anytime she wanted.
When you hire a top handler, what you’re really doing is paying to present your dog in the best manner possible. In Jack’s case a big part of that is keeping him from leaping up and sticking his nose in the judge’s ear. But there’s much more to presentation than that.
“The reason top handlers do the majority of the winning, particularly on circuits and at clusters, is because their dogs are usually well rested, in good weight, and feeling good physically and mentally,” Hastings told me. “They are eating, drinking, and eliminating as they should; they are not stressed from the heat.”
And Heather is as organized as they come. “Heather’s personality is a lot like mine: She’s quite emotional, quite demanding, and everything has to be a hundred percent perfect,” says her mom. “She might not win, but those dogs go in that ring looking immaculate, and both she and Kevin look picture perfect.” That is one thing that you can control, she said. “You and your dog have to look phenomenal. Beyond that, it’s one judge’s opinion.”
It’s an absolute certainty if you attend dog shows that you will hear owner-handlers complain that they have no chance, that in today’s game it’s all about professional handlers. Here’s how Tom Grabe, a former professional handler and now the publisher of the industry magazine Canine Chronicle, sees it. “If I was a bicycle racer and I rode my bike fifty miles a day every day and you went out on weekends and want to be a bike rider but have a job during the week, odds are, unless you’re incredibly talented, I’m probably going to beat you during the race. Pros are showing ten to thirty dogs three to four days a week. Owners can’t practice as much as professional handlers.” This is not illogical.
Presentation, then, is probably foremost. If your dog isn’t well fed, properly exercised, and groomed in a way that best accentuates his positives—and, if necessary, disguises any negatives—it won’t matter how well he moves or handles himself. If you hire the right handler, that part is never a worry. The second part, of course, is how well the dog plays along. And the reason that handling, done well, is so effective is that dogs are genetically attuned to observe us. Provided we give them the right messages, they want to comply.
Dogs can, better than any other species, respond to human gestures. Recent research has shown that they are born knowing how to read our faces. Dogs display something called “left-gaze bias,” meaning that—when watching humans—they look to the right side of our face, which psychologists have proved to be the side that best reveals our true intentions. Wolves do not seem to do this, nor do dogs do it to other dogs, so the best theory is that dogs have learned, by living at our side for thousands of years, how to read us.
Dogs can also read and respond to head and arm cues, nods, and even quick glances of our eyes—something neither chimpanzees nor three-year-old kids are very adept at. Brian Ware, a researcher at Harvard, discovered that dogs could interpret fairly subtle signals, even a glance, indicating the location of hidden food four times better than monkeys can and twice as accurately as young children. “When faced with a manipulation task that they can’t solve,” reports the dog-cognition guru Stanley Coren, they “will stop, look at the face of the person with them, and try to discover clues as to what to do from the person’s actions.” Wolves, notably, do not do this.
The psychologist Alexandra Horowitz, the bestselling author of Inside of a Dog and one of the world’s foremost authorities on dog cognition, says that dogs are inherently adaptable to different situations, “especially if you make them encounter those situations when they’re young.” She says that early exposure to dog shows certainly benefits a potential show dog—and the AKC stages puppy shows to give experience to both human and dog newbies—but that a well-adjusted dog from a loving home “is just going to be adaptable to all situations as long as there’s the constant of a person there. That’s the interaction which is salient to them.”
A dog wants to respond to and please you, the constant, Horowitz says. But for this to work well, “you have to become more skilled in clearly telling your dog what you expect of [him].” For instance, “‘You’re standing still now while I’m blow-drying your hair.’ Or, ‘You stand with me and then run by my side, and here’s the little bit of food that will remind you of that.’ If you’re clear about it, they will listen.” The problem, she says, is that “most owners are not clear about what they tell their dogs,” and the result is that “we feel like the dog’s behavior is all over the goddamn place.” The fault is ours, “because we’re just not explicit with them with what we want them to do. They’re very responsive if you’re explicit.”
What you’re buying in a handler is an ability to be explicit in a way that gets through to dogs. An effective handler, she says, is one who doesn’t give unnecessary cues. “They give consistent cues—cues that are quickly timed for behavior so that behavior happens and it’s the positive behavior. You reinforce it quickly
. Dogs are on that—if you give them the opportunity to listen to you, they will.”
This isn’t just about the dog’s ability to understand you; it also means being able to read the dog’s signals. Handlers have an “ability to see the dog’s behaviors” in a way we regular pet owners probably don’t—which means to “be so observant of your dog that you’re seeing when a behavior starts, a behavior that you desire to reinforce or a behavior that you want to discourage.” The vast majority of us, she says, are very slow at reacting to our dogs. “We’re kind of clumsy compared to the dog’s pace of acting.”
One of Horowitz’s favorite areas of study is canine play. She will videotape two dogs playing and then meticulously watch and log every cue and movement—in such detail that twenty seconds of video take six hours to analyze. In a single minute of dog play, she says, “there are thousands of little things happening”—starts and stops and warnings and signals and behaviors—most of which we never pick up on. Horowitz has never studied handlers, but she’s pretty sure the good ones are the ones who can pick up on nuances in posture and signals and other behaviors so that “they start seeing when behaviors start and stop and they’ll be on it and will be able to reinforce it and catch the behaviors they want and discourage the behaviors they don’t.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fantastically Rich People
Do the Darnedest Things:
A Brief History of Dog Shows
* * *
So enthusiastic is the average fancier today over the beauty and the wonder of his own dog that he sees him for the most part as the exponent of a breed unique among all other breeds; to him, other breeds may not even exist.
—JOSEPHINE Z. RINE, MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY DOG WRITER
* * *
Dog shows first appeared on the scene in England during the Victorian era, and you can still see that period’s patrician influence in the floppy hats and natty attire that the sport’s old guard love to trot out for big events like Westminster. The first dog show ever held seems to have occurred on June 28, 1859, when a group of hunters gathered in the town of Newcastle upon Tyne and picked over sixty dogs from just two classes: pointers and setters. It wasn’t that they were being choosy; these were just the only dogs anyone involved owned at the time. Winners were given guns in lieu of trophies.
A second show was held in November of that year in the town of Birmingham, and its organizers expanded the field by a full one-third, tossing spaniels into the mix. A year later the Birmingham show welcomed hounds for the first time, and we were off and running. The National Dog Show Birmingham, as it was called, survives to this day, with far more company for those hounds and spaniels. It is considered to be the world’s oldest dog show and is held every year in May at the Staffordshire County show ground with a field that typically features more than ten thousand dogs. More than three times the size of Westminster.
In those early days, there weren’t really standards for the breeds; the dogs’ owners probably couldn’t have told you exactly what breed their animals were, because no one asked such questions. He was, for instance, probably just a red-colored foxhunting hound, and since the progenitors of shows were hunters, the real measure of that dog was how well he performed at his particular job.
Things began to formalize in 1874, upon publication of the first Kennel Club stud book, which included a code of rules that dictated how a dog show should be conducted, as well as a calendar of events that listed a full year’s worth of shows—all two of them.
Here in the United States, we were too busy spearing each other with bayonets to make time for something as frivolous as selecting the finest dogs, so it wasn’t until the end of the Civil War that things got moving. And we owe it all to Mr. P. H. Bryson, a furniture dealer from Memphis, Tennessee,* credited in a history of the Memphis Kennel Club as “the First Advocate of Dog Shows in America” (their caps, not mine). Like most able-bodied men of his day, Bryson served in the war, and he survived his service, but just barely. He was so badly wounded that when army doctors discharged him from a military hospital, it was to “go home to die so that he might have a decent burial.” Once home, Bryson went to see his family doctor, the honorable D. D. Saunders, and when the doctor got a look at the skeletal presence in his office, a 110-pound weakling who “could not walk a hundred yards without pausing to rest,” he told Bryson his only hope of carrying on was to try to rebuild his strength, and he prescribed exercise—in particular hunting, with the help and companionship of a bird dog.
Bryson went out and got himself a gun and a dog, a “bobbed-tail Pointer,” and commenced killing birds. The exercise, and the dog, saved his life. His vigor returned, and he put on a hundred pounds. Bryson and his brother would move on to setters, importing top specimens from England, and founded the Bryson Setter Kennels. But hunting and breeding weren’t enough for old P. H. Bryson. He wanted to show his dogs. Bryson began a campaign to get the sport off the ground, lobbying via a series of articles in the magazine Turf, Field & Farm, which despite its name was not a periodical about sod. Apparently people were reading, because before the Bryson brothers could even put together their own show, the Illinois State Sportsmen Association beat them to it, staging America’s first-ever dog show, in Chicago, on June 4, 1874. It featured just twenty-one dogs, all of them setters and pointers.
Lacking any template or rules, organizers were making things up as they went along. Instead of a winner, the three judges merely pronounced critiques of the dogs presented. All the dogs were complimented by the judging panel, but the best review seemed to go to Exhibit 5, J. H. Whitman’s Frank and Joe—a pair of three-year-old “black and steel mixed Setters, bred by Hilliard, from imported Gordon Setters.” The judges’ report proclaimed that “the committee, among so many well appearing dogs, find it hard to make an award, but incline to the opinion that this pair of animals are entitled to the highest marks of credit as the best pair of Setters exhibited.” It wasn’t pithy, but it was kindly received.
America’s second dog show was to be held a few weeks later, in Oswego, New York, but this one didn’t go off quite so well. “As there was no competition, there being but two dogs and one bitch entered, the committee deemed it advisable to return the entrance money to the exhibitors, Mr. A. L. Sherwood and N. W. Nutting,” said a report. (Though it should be noted that “the committee desires to express the highest commendation of Mr. Sherwood’s orange and white pair of Setters,” which I guess were the two dogs that entered.)
A third, better-attended show took place in October in Mineola, on Long Island, and that one at least aspired to be organized. It was carried out according to English Kennel Club rules, and dogs were judged according to four categories: Irish setters, Gordon setters, “Setters of Any Breed,”* and pointers.
The Bryson brothers, then, would stand fourth in the historical record. On October 8, 1874, the two, along with old Dr. Saunders, staged a Field Trial and Bench Show in Memphis that would, for what is believed to be the first time in America, present a Best in Show award—pitting the Best Pointer against the Best Setter. And who should qualify to compete in the final two but Mr. P. H. Bryson, with his setter, Maud, and May, the pointer of Dr. Saunders, the physician who told him to get a dog in the first place. After much deliberation the judge made the difficult decision and let the record state that the first Best in Show in American history was awarded to P. H. Bryson, the man who’d started the whole dog-show conversation in the first place, by a hair over the doctor who’d saved his life by prescribing a dog.
America’s oldest surviving show happens to be its most famous: the Westminster Kennel Club show, so named because it was born at the bar of the Westminster Hotel in 1877. Originally called the “First Annual New York Bench Show* of Dogs,” it was open only to sporting dogs but is now a juggernaut broadcast live over two nights on national TV (the only show to get such treatment) and is the second-oldest continuously held sporting event in America, after the Kentucky Derby, which predates
it by a single year. Among the top attractions of that debut show were two staghounds from a pack owned by (the then-dead) General George Custer, two deerhounds bred by Queen Victoria of England (reported to be worth fifty thousand dollars each), and a two-legged dog said to be “a veritable biped, and withal possessing almost human intelligence.” It was the place to be for New Yorkers on the scene. A New York Times story reported that “the gentlemen who served as ticket sellers could not make change fast enough to suit the impatience of the throng that was continually clamoring for admittance.”
Just a year later, benched dog shows had become such a hit that Field & Stream wrote the following: “We doubt if even the ‘Bench Show of Intellect,’ suggested by The World, and in which it is proposed to exhibit all classes of poets and literary people in general, would call forth more interested, aristocratic, or cultured throngs than the dog show audiences.” And then, a year later, concern for dog shows’ spread prompted this in the same magazine: “We think there are too many Bench Shows. This opinion is not alone our own, but is pretty generally expressed by the public. We believe that during the year there should be held only two great shows in the country, and no more.” The proliferation of shows, the editors felt, could only diminish the luster of existing events.
Field & Stream’s plea fell on deaf ears, and the dog-show juggernaut rolled on. The American Kennel Club was formed in 1884, in Philadelphia, when the heads of twelve distinct clubs gathered with the goal of creating a “club of clubs” to rule them all. A month later they met again in New York City to write a constitution and bylaws and formally adopted a reliable “studbook” that set breed standards. It took a while for the AKC to inculcate the nation’s dog fanciers with formalized rules and standards for conformation, but by 1909 the organization had created the fifteen-point requirement for achieving a dog’s championship (and even then an exhibitor needed those points to come from at least three judges). By 1920 the AKC was officially sanctioning shows, and in 1924 the two existing groups—Sporting and Non-Sporting—were split into five: Sporting (which included hounds), Terrier, Toy, Non-Sporting, and Working (which included herding). That same year 154 conformation shows were held across America, up from 11 in 1884, the year the AKC was founded.
