by Josh Dean
This interest began to show up in his prose, and slowly but surely the race itself became the blog’s focus. And suddenly the handlers of top-ten dogs were sending in photos and updates and asking Wheeler to post the standings. He did this, more regularly than any other Web site, and also began his own rankings, including a feature called “Dogs2Watch” that highlighted up-and-coming dogs. By the time Westminster rolled around, Dog Show Poop was a phenomenon. He hosted a “Garden Party” during that event, and twenty-five thousand participants ambled through the chat room, chewing over the show in real time.
Today Wheeler devotes more than eight hours a day on weekends and Mondays reporting on every all-breed show in the United States: “about fifteen hundred a year.” His in-box overflows with photos and tips. Just the day before we talked, he said, at one of the big shows, “I had a lady standing at ringside giving me results by cell phone as I was typing. I broke the story on the president’s dog six weeks before anyone else. They made the announcement in April; I broke the story in February.”
How did he know about Bo? “I had my contacts.”
According to Wheeler, some in the Portuguese water dog community tried to stop the sale of the First Puppy to the Obamas. “They did not want the president to have a Portuguese water dog. It’s like the Westminster effect—once the president has one, everyone tries to buy one. And there are a lot of negative aspects to that. But I wrote to a board member of the Portuguese Water Dog Club of America and said, ‘He can run the free world and not own one of your dogs? He has a six-acre lawn.’”*
And it’s all a labor of love. Wheeler estimated that he’d made “no more than seventy dollars” on the few micro-ads he’s accepted. People often offer to pay him for placement of their dogs, and Dog Show Poop could easily become a revenue generator simply by taking the sorts of ads that pack the main industry magazines like Dog News, but he won’t do that. He cares about his objectivity. He is the rare—perhaps the only—blogger with a strict moral compass. And that’s because he just really loves dog shows.
“The sport is dying,” he said, and that surprised me. A recurring theme of his editorializing, he told me, was a focus on what he calls “endangered species; the British Kennel Club calls them breeds at risk. I owned a Sealyham terrier once. There are fifteen thousand polar bears in Canada, and there are not five hundred Sealyham terriers in the world. And you can’t have a polar bear sleep on the end of your bed.” I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison, but I suppose the point is taken. While breed popularity ebbs and flows from year to year, some breeds have fallen drastically out of favor and are in danger of disappearing entirely. Only breeders, reacting to demand, can save them.
“The rarest dog in the AKC registry is the American foxhound,” Wheeler says. “That’s a breed developed by George Washington.” He pauses a moment for the thought to sink in.* “Do you want to be responsible for losing that iconic American symbol?” Wheeler said that more than a third of the 160-plus recognized breeds are at risk and could very easily disappear over five years.
And helping to stall that slide is one of his obsessions. “When the AKC published its top ten most popular breeds list last year, I published the bottom ten and went through each one and said, ‘How come people don’t own these?’” Just to return to the one he knows best, he marveled, “I don’t know why people don’t own Sealyham terriers. They’ve won Best in Show at Westminster three times. Alfred Hitchcock had one.
“My point is that the game is getting more and more difficult. It’s expensive even at the entry level. Just gas—you have to drive around the country to shows. And from the get-go, the average exhibitor only stays in game for five years.
“Honestly, I try to preach this whole thing of balance. There are things in life other than dog shows. When people complain to me about politics, I say, ‘You are taking this shit way too seriously. This is not life. This is a dog show.’”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Campaign:
I’ll Take Thirty-four Consecutive Back
Covers of Dog News, Please
* * *
Of course we’ve evolved. We’ve made it a big business. It’s a multimillion- dollar business.
—SUE VROOM, AKC
* * *
For Jack to succeed on a national level, to rise to a point where he is among the handful of dogs that judges immediately look to when Aussies assemble in a major show ring, many things would need to happen. Foremost among these, he must win. That part was going pretty well so far. But winning isn’t as simple as just being the best dog on a given day. A successful show-dog career is built on the smart decisions of his handler and to a large degree on the depth of his owner’s pockets.
When an owner and a handler begin a dog’s “campaign,” which is what you call a pursuit of titles with the goal of a national ranking in both breed and group, they must spend money—toward travel expenses and entry fees, obviously, but also toward advertising the dog.
A show-dog advertisement is similar to those “For Your Consideration” Academy Awards ads that the studios buy for films they deem Oscar-worthy. These films are said to be “campaigned,” just as dogs are, and I suppose both ideas borrow from politics. You place a flattering photo or two against a colorful background, make a brief and compelling pitch for why the film/candidate/dog is worth your consideration, and top it off with some witty or otherwise memorable slogans. You then place those ads in the highest-profile space you can afford; for a studio that might be the New York Times. For a dog it’s Dog News or the Canine Chronicle—and the more money you’re willing to spend, the more desirable the placement you’ll receive, right up to and including the front cover.
The best of these ads, for the country’s top-ranked dogs, are lushly photographed and well-designed spreads—two pages of full color with beautiful photos and artful typography positioned prominently in the magazines. Jack’s first ad, which appeared in the April issue of the Canine Chronicle, was a little more modest and low-fi and fell more in the middle of the magazines. To use more popular magazines as a reference point, it’s the sort of real estate where you might find the ads for Pam cooking spray as opposed to TAG Heuer watches.
Seeing as how Jack comes from modest means, with owners who have very little if any expendable income, he was only able to procure a slot in the discounted monthly section provided to Heather and Kevin for helping to distribute the Canine Chronicle in their area. And his debut show-dog advertisement was a basic one, with a cute close-up of his face taken at Westminster by the photographer Miguel Betancourt, with an inset of Jack’s win photo showing him, the judge, and Heather, along with the purple Award of Merit ribbon. Across the top was the line “He’s Got Major Moves!” over his show name. Below that, “Westminster 1st Award of Merit,” with his call name “Jack,” and the two sell lines, which speak in the lingua franca of dog shows to people who understand—judges.
One line was two simple words, “Movement—Expression” (citing, in most basic terms, his strengths), and, below that, “Multiple Group Placings in limited showings,” a pithy phrase that actually says a lot. It means that when Jack shows, he does well, and the only reason he’s not ranked higher is that he’s not out there every weekend. For all the readers (i.e., judges) know, maybe his owners are just testing the waters or have a bigger-picture strategy.
A top-ranked dog is almost never a one-year project; typically you spend a year (or two) building a reputation and accumulating a list of judges who are proven to like your dog. Then you target those judges the next year, along with others you feel will like the dog, build some momentum, and help fuel it further with strategic advertising—or, if you can afford it, a promotional blitzkrieg.
The other critical factor in a campaign is scheduling. The dog world is small enough that most people who’ve been at it for a while—and though Heather and Kevin, both in their mid-thirties, are on the young side, they have experience beyond their years—can look at a list of dog show
s and handpick a schedule that maximizes their animals’ chances of winning. Judges are always chosen in advance, and certain ones are avoided; others are sought out. The size of the field can be a factor, as can the location—a site could be too hot, too cold, or too cramped for a handler’s liking.
There’s also the simple logistics of travel. If you’re not the type of handler whose owner has a private jet, you can’t show in Boston one weekend and Seattle the next; if you’re like most people, you can’t even really afford to show every weekend, though plenty do. I met many owners backstage at dog shows who have full-time jobs and yet somehow manage to show their dogs up to fifty times a year.
Kevin and Heather are on the road more or less forty-five weekends a year, mostly up and out the door by 5:00 A.M. and not finished until after 9:00 P.M., but they rarely travel so far that they can’t get home in a day. No matter how you look at it, it’s a grind.
Once Tanner had left for Europe and there was no longer a single dog important enough to build the schedule around, Heather and Kevin seemed to choose their shows based mainly on location—nothing too far from home, which still allows for quite a selection when home is Pennsylvania—and on general impressions of judges. Those who’d been kind to them before got preference.
By contrast, the dogs at the top of the all-breed rankings were speeding around America. And by April two dogs in particular had begun to distinguish themselves: a smooth fox terrier named Dodger and a Pekingese named Malachy.
Very rarely does a dog just emerge with a new championship and go on to compete as a nationally ranked special.* Most often a special campaign is a two-year process at a minimum. The first year is all about winning breeds and placing in groups and gathering those win points and photos in the form of ammunition that can be deployed in ads. The second year, having won over judges, you can start to focus on dominating a group.
Tom Grabe says that for anyone new to the specials game it typically follows a specific pattern. Few people set out to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars, but success begets success and the feeling is addictive. “First people want a championship, then to special the dog,” said the man who benefits greatly from this addiction. “Then you win breeds and place in groups and you want to win a group,” and once that happens—and this is exactly where Tanner is and has been—“you want a Best in Show. And then you want the next BIS, because that one’s over already.” And the next thing you know, you’re advertising fifty-two consecutive weeks in Dog News. “I think that’s how you get into anything.”
If Billy Wheeler is the counterculture, Tom Grabe is the culture. Grabe publishes the Chronicle as well as its sister magazine, the Equine Chronicle, along with his wife, Amy, out of a modest office in Ocala, Florida. The Equine Chronicle is the largest show-horse magazine in the country, and the The Canine Chronicle, Tom thinks, has the same status among dog-show magazines, although because none are audited for circulation, it’s impossible to say for sure.
The Chronicle was founded in 1975 by Ric Routledge and was a newspaper for the first fifteen years of its existence. Not long after its launch, the AKC board summoned Routledge to New York and said they didn’t like the Chronicle. “They felt that it served only to attempt to influence AKC judges,” Pat Hastings told me. “To which Ric said, ‘Gentlemen, if your judges just judged dogs, I’d be out of business tomorrow.’” The implication: If buying ads didn’t really help sway judges, Ric would have no customers. The AKC promptly shut up.
In the 1990s, Tom and Amy Grabe were professional dog handlers—their résumé, it turns out, includes the best-winning Aussie of all time, Bayshore’s Flapjack—who never aspired to own magazines, but they regularly bought ads for their various dogs, and after a few years of flirtation with a woman who’d bought the publication from Routledge, they bought her out, moved to horse country, and changed careers.
The Chronicle has three primary competitors: ShowSight, Dogs in Review, and Dog News (a weekly), and none publishes its circulation or really even cares to sell subscriptions or drive newsstand sales.
The Chronicle prints fifteen thousand copies a month, most of which are distributed for free at shows, but the most important are the copies mailed directly to the more than three thousand AKC-approved judges, plus a few hundred more shipped internationally to the “all-arounders”—or judges licensed to judge all breeds (and thus those most likely to be hired to judge in the United States—in Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Japan). A judge need not ask Tom for a subscription; once he or she is approved for duty, a subscription goes out automatically. This is expensive, but it’s smart business. Because exhibitors know that judges get (and flip through) every issue, they want to be in the pages. The way advertising works in traditional media is that a business buys a page in hopes that some percentage of the readers who pick it up will be interested in their product; in this case the target audience is 100 percent pure.
Premium placements are the most sought after—and anything in the first 125 pages is considered premium at the Chronicle—and the best of those (the inside front cover and its facing page especially) are essentially impossible to purchase if you are not a client with a long history of advertising. Fortunately for Tom and Amy, there is no shortage of those types, and to keep them happy the magazine rotates different advertisers in and out of the most coveted spots throughout the year.
The Chronicle’s rates are reasonable: $400 for standard color (color photos on a white page with black type) or $450 for deluxe color (color photos on a color page with color type). The front cover runs $4,500, and the back is $3,500. The inside front is $1,600, and the inside back $1,400.
Premium spots are typically booked at least a year in advance. The truth, Tom admits, is that it’s hard for any new client to buy a spot in the first fifty pages (the superpremiums!), because those belong to a core group of advertisers who’ve been with the Chronicle for years and have worked themselves into preferred customers, and who are rotated around in that area to be fair to all. A specific dog can appear on the cover only once in a year.
Tom says that “most of the top dogs” advertise with the Chronicle, but not necessarily all of them. “Everyone’s got their favorite magazines. We put out a product, and people who like us like us. People who don’t, don’t.”
Just for example, I picked up an issue that happened to be sitting in a pile on my desk. On the cover was Dodger, the smooth fox terrier who was the country’s number-one overall dog. On the inside cover and facing page was Walker, the toy poodle handled by Kaz Hosaka and who had (at that point) collected forty Bests in Show and 153 Group Firsts; and after that, Beckham, the nation’s top cocker spaniel, the number-two sporting dog, and the sixth-ranked dog overall; followed by America’s number-one English sheepdog; then a top-ranked German wirehair pointer; and then Malachy the Pekingese, America’s top toy dog and the furry little footstool that would duel Dodger for number one up until the final days of 2010. Not every dog in the first 125 pages is a major national contender, but most are, and if not, they’re likely at least handled by one of the very top handlers or backed by an owner with a history of substantial show-dog investments.
The first Australian shepherd appears on page 54, and it is of course Beyoncé, in a two-page spread announcing her back-to-back wins at the Australian Shepherd National Specialty show at the Purina Farms complex* near St. Louis, Missouri.
The first editorial content appears on page 74.
When you consider that some owners campaign more than one dog a year, it’s not hard to see how they can run up quite a tab. The maximum for a single dog in one year—factoring the inside front and facing cover every month, plus one cover—would be a bit under forty thousand dollars. “Unless you did a foldout ad,” Tom says. “That runs forty-five hundred.” The Chronicle’s average advertiser spends about thirty thousand dollars a year, but some clients have as many as five dogs advertised at a time. For the Westminster issue—the year’s largest at nearly five hundred pages—
there were two owners with seven different dogs. “You start adding that up and you can easily spend a couple hundred thousand,” he says.
Though showing has historically been a preoccupation of the tweed-and-Ivy set, Tom says that the business has become more populist over time. He’s seeing “more and more people who are self-made. Not old money, but new money. You don’t see the kennels anymore owned by Firestones and Rockefellers.” (Which isn’t to say that old money has vanished entirely. One of the two backers of Malachy the Pekingese, I would later learn, is Iris Love, a Guggenheim.)
“It’s much more of a microcosm of our society now,” Grabe says. “That’s the good thing about dog shows as opposed to horse shows—if you’ve got a dog, and a car and a leash, you can go show.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Meet Ron Scott,
Show-Dog Investor
* * *
Many years ago I asked one of our major backers of dogs why she did it. She said, “Do you realize that most art in museums is sponsored?” I didn’t. She said, “I have a lot of friends who sponsor art; I don’t like art, I like dogs.
I would rather sponsor dogs for the world to see than a painting on a wall.”
—PAT HASTINGS
* * *
If the dog-show world’s top backers were imagined as our solar system, Ron Scott would be one of the larger planets—at least Saturn, if not Jupiter. He will tell you that the white-hot sun that scorches all earth is Victor Malzoni, a São Paulo–based construction magnate who backs six or seven dogs a year in the United States plus another handful in Europe and at least that many at home in Brazil. “He’s a very wealthy man whose passion happens to be dogs,” Scott told me while finishing up breakfast at his home in Pennsylvania. “He has a Gulfstream big enough to fly back and forth from São Paulo to New York City.” But Malzoni is an interloper, and it’s more typical of the current landscape and instructive to anyone curious about how backing works, most often, to stick with someone more local. (Though it does serve notice that the emerging economies, increasingly influential in most segments of business, are becoming a force in dog showing, too.)*
