by Josh Dean
“The ex-pen is never an option!” Dawn howled, coining a phrase that should one day grace a T-shirt. She exhaled. “These are the things that make us look nuts!”
Kimberly had it easy, relatively speaking. Because while there’s only occasionally drama between rival owners of Australian shepherds, owners in many other breeds struggle to maintain even a modicum of congeniality. There’s inevitable resentment in losers and jealousy of winners, no matter the dog, but in the most highly competitive breeds the atmosphere can be downright nasty. You will rarely see, for instance, more than a couple of rottweiler owners heading out for drinks together at the end of a day. Of all the owners in Heather and Kevin’s camp, it was Cindy Meyer who had the hardest time. The Chesapeake Bay retriever isn’t a terribly popular or competitive conformation dog, but for whatever reason tensions run consistently high among the humans who love and show them, and Cindy had long since given up hope of having both a winning dog and a collection of good friends who share this highly specific interest.
This was clear on the second day in Edison, after Rita lost to a dog handled by her owner, a prominent breeder. “We didn’t lose to the dog,” Cindy hissed. “We lost to her.” Within seconds, though, she’d hugged her dog and moved on. Every loss stings, even if an owner tries to shrug it off, but Cindy had seen it all and, like Dawn, had acquired the ability to get over it quickly.
“Kim called me last week to ask me how I deal with it,” she told me. “I said, ‘Kim, get used to it. There’s always another day.’”
Like tomorrow.
Cindy thought she’d be done with dog shows by this point. Her plan for most of 2009 had been to retire Rita after Westminster in order to breed her, but her Best of Opposite was such a good result that, with some cajoling from Kevin (who loved Rita and her winning), Cindy had a change of heart. Dog shows, I was finding, seemed to be popular among humans in large part because they are addictive. There’s a very obvious element of the gambling psychology involved, wherein each ribbon won triggers the same reward center as does a major payoff at the blackjack table. Similarly, the drive to satiate this reward center overwhelms good sense and allows people to say the kinds of things gamblers are wont to say—for example, “Tomorrow’s the day I win for sure!”
Cindy had just bought a new stuffed toy to replace the red-and-green “baby” that Rita adored and had almost literally loved to death. She’d torn it open repeatedly, and the fact that it lived on to Edison was thanks entirely to Cindy’s heroic sewing.
“I am so in debt over this dog,” she said as we watched Rita chew on her new baby.
Nearby a young woman laughed loudly. “That’s all of us.”
“I was going to pull her,” Cindy explained. “Then the rankings came out.”
“Where are you?” the woman asked. Told that Rita was number three overall and number-one Chessie bitch in the country, the woman’s eyes lit up. “That’s good!”
“Good for them!” Cindy said with a smirk, nodding toward Kevin.
The tricky thing about Rita was that the dog was stuck in a bit of a cycle. Cindy wanted to breed her and knew that that window was closing fast, but Rita couldn’t go into heat until she was taken off a medication she’d been put on to prevent false pregnancies—a medication necessitated by her life on the road. You see, poor Rita had been plagued by false pregnancies, and they weren’t good for her psyche. It’s a wicked trick nature plays, letting a dog think she’s pregnant, to the degree that Rita was nesting on Cindy’s bed and then took to carrying around her “baby” as if it were a puppy when no real puppy arrived.
“That’s why she has that toy in her crate,” Cindy said, and my heart broke a little for her. “She got depressed. She’s five. I should have bred her by now.”
Jack was approaching his second birthday. He was now sexually mature. And he was starting to show it. After seeing how Shumba the Rhodesian ridgeback’s hormones were affecting him, Heather asked Kimberly to take Jack home at night rather than keep him in the trailer with the gang. Like any teenager experiencing the first flutters of sexuality, Jack wasn’t exactly in full control of his faculties.
This was quite apparent on the grooming table, which was frustratingly close to Shumba’s crate. Technically she was out of heat at this point, but even the dwindling effects of her reproductive status were still giving Jack fits. His gums tensed and seemed to vibrate, a phenomenon known as “chattering,” which indicates that he’s ready to service her, if necessary. (“That means ‘I’m here for you,’” Kevin said with a grin.) Jack picked up one paw after another, as if walking on hot sand, and his mouth curled up a little so that he looked to be smiling.
“He wants some of what he’s not getting,” Kimberly said.
Soon enough Jack would have his moment, but it was unlikely to be satisfying. A few days before the show, Kerry sent me an e-mail that said she was planning to breed “one of my nice bitches” to Jack. “I’m hoping for her to come in season in the next month or so.” Kerry wasn’t likely to ship this nice bitch out east and nobody wanted to pull Jack off the circuit to mate the old-fashioned way, so sometime soon Kerry and Kimberly would have to arrange to have a sample of Jack’s sperm extracted and shipped to California. No one was thrilled at the prospect, including Kimberly. “Kerry may be missing the excitement of seeing Jack win,” she told me. “But I’m going to miss the excitement of the birth of his first litter and watching the puppies grow. Hopefully, I can find an appropriate bitch around here so I can experience it, too.”
The logistics of canine lovemaking were a lesser concern at the moment, however, as Kimberly and Heather were butting heads more and more over Jack’s spot in the pecking order.
Once Tanner left for Europe, Heather wouldn’t have a ranked dog, and she was well aware that her reputation in part is based on her ability to win often. And when she surveyed her kennel in search of dogs with star potential, few stood out more than Jack.
The issue reached critical mass on the last day at Edison, when Kimberly and I were standing with Jack at ringside, mere minutes before he was to show.
She looked nervous, and I noted this.
“Nervous that I have no handler,” was her reply.
Due to slow judging, Heather was unlikely to make it in time, and despite the fact that she had vowed never to show Jack herself—and that she and Kerry had agreed it was better to scratch him than to have her do it—Kimberly strapped Jack’s number onto her arm with a rubber band and sighed. She approached the ring steward.
“Can you move me back?” she asked, meaning in the order of examination.
How far?
“To the end of the specials?” By doing this, Kimberly would buy herself time. With eight specials entered, her turn wouldn’t come for at least ten minutes, and as long as the judge hadn’t begun his hands-on examination of Jack, she could still pass the number off to Heather.
The steward conferred with the judge, who looked like a redder, rounder-faced Ed Begley Jr. He acceded, but not happily.
Out of the crowd appeared Rachel, a cute, freckly twelve-year-old apprentice who was assisting Heather for the weekend. She was nearly out of breath and managed to say, between gasps, “Jesse is going to start, and then Heather will take over.” Jesse was a young, good-looking handler whom none of us had ever seen before, and Kimberly handed Jack off to this strange man a little tentatively. She wasn’t happy. “I don’t want to stress out about my dog every weekend.”
Just in case, Kimberly gave Jesse a quick primer. Most important, she told him, is a firm hand. “‘Yes’ is a praise word. I use that more than ‘Good boy,’” she said. And because praise is positive reinforcement, a dog is happy to hear it, and when Jack is happy, he is bad (for dog shows). “We’re practicing baby talk at home so he doesn’t get so excited,” she said. “Because sometimes judges talk to them that way, and that will set him off. It’s a problem in the ring. Sometimes his back end starts going.”
I scanned the crowd ner
vously as Jesse led Jack into the ring, and I spied, in the distance, a flash of melon. It was Heather.
Hold on! I said, and Heather was nearly sprinting as she reached the ring, jumped into line, popped Jack’s number under her armband, and calmly began to trot him around the ring as if nothing had happened.
Kimberly was always silent at ringside, but she was especially stoic now. “Too much drama over my dog,” she muttered coldly. “I’d be surprised if he wins.”
And Jack did seem antsy. “See that?” said Dawn, who’d come over to show her support. “That little edge is what makes them show dogs. They’re not blah.”
“They’re a little bad,” Kimberly added. Or in Jack’s case a lot bad.
In my entirely unscientific sample of shows attended to date, I found that it was always a positive sign when Kimberly said this. And sure enough, despite Jack’s obvious jitters, the judge was giving him a good look. It was quite apparent he was going to choose either Jack or Striker, Jack’s old nemesis. In the end it was Jack.
Heather said whatever it is she says to Jack when he wins,* and he jumped up and kissed her, then jumped up again onto a chair near the entrance and almost knocked over the steward’s table.
Success has a funny way of assuaging troubles. When Heather handed Jack’s lead to Kimberly, both were all smiles. With the weekend’s success, Jack had solidified a spot in the top twenty rankings, and any thoughts of switching handlers had faded, at least for a while.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
And Now a Brief Interlude
Featuring the Perez Hilton
of Dog Shows
* * *
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog
—FRANZ KAFKA, “INVESTIGATIONS OF A DOG”
* * *
It’s a little unfair to compare Billy Wheeler of Memphis, Tennessee, to Perez Hilton of Los Angeles, California, but I can see why the latter is sometimes used as a reference point. While he’s not at all mean-spirited or even judgmental (he has, in fact, an explicit “no haters” policy), Wheeler’s blog, Dog Show Poop, is pretty much a must-read for America’s handlers, judges, and show-dog owners.*
When I reached him by phone at his Memphis home, it was just a few days after he’d celebrated his fortieth wedding anniversary. “Forty years in the dog-show game and forty years with the same woman,” Wheeler told me, his husky voice a little fatigued thanks to the weekend’s celebration at a local casino. In the background a bird squawked. That was Julio, his double yellow-headed Amazon parrot. “He likes to get in on the conversation. He imitates my wife and daughter to a tee.” Julio used to have unclipped wings and the run of the place, and each morning he’d wake up in his cage and fly upstairs to crawl into bed with the Wheelers. Then one day Mrs. Wheeler’s poodle attacked him, and he’s been caged ever since. Which is probably a good thing, since the Wheelers now have terriers, one of which has already shown an aptitude for killing birds outdoors.*
When he’s not blogging, Wheeler is often showing dogs himself. His local kennel club, in Memphis, is a very old one. He says it has disbanded and re-formed several times but that “there is solid documentation that they had the first dog show in the country.” His club, I discovered later, was the one that rose from the ground laid by our old friend P. H. Bryson, the 110-pound weakling who started this whole business in the first place. The show Wheeler was referring to was the one in which Bryson beat the doctor who saved his life.
Wheeler caught the show bug in 1968, at age nineteen, when he attended a show and saw Michele Leathers Billings—“one of the doyennes of the judging circles”—handling an Afghan hound named Gabe. “It was a very glamorous couple,” he recalled. “A beautiful woman with a beautiful dog. It hooked me.”
He and his wife skipped around the country a little, often showing Maltese, before settling in California, where they stayed for twenty-five years. There he bought his first terrier, a Sealyham,* and took him out to shows, where he found California to be a hotbed of top handlers. “I never got a single point,” he says. Not that this mattered. “I have no aspirations of winning. I just go for the company and human drama. What’s really cool about the sport is that it transcends social structure. You’ll be sitting there and talking to somebody and not realize they’re fabulously wealthy.”
Wheeler says that thanks to dogs he’s had many, many brushes with greatness, including lovely talks about Pekingese with Jackie Onassis and Liz Taylor, whom he calls “the most beautiful fat woman I’ve ever met.”
I had only mentioned Jack by his everyday name via e-mail, and with virtually no other details, but already Wheeler was keeping an eye on him. “Research is my game,” he said. “He’s a blue merle, right?” he asked rhetorically. “So he’s got those eyes that look right through you.”
Wheeler’s blog is famous for its nonstop coverage of show results and also for its rankings of the nation’s top dogs, updated weekly. Wheeler provides the rankings in two forms. One is the so-called traditional top ten and is uncolored by algorithm—it’s just a straight-up ranking of the most dogs defeated. (“There are couple things wrong with that,” he noted. “The person who shows at two hundred fifty shows a year is competing against the person who shows a hundred shows a year. Who has the better dog?”) The second ranking is his own and uses two factors: group placements and the number of Bests in Show won. But Wheeler has a background in mathematics and has further tweaked the ranking by weighting for the size of the show.
“There are a lot of technical issues behind how the placings work,” he said when I asked what it would take to get Jack onto this list. He said it would be “unlikely” that an Australian shepherd would make the top ten (at least at that particular point in time). This didn’t surprise me, even if I didn’t totally understand the reasons. Despite the fact that the Australian shepherd is an ascendant breed currently in vogue and is always one of the largest entries in a particular show, it does not win big awards often. In fact, as of mid-April, only one Best in Show in all the shows held to date had gone to an Aussie (and it wasn’t Beyoncé).
Wheeler thinks that there are two main factors working against the Aussie. One is that “the quality is not that good,” meaning the overall quality of the entries, not the quality of specific top dogs (such as Jack, or Beyoncé). This is because the breed is a popular family pet, and many of the exhibitors are showing pets for fun and not dogs bought expressly for showing. And the same would be true for other popular family dogs, such as Labs and goldens. The other hurdle for Aussies is that “a lot of the dogs are multiple titled.” What he means is that because the dogs are such tremendous athletes, their owners tend to enter them in other disciplines—herding, obedience, dock jumping, Frisbee, et cetera. And, says Wheeler, “If you want to be good in something, focus on it. Michael Jordan found out he couldn’t play baseball and basketball at the same time.”
When I asked Wheeler to name the most commonly rewarded dogs, his first response was, “Terriers, without a doubt.” And why terriers? “Terriers have the quintessential show personality,” he said. “I own a Cairn and a Scottie, and my wife just absolutely hates the fact that they will not listen to her. They do what they damn please. Unlike Dobermans or gun dogs, they’re bred to work by themselves. They see human interference as interfering with their jobs—to go out and kill something.” He was right. Terriers never look bored or distracted. They always look like they’re about to bite your ankles.
Wheeler asked me which dogs I thought won most. That was easy—and it was the same answer I’d have given if he’d asked me before I attended a single show: poodles. I’d since seen them win often and had observed the crowds that collected along the edges of poodle rings like metal shavings around a magnet.
My preconceived notion of dog shows was pretty common: that they were beauty contests that rewarded some weird and artificial concept of canine aesthetics that wasn’t at all representative of reality on the street. And the dog th
at most represented that faux beauty was the poodle, a dog with preposterous hair that can be fairly portrayed by a clown with a knack for making balloon animals. They were so silly-seeming that I never gave them a chance to be smart. (In truth they’re one of the cleverest breeds. Poodle proponents can stand near the front of the line of dog people who deserve my apologies.)
* * *
STANDARD POODLE
Wheeler was not surprised by my answer. “I had written early on in my blog something called ‘The Standard Poodle Dog-Show Cliché,’” he said. “That dog is really a dog show icon. It’s amazing year after year after year how many great ones you see.”
He was, quite quickly, developing a status as the very loud voice of reason among dog-show enthusiasts. Even though that was never his goal. “Five years ago I had a heart attack,” Wheeler said. “And I retired from my job. It was a long, slow recovery. My wife bought me the Scottie as a pet to help me through rehab. And after I recovered sufficiently I decided to get a show dog—something to help get me out of the house, to get me into the world.”
Wheeler said he wanted a bulldog but that he went out to a local show and ended up chatting with “this very elegant little southern woman who looked like she walked off the set of Designing Women. She had a Cairn terrier on a leash.” The woman told Wheeler that she was sitting on a litter of puppies sired by a son of the top-winning Cairn terrier of all time. “I jumped on it. For people to sell you a high-quality dog is very unusual.” (Kimberly, again, got very lucky with Jack.)
This was August 2008, and Wheeler thought he would start a blog to write about his puppy. He thought it would “just be your typical personal blog,” interesting to no one. Then he found himself mesmerized by that year’s race for America’s top dog—a race that was exceedingly close, especially between the top two, the giant schnauzer Ch Galilee’s Pure of Spirit (who finished the year with seventy-one BsIS and 117,954 dogs defeated), and the pointer, Ch Cookieland Seasyde Hollyberry (with ninety-six BISs and 117,199 dogs defeated).
