by Josh Dean
She said she considered certain questionable tactics herself, but thought, “‘If I do this, isn’t it fake? I cheated.’ That’s always been my philosophy. I have no problem with chalk and good shampoo. But when I wash him off, he’s still gonna be the same dog.”
On the other hand, the end result of breeding done well is that we wound up with wonderful animals like Jack and Tanner and Rita, and all the other cool and interesting dogs that share our homes and workplaces. One of my favorite things in the course my research was reading about the almost impossibly diverse array of jobs that dogs have been bred to do.
“At various times, and in different places, domestic dogs have served an incredible variety of different behavioral roles,” reported James Serpell in the introduction to his anthology, The Domestic Dog, “including security guards, burglar alarms, beasts of burden, weapons of war, entertainers, athletes, fighters, lifeguards, shepherds, guides, garbage collectors, and instruments for detecting truffles, drugs, dry rot, explosives, and estrous pheromones in cattle. As hunting aides they have been modified behaviorally (and physically) to assist in the capture or retrieval of everything from rodents and small birds to lions and kangaroos, and of course, since time immemorial, they have also employed their social skills to provide us with affectionate and reliable companionship.”
Since Roman times they’ve been at our side in combat. The Soviet Red Army had more than sixty thousand enlisted dogs that wore uniforms and were given the rank of corporal. This canine corps is credited with saving the lives of at least seven hundred thousand wounded soldiers—by delivering medicine to the field and even dragging them to safety on sledges. Soviet war dogs also detected mines, carried more than two hundred thousand messages to the front, laid twelve thousand kilometers of cable, and even served as saboteurs—at least once. A dog named Dina is said to be responsible for bombing a Nazi train in Belarus. On the flip side, a collie named Dick was responsible for deactivating over ten thousand explosives in the course of World War II.
We’re still finding new uses for them. Dogs are being trained to “smell” cancer on patients.* Italy employs a corps of three hundred Labradors, Newfoundlands, and golden retrievers that serve as lifeguards on the country’s beaches—leaping into action in some cases from helicopters, boats and Jet Skis. Anatolian shepherds are being raised on ranches in Namibia with the express purpose of keeping cheetahs out of the flocks and thus out of ranchers’ gun sights. (Similar work is being done with komondors and wolves in the American West.) In places where vampire bats are a plague on cattle, dogs have been deployed to listen for their approach with their keen hearing and then prompt the cattle to move, because the bats won’t attack a moving target, and certain tribes in the Brazilian Amazon use dogs to warn them of poisonous snakes on trails. A team of eight dogs employed by the Montana-based Working Dogs for Conservation are now sniffing out invasive species across the West.* One of the best known and most useful residents of New York City in 2011 is Roscoe, a beagle prized—and advertised on TV and in newspapers—for his ability to detect bedbugs.
Breeds have come and gone over the years, for the most part evolving into new ones but in some cases disappearing entirely. A few lost out to fashion and the whims of popularity, while others were obviated by technology. For instance, writes Jane Brackman in an article from Dogs Today: “Tumblers, who mesmerized prey by ‘winding their bodies about circularly, and then fiercely and violently venturing on the beast,’ disappeared when guns came into widespread use. Turnspit dogs, who made a living running on a wheel to turn meat so it would cook evenly, received their pink slips when technology improved cooking methods.”
As far back as 1950, McDowell Lyon was wondering if, instead of perpetrating Old World abilities, maybe we should be updating our dogs. “Perhaps we should breed our dogs for modern conditions, even to sprawling with a highball on a chaise-longue atop a penthouse roof,” he wrote. The joke is only funny because it’s not that far-fetched.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Delaware and Beyond:
The Slump Begins
* * *
If it’s not fun for the dog, it’s not fun for you.
—DAVID FREI
* * *
In the northern realms of the East Coast, where we’re slave to the seasons, the first of May marks a major transition, as the shows move outside, graduating from the smelly claustrophobia of overstuffed auditoriums full of dog hair and sawdust into the far more spacious environs of fairgrounds and stadiums, which come with their own unique problem: the possibility of inclement weather.
Jack’s first outdoor show of the year was in Bear, Delaware,* a rural town a half-hour south of Wilmington. The coastal air didn’t do much for Jack; he went zero for three over the weekend, clearly not at his best for a number of reasons. Heather thought his coat was lackluster; Kevin said he seemed a little worn down, that for the first time it seemed as if Jack “missed his mom”; and Kimberly said he was probably just sick, as well as tired from all the action he’d been enjoying back home.
It could have been any of those things, or perhaps a combination of all of them, but it might also have been something else: During Jack’s absence Halle left Kimberly’s to finish out her hoped-for pregnancy at Maggie’s, because having her around was proving too much of a distraction for Jack, especially with Kimberly away all day at work. So when he came back from Delaware, his girlfriend was gone.
Jack was always exhausted after a weekend of showing, and his normal routine was to almost immediately curl up and sleep when he got home. Not this time. Poor, tired, ailing Jack searched every inch of the house for Halle—starting with the obvious spots like the kitchen floor and the tile by the fireplace, then checking the cage and the laundry room before moving upstairs to both bedrooms, where he made sure to double-check in closets and under the beds. He cried at the basement door, so Kimberly let him go downstairs, and then he cried at the back door, so she let him outside. But everywhere Jack looked, he found only empty space.
At 4:00 A.M. the first night, Kimberly woke with a start at Jack whimpering. He didn’t have to pee—he wanted to go check to see if Halle had come home. Like a scout on patrol, Jack would “go to the basement, go to the door, go to her cage, and look outside.” For two days he repeated the ritual every few hours, and then finally, recognizing the futility of his efforts, he just gave up.
I imagine if you let Jack choose between a handful of breed wins or a few weeks of furious lovemaking, he’d choose the latter, so even if the breeding didn’t work out, it would be hard to call the past several weeks a total disappointment. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Kimberly was disappointed, though, and felt as if Jack’s string of losses had to be because of Halle. On top of that, of the ten days when Halle was sharing his home, Jack spent six of them showing. “It was a lot for a young dog to go through,” she said.
I spent much of the late spring tethered to Brooklyn, awaiting the arrival of my own offspring, due anytime. And for those weeks while Jack and I were lost in our own respective reproductive activities, I kept track of his progress almost entirely via e-mail with Heather and Kimberly. Both agreed that Jack had lost some appetite and as a result his coat was suffering. You often hear show people talk about their dogs “blowing coat,” which is something of a catchall term for a dog’s fur being in a less-than-perfect state, typically either growing in for winter or thinning out for summer. Jack wasn’t blowing coat, but he was probably lacking a little in nutrition. And nutrition, Heather kept telling Kimberly, is critical to coat.
Both Heather and Kevin were also increasingly concerned with Jack’s fitness. It’s something each of them can easily assess by touch—by feeling his muscle tone in the way that judges do—and by his performance on training runs with Kevin, who takes the dogs out for nightly bike rides when the gang is on the road. And on the first night in Delaware, Kevin could barely get Jack to run a mile. Heather informed Kimberly that “he was as bad as a mas
tiff,” a breed not designed to run for miles the way an Aussie is.
Kimberly couldn’t believe that that last part was true. Jack had always been a good athlete, for whom running came naturally. And when he returned to Pennsylvania, she decided that the only explanation was that he was ill. She was always worried that Jack’s frenetic personality and his stoic tendency in the face of discomfort could cause her to miss cues that a problem was afoot. Jack was hard to read, she said. “He’s so hyper all the time that even if he doesn’t feel good, if he’s in that cage all day long and you let him out to groom and potty him and show him, he’s going to be so excited to be out of that cage.” She had long worried that she might not know if something was really wrong until it was very far along—maybe too far along.
The next round of shows took place in Jack’s backyard, in Bucks County, and boy, was that an eventful few days. For starters, an epic storm blew through Pennsylvania, bringing with it torrential rain and powerful wind gusts that threatened tents and Pomeranians alike.
“It was insane. It was horrific,” Heather said when I called for a recap. “They took down tents because they were blowing over. Rings blew away in fifty-mile-per-hour winds. When we were in the ring on Saturday with goldens, posts were snapping. I could barely walk. I don’t know what they did with toy dogs. They should have canceled the show.”
But instead the show went on. And weather only fueled the chaos in the team’s camp. Delays built on delays, and conflicts arose. Compounding troubles, in Kimberly’s estimation, was a deep field of Aussie specials in better shape than Jack, plus an unfocused handling team that brought along too many dogs carrying higher priority (because Jack’s precise standing in the hierarchy remained undefined). Twice over the weekend, Kimberly was poised ringside to show Jack herself should no handler arrive, and both times Kevin swept in at the last second and took the dog into the ring with no prep. Having Kevin was better than resorting to an unfamiliar substitute, but it wasn’t the same thing—when it comes to Jack—as having Heather. But the only way to ensure having Heather was to sign a contract.
The situation only worsened as the month went on. For one thing, a new dog—Nacho the bullmastiff, who had an owner with ample disposable income—had signed on as a fully committed contract dog, pushing Jack further down the ladder. And this made Kimberly begin to question the wisdom of signing a contract for Jack, should the one Heather kept alluding to ever actually appear.* In theory she and Kerry had recently decided they’d finally sign one, but the way things were going in May, they instead began to discuss whether it made sense to commit to anything if Jack wasn’t going to get priority.
The way Kimberly understood a handshake deal she and Heather had first discussed at Edison was that if she and Kerry were to sign a year contract, the commitment would give Jack priority—a priority that was then never really defined. Kimberly’s opinion on the matter was prone to regular swings, and on some days her frustration with Heather—which she would always qualify with the phrase, “Now, I love Heather, but . . .”—caused her to reconsider the whole arrangement, even though we all knew there was no one else she’d trust as much to handle her dog. Heather, on the other hand, seemed to feel she was regularly going out of her way to accommodate Jack—which, to be honest, she was—and that the situation wasn’t actually any closer to the resolution she wanted: a signed contract that would lock Jack in for a year, and all that this implied.
As a man in the middle conversing with both camps, I could never discern exactly where the real problem lay, and I felt it was often in a simple lack of communication. I began to feel like a child in a marriage of passive-aggressive parents who loved each other but couldn’t ever exactly agree on anything.
“Honestly, I’m not totally averse to changing handler if I have to worry about who is showing him and if they are going to make it to the ring,” Kimberly wrote to me in an e-mail. “Don’t get me wrong . . . I love Heather and Kevin. I have no desire to go anywhere else. But why would we sign a contract? We’ll go show to show and take our chances.”
She was even wavering between paragraphs.
“We’re gonna win more with Heather than with a less experienced handler”—which she was viewing as the alternative. “Heather has the face. But if she can’t commit, maybe we’re better off with someone who has only five dogs.”
Heather and Kevin are on the road almost nonstop, and when they do happen to be home, they’re mostly either unpacking from the last trip or cleaning up, then preparing and repacking for the next one. When I managed to catch Heather on the phone a few days later, she was just back from the Bernese Mountain Dog National Specialty in Wisconsin, where they’d done ten consecutive days of showing from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.—and to 10:00 P.M. on a few of the longer days. The high temperature over those ten days was forty-two degrees, and Heather is not a cold-weather person. What’s more, it rained. A lot.
How was she doing? I wondered.
“Tanner left. He’s gone. I wish he was here, There’s not a whole lot I can do about it,” she said. And then added, “I would not have chosen to send him.” A large part of this was self-interest. Heather loved Tanner, more than any other dog—the Bernese mountain dog was her first breed—and she loved to win, which Tanner did often. But Heather said she was also a little worried about having such a valuable dog shipped to Europe and entrusted to the care of someone she’d never met. She trusted Dawn, who was both client and mentor, but still had her doubts.
Heather said that she and Kevin would be taking only a handful of dogs to the next show, on Long Island, where I planned to join them for my first show in six weeks, since my son, Charlie, had been born, on Cinco de Mayo. They were traveling light because they’d be leaving straightaway for a two-week vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. “We’re very much in need of a break,” she said, and it would be hard to argue that point.
I asked about Jack.
“Jack’s not been doing anything at all,” she said. “It just sucks. I mean, it happens. It’s not one thing. It’s a combination. A lot of these judges we’d never shown to before. When you start a dog out, there are a billion judges you haven’t shown to,” she said, the implication being that judges are predisposed to favor dogs they’re familiar with; it’s the same logic that drives the thriving vanity-ad business and the reason you rarely see a dog explode onto the scene its first year and shoot to the top of the rankings. It’s possible we all read too much into Jack’s early success, and I wasn’t the only one starting to think maybe we were in for a long year.
She also mentioned Jack’s fitness and nutrition. “I know Kimberly’s working on getting him into better shape and getting his coat back. He was out of shape a little bit and out of coat a little bit, and you add all that up.”
There was also the breeding. “He was a little stressed in Delaware.”
Heather took some issue with the way the breeding was handled, saying, with a barely disguised tone of disappointment, “She called and told me Jack and Halle were together for three hours in a room. I said, ‘You need to separate them!’ Honestly, dogs can die from that. Male dogs can die.” (There are worse ways to go, one supposes.)
Lastly, there was the matter of the competition. “There’s definitely been some nice Aussie specials competing.” This was a trend that seemed likely to continue.
“I definitely think the bitch is beatable,” she said, meaning Beyoncé. “But Jack needs to be perfect. That’s a dog that’s been out campaigning for a while now. It’s like showing against Tanner. Jack’s still at the beginning-beginning stages.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Oyster Bay
* * *
Grooming is natural: wild dogs and wolves do it all the time; but the methods they use are basically limited to licking one another.
—JANE AND MICHAEL STERN, Dog Eat Dog
* * *
Oyster Bay is one of the crown jewels of the Gold Coast, a stretch of rolling, sylvan, extraordinarily pric
ey terrain along Long Island’s North Shore. This is Great Gatsby territory, a land of spectacular century-old estates with brick-and-wrought-iron gates opening onto private lanes that wind off to gigantic mansions not visible from the roads. And on this, the second-to-last weekend of May, Oyster Bay is home to the Ladies Kennel Association of America’s 114th all-breed dog show, at the Planting Fields Arboretum.
Heather and Kevin were to leave there directly for Newark Airport, where they’d disembark for Cabo. They left the trailer at home and brought only the Chevy Astro van, plus a small coterie of dogs, including both Jack and Summer, whom Kimberly planned to test against the show’s relatively small field of Aussies. In total, there were just 558 dogs entered, and seven Aussies, including only one other class bitch, which meant that Summer stood a great chance of getting her first-ever AKC point.
The team set up their tiny camp a hundred yards from the blue-and-white tent where the dogs staged for the ring and just across a split-rail fence from a giant RV representing the International Canine Semen Bank, now accepting deposits. I arrived in time to see Summer trot into the ring for her dog-show debut, with Heather on the lead. The dog ably performed a down-and-back and then—just before stacking—proceeded to take a dump right in front of the judge, who was clearly irked but managed to overcome her repulsion and award the class to Summer anyway.
Heather saw me giggling and shook her head as she handed me Summer’s leash. She informed me that Summer had crapped in her crate and again when they’d walked her prior to the show. “I’ve never seen a dog shit so much,” she said, and it momentarily stunned me to hear this petite, meticulous young woman in pastels swearing openly in such patrician environs.
