by Josh Dean
The two most intimate parts of the exam are the inspection of the teeth and, in the case of male dogs, the testicles. Most breeds have very specific requirements for teeth, as well as the depth of the jaw and the way the jaw fits into the neck. Testicles are gently squeezed for a very simple reason: A dog with one nut or none can’t breed, and breeding is the whole point.
Once all the visual and tactile information has been downloaded, the judge turns to movement. Which, Helen Lee Jones says, is meant to answer this question: “Did your evaluation and the information it gave you really fit with the way that dog moves?” And if you’re still not sure, she says, “move it again and find out.”
An honest judge knows he can’t be perfect—and, more than that, that no dog is either. Ed Bivins, a veteran Best in Show judge, described judging as “an articulation process,” meaning that a judge should “elevate those things about which you feel most positive. You take the dog that possesses the greater number of positive characteristics to the higher degree and elevate him to the first position.”
Despite the fact that conformation shows were created to help single out those dogs most capable of functioning properly—doing their “jobs”—a constant and underlying tension has arisen between showing and working. True working-dog enthusiasts, those who breed and own dogs specifically to perform jobs, think that the nature of judging dogs in the ring creates a beauty pageant, even though it’s not supposed to. People are people, and they are drawn to what’s most attractive, even it’s not correct to the ideal of the standard. In the case of the Aussie, this tension is most apparent in the matter of movement.
We know that the Australian shepherd is a “movement breed”—it is the dog’s mantra (or one of them)—and that means that how a dog moves is paramount over how it looks. But it’s actually more complicated than that.
A major bugaboo for the Hartnagles—a family that literally wrote the book(s) as well as the standard on the breed—is that the way the Aussie’s movement is judged in the ring isn’t even proper. Show dogs are bred for “reach” and judged in what is called a “two-beat trot,” an easy, effortless-looking run that is smooth and flow-y and pretty to look at. The correct terminology for this movement is “at the trot,” a phrase that never stops sounding awkward.
To create the flowing trot movement, breeders strive for a structure that includes what Jeanne Joy Hartnagle (using the lingo coined by her father, borrowing from the automotive industry) calls the “trotting drivetrain.” The particulars of this involve angles I never fully understood, but the point, Jeanne Joy says, is that “dogs with this trotting drivetrain—show dogs—take a half-stride more to get into a gallop.”
Now, that would seem to be the very definition of nit-picking but consider that a true working Aussie jogs, sprints, jumps, and makes quick cuts over varied terrain in close proximity to hooves and horns and a half-step could be the difference between a corralled sheep and an escapee, or worse—a hoof to the head or one that is dodged. “That really is a huge, huge difference,” she told me. “A lot of people showing don’t understand that.”
Hartnagle pointed out that a working Australian shepherd should instead have “a sprinting drivetrain.” The fault, she says, comes from McDowell Lyon, author of the 1950 movement and structure bible “The Dog in Action.” Lyon, whose book is still revered, strongly “believed that a dog with a long-striding trot could work all day long.” He thought this was the most efficient movement.
“Herding dogs are different,” Hartnagle explains. They have to follow stock—and a single dog can be responsible for 2,000 head of sheep. A dog needs to round-up, gather, settle, and then direct those sheep wherever they’re needed and to do this requires a variety of movements. “Sometimes trotting, sometimes walking,” Hartnagle says. “If something breaks away the dog has to be able to sprint and turn on a dime, chase them through arroyos. That dog has to be able to change gaits”—and the most effective way to do that is to have “a sprinting structure. But in show ring it’s free-flowing trot, which is pleasing to the eye.”
If technical detail helps you picture this, Jeanne Joy Hartnagle explains that “the greater angulation of the trotting drivetrain produces fewer strides per 100 feet than the sprinting drivetrain does at the same gait.” Why? “Because the trotting dog spends more time in the air due to his longer stride which produces a slower reaction time. The sprinter, with his shorter stride, is more agile.”
The sum total of misunderstanding this has changed the breed, she said. “Now you see Australian shepherds that don’t move anything at all like the original dogs.”
By the time I finished chatting with Jeanne Joy Hartnagle I was more convinced than ever that the job of judge is not only impossibly subjective, it’s nearly impossible to do correctly. Which, I think, is why the people who’ve been exhibiting dogs the longest are the least fazed by the ups and downs and seemingly inexplicable wins and losses.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Edison
* * *
The five-second rule does not apply at dog shows.
—DAWN COX, AFTER SOMEONE DROPPED A DORITO ON THE FLOOR AT EDISON AND FOR A SECOND CONSIDERED EATING IT
* * *
For the final weekend of March, Heather and Kevin’s carnival decamped for Edison, New Jersey, home of the New Jersey Exposition Center. In the pantheon of depressing convention centers, the Expo Center is certainly formidable. Located several miles into a complex consisting exclusively of industrial and office-park buildings, it looks like the fulfillment center for curtain rods or terra-cotta pots or any other anodyne product you might purchase from QVC, and it’s tucked among other buildings even less aesthetically appealing, if that’s possible.
On the inside . . . well, it still looks like a fulfillment center—one that pulled up stakes and left in the middle of the night. The NJEC has concrete floors, concrete walls, and an industrial ceiling of exposed beams and ducts painted black. On this particular occasion, it also smelled like shit, literally. But that wasn’t the building’s fault. It was the work of 2,069 dogs in 154 breeds, plus 4 entered in the Miscellaneous category, a catchall for provisional breeds not yet officially accepted by the AKC.
I found Kimberly outside Ring 5, where Jack would soon show, and she was fretting. “I’m having handler issues,” she stage-whispered. “We need to talk later.”
It was a typically large group of Aussies, numbering twenty-three, including Striker, the red merle who was becoming a consistent winner himself, and a young black tri female named Aster, who had beaten Jack in a Herding Dog specialty show held the night before and would turn out to be a top-five dog by year’s end. “She’s a real nice bitch,” Kimberly said. “I would breed Jack to her, and I’m picky.”
As was often the case, Aussies made up one of biggest entries in the show, trailing only goldens and Rhodies. To give some sense of how dramatically you can skew your odds by simple breed choice, consider the four breeds showing in the ring after the Aussies: Pyrenees shepherds, Norwegian buhunds, Beaucerons, and the Xoloitzcuintli,* a bizarre, hairless Mexican breed that had only provisional status with the AKC.*
At Edison there was just a single dog entered in each of these four breeds, meaning that unless these dogs were to show up lame, or fall asleep, or maul the judge, they were guaranteed passage into the Herding Group. To do the same, Jack would have to beat twenty-two dogs. The flip side is that your Beauceron better be some kind of specimen to even merit consideration for group placement.
* * *
XOLO
Like many of the best all-breed handlers, who find themselves in demand precisely because they are among the best, Heather and Kevin were always scrambling from ring to ring, handing off one dog so that they could dash to show another. And in Edison the schedule wasn’t looking good for Jack. “I think there’s a conflict,” Kimberly said coldly, meaning that Heather might not make it in time and had dispatched Kevin to take Jack just in case. The thing was, if delays were to a
rise, Kevin would have a conflict himself, and if that were to happen, Kimberly would either have to show Jack herself or recruit another handler to take him as a favor.
The only way for her to ensure Heather as handler was to sign on for a full-year contract, which would put Jack just behind Tanner on Heather’s depth chart, but considering the realities of her finances, that wasn’t actually an option. If Kimberly wanted Heather to handle Jack, stress and worry were going to be part of the package. Her choices were either to deal with that or not.
These were the sorts of thoughts bouncing around her head when, at the eleventh hour, Heather came fast-walking down the aisle between rings, wearing a melon-colored suit that (sort of) matched Kevin’s orange tie—there seemed to be no limit to the colors in their complementary wardrobes—grabbed the reins from him, and prepared to take Jack in front of a stern-looking woman with white hair, wearing a brown suit and kerchief.
Jack, having passed from one boss to another and, in Kimberly’s view, not spending enough time at ringside getting his game face on, looked a little antsy out there. As the dogs and handlers trotted around the ring, he was fidgety and pulling in close to Heather’s legs so that he was practically head-butting her knee. “He’s a noodge,” Kimberly said. “She hates when he does that.”
As the Aussies free-stacked, Heather tore a chunk from the limp hot dog strapped to her arm with a rubber band and dangled it in front of Jack’s nose. Considering that he isn’t a dog who needs food to be focused, the act was telling. She was concerned with his concentration. Once in place, however, he didn’t budge. And by the time the judge arrived at his side, the nervousness was gone. He looked attentive.
After the judge moved on, Heather motioned for a tissue. “I don’t know if it’s for his mouth, his butt, or her nose,” Kimberly said, and then Heather took the tissue and blew her nose and the mystery was solved.
Jack looked good, but the judge picked Striker, who to my eye looked a little bulky.
“I thought he showed great,” Kimberly said to Heather, who agreed.
“You did good, Jack,” she said, and leaned in for a kiss that was enthusiastically delivered.
“Now he just needs to start winning,” Kimberly said.
Elsewhere, Kevin was out at Ring 6 with Tico, a Tibetan terrier. Sometimes called “the Holy Dog of Tibet,” the Tibetan terrier was bred to work in tandem with the gigantic Tibetan mastiffs, and if the two breeds were to star in a buddy cop movie, it would play the role of the comedian and would probably be voiced by Chris Tucker. Basically its job was to be alert and bark, something it does well; that bark served as a signal to the mastiffs, which are bigger and lazier and prefer to lie around sleeping until there’s a person to attack rather than patrol and look for problems on their own. Once the terrier barked, the mastiff would awake, yawn, and take care of business, while the terrier backed off and watched safely out of range of ninja swords.
Tico was a semiregular of Kevin’s. He wasn’t on a monthly plan, but I’d seen him around quite a bit lately. This afternoon he stood vigilant near the table at Ring 6, home to one of my favorite new dog-show regulars: the Candy Lady. The Candy Lady is Dottie Davis, an elderly woman with a warm and pleasant visage who serves as a ring steward, meaning she keeps order for the judge, calling out entries and breed types from a sheet of paper with the help of a pair of glasses that dangle from a chain around her neck.
“Everyone loves Dottie,” Kevin said. “She loves dogs and shows and has been in dogs for like fifty years.”
And her candy is for anyone?
“For exhibitors only,” he said, and grabbed a piece. “But you can have some.”
One thing the Candy Lady does not offer is dog treats. There were plenty elsewhere in the room, though—for instance, in the pocket of every handler in the house—but the real mother lode of dog treats was found at a kiosk known as Best Puppies on Earth. BPOE is a one-stop shop for dog goods. It has chains and leads and bowls and beds and rugs and a diverse inventory of clothing that includes your standard raincoats and sweaters but also tutus and prom dresses (mostly in pink) with feathers and satin and sequins. There are infant-style onesies, quilted sleepers, vests, and camo jackets. (And all the most outrageous stuff seems to be made by Cha-Cha Couture, a brand whose slogan is hardly a match for its goods: “Fashion & Beds for Pets.”)
BPOE has a human-high wall of baskets and bins filled with animal parts dried for canine consumption: duck trachea (which looks like a ribbed straw and comes three for $1.00), duck feet (also three for $1.00), elk bones ($6.00, or two for $11.00), beef kneecaps ($2.00), pig ears ($1.50), smoked hoofs ($1.25, and isn’t it “hooves”?), bacon-wrapped beef ribs ($3.00), beef knuckle bone: ($5.00), Achilles tendons (species not specified, $3.00), buffalo knuckles (appropriately gigantic, $5.00), and pork jerky bone ($3.50). It would be a disservice to the show’s canine-general-store competitor White Dog Bone to suggest that BPOE’s treat wall is any larger or more thorough. It is not. The only difference as far as I can tell is that White Dog Bone uses slightly cutesier nomenclature—for example, Porky Bone ($2.25) and Meaty Knuckle ($3.50). The alpha treat at WDB is the fourteen-inch Monster Femur (from a cow), which costs $9.00 and looks like something you’d find on Fred Flintstone’s plate at the dinosaur steakhouse.
One major event was about to affect the team. Dawn and Georgeann had decided to send Tanner off to Europe, to spend the summer breeding with top Bernese mountain dogs on the Continent as well as to compete for championships in various countries under the care and handling of a Norwegian friend. His summer would culminate with an appearance at the World Dog Show, to be held in Copenhagen in August. I was going to miss the old galoot, who was relentlessly happy and utterly dominant in his breed ring despite the fact that he mostly looked like he was just out for a stroll. But I wouldn’t miss him as much as Heather, who’d be losing her favorite dog.
Heather and Kevin wouldn’t be lacking Berners in Tanner’s absence. Georgeann had contracted to keep a dog out all year, and Dawn was experimenting with one or two of her own, including Echo, a giant young male who was very sweet but also quite dumb and had become the house outcast. Everyone in her house, Dawn said, hated him. “My husband says, ‘Tanner is number one. Echo is number zero.’ The other day he came in with this sad face and he reeked of cat pee,” she told me. “I said, ‘Echo what did you do?’ And he just has this look—it turns out the cat peed on him. He’s like, ‘Nobody likes me; even the cat peed on me.’ That’s the ultimate insult.”
I’d also miss Tanner because of Dawn, who was planning to enjoy some rare weekends away from the dog shows with her husband, Newell (who loves Tanner and sometimes comes to shows, even though it’s not really his world),* while her favorite dog was off on a European vacation. Dawn is the kind of person who overpowers any conversation and who always has the right amount of perspective, allowing her to step back and observe that this world to which she’s devoted a major portion of her life is sometimes, if not often, ridiculous. You can count on her for a good story. And in Edison she had a doozy.
We were discussing the matter of a recent controversy involving Trader, a top Akita handled by Kevin who’d recently been given a ban for allegedly attempting to bite a judge. Kevin swore that the judge misinterpreted the situation and that Trader did not attempt to bite anyone, but the judge reported the action and Trader was at least temporarily banned from competition.
The owners in Heather and Kevin’s camp tended to believe Kevin, an honest guy of great integrity, and the talk of politics led Dawn to share an experience we’d somehow all missed back in York. As part of her duties as a board member for the York Kennel Club, Dawn had to sit on a panel adjudicating any violations of rules or decorum, and on the show’s second day, Dawn said, she and her fellow board members had to mete out some punishment of their own. They actually kicked a handler out of the show—because this grown woman had decided to relieve herself in the ex-pen.*
It seems that this owner
of a field spaniel had a sudden and uncontrollable urge to pee just at the moment when her dog was scheduled to enter the ring with a chance to earn its final, elusive major. The restrooms were occupied, so this owner, almost certainly having spent too much time in the company of dogs, ducked into one of those sawdust-lined, fenced enclosures and dropped her pants.
Someone reported the incident to someone else, who reported it to an AKC official, who said it was the first time in all his years he’d ever heard of such a thing happening. He reported it to Dawn and the board, and their reaction was equal parts shock and disgust. “What the hell were you thinking?” Dawn said she asked the woman during an impromptu hearing called to address the situation.
I had only two options, the lady told her: to pee myself or pee in the ex-pen.
“I said, ‘Stop—that is not an option. You had thirty-two options, and that’s not one of them,” Dawn recounted, her voice rising. “The other one also isn’t really an option either.’ I’m basically yelling, and the chairman says to me, ‘Aren’t you being a little harsh?’ And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? NO! This woman peed in the freaking ex-pen.”
And not just any ex-pen. It was the one for puppies, which has a short door intended to keep out larger dogs. The woman, Dawn said, had to crunch into a ball and crawl to get in, and then—to add to the indignity—she got stuck on the way out. Within a few minutes of her ungainly exit, someone had hung a sign that said DOGS ONLY.
