by Josh Dean
Jack was also ringside, waiting his turn. With just seven Aussies, including two specials, he stood a pretty good chance of breaking out of his slump, and sure enough he did just that, taking the breed in a matter of moments over the only real competition, a very unusual- (and cool-) looking red merle bitch with a red spot over her eye.
With such a small pack of dogs to look after, Kevin and Heather seemed especially relaxed, and I’m sure the thought of an upcoming two weeks of tacos and margaritas didn’t hurt. During outdoor shows the handlers stage at their vehicles, and because there weren’t many dogs to groom, mostly there was time to sit around and talk. And both were still concerned with Jack’s fitness.
As a model of what good dog musculature should be, Kevin said to imagine Nacho, the new bullmastiff special. He wasn’t there on Long Island, but I had a good picture of him in my mind—like any great bullmastiff, he looks to have been carved from a solid rock. He was all muscle. When I noted this, Heather said, “He didn’t use to be.” In the beginning Nacho could barely finish a mile on the roads. “I had to drag him to the finish,” Kevin said. “Now he can do a mile and a half, no problem.”
“The trouble with Jack,” Heather said, “is that he spends all day in a town house. Nacho has a personal trainer”—pause a second to take that in*—“who his owners hired to bike, swim, and run him into shape.” She looked at Kevin. “You need to have a talk with Kimberly later.”
On Long Island there was a light breeze and a whiff of spring growth; it was pleasant in a way that indoor shows weren’t, and there was something graceful and sporting about the soothing rustle of paws in the grass.
Heather and Kevin had dressed in attire befitting the scene, Heather in a pink tank top and pastel floral skirt, Kevin in shirtsleeves and a pink silk tie. They would easily fit in at a polo match or a yacht club. Aside from Jack, the only other special in the van was Rita, and she, too, was having a rough month. She’d gone a few weeks without a win and had lost her standing as the country’s number-one Chessie bitch. Her luck didn’t turn in Oyster Bay either, and with Heather on her leash (in hope that she’d sway a judge known to prefer young female handlers), she lost again.
Each show I found myself obsessing over a new breed, and on Long Island it was the Dandie Dinmont terrier, which has the dual attraction of an odd name and an odder look. Named for a character in the Sir Walter Scott novel Guy Mannering* and recognized by the AKC since 1886, the Dandie Dinmont is, like most terriers, a vermin exterminator that, according to several online advisories, should not be trusted with small pets such as hamsters, gerbils, or rabbits. Mostly what I like about it is its head of hair: The dogs appear to be wearing curly white barristers’ wigs atop their crowns, and combined with what the breed standard describes as “large, soulful eyes,” they ooze personality and look more than a little like cartoon characters brought to life.
* * *
DANDIE DINMONT
Speaking of compelling characters, there was a large black, brown, and white void in the camp now that Tanner was off gallivanting around Finland. While Heather still wasn’t totally on board with the idea, she was happy to report that his track record as a stud dog had improved dramatically over the past weeks. “Tanner got his act together. He just got eight bitches pregnant,” she said, then corrected herself. “Or at least six.”
I made a mental note to share that news with Kimberly. There was hope for Jack yet.
Things looked good for Jack at the group ring, too. The judge who’d be judging the Aussies the following day pulled Heather aside as she walked out to the ring and told her that “he’s a really nice dog.” A woman standing to my right spotted me talking to them and noted, “He’s got such a cute face.”
I’d have thought he had a shot at a Group 1 in Oyster Bay if not for the presence of the bearded collie Roy (aka Ch Tolkien Raintree Mister Baggins), the number-two herding dog in America, and a top-ten dog overall. In the end Roy didn’t win the Herding Group; a puli—a dog that looks like a head of Rasta-man dreadlocks (and was once used in a Bud Light commercial as exactly that)—did. Jack took a Group 4. Which was hardly a bad day at the office and would at least help put an end to his backward slide in the rankings.
Dog showing is not recession-proof. Participation had dropped in both 2009 and 2010, and the AKC did not take this lying down. In May the organization made two major announcements. The first: that it was going to open certain competitions—in particular, obedience and agility—to mutts. The second was the creation of an entirely new title, “Grand Champion.”
Nobody seemed totally certain what this meant or how it would even work, and that would include Heather. Apparently, in addition to the regular Best of Breed and Best Opposite ribbons, judges could give out additional citations at their discretion, and these ribbons equal points that tally toward the title of grand champion, which seemed to be primarily a clever effort to keep more dogs out longer after they finish their championship, thus helping to stem the tide of declining entries.*
It was quite possible that the grand champion title would catch on. For one thing, the AKC incentivized it by stating that all grand champions would be invited to the year-end Eukanuba National Championship in December, an event that otherwise invites only the top twenty-five dogs in each breed. But at this point Heather had yet to even bother studying up; to her it was just marketing.
Since things were so relaxed, we got to talking about bad dogs. Heather told me that she and Kevin had only ever fired three dogs—the first being a white Newfoundland (a gigantic breed) that used to shit in his crate and roll in it (repeatedly). Kevin would walk him for an hour at each show, trying to encourage him to move his bowels, but the dog refused. Instead he’d walk around for an hour, then wait until he was back in his crate, where, like clockwork, he’d shit. Heather, who tends to delegate the walks to Kevin, or to whoever’s assisting them, at first assumed it wasn’t being done right, so she walked the dog herself—for an hour!—and nothing happened. Then she put him in the crate, whereupon he took a giant dump.*
The second dog fired was a Berner who shit in his crate and, Heather said, “tried to eat you when you cut his nails.” The third, another Bernese, was also a prodigious crate crapper. The lesson here is obvious: Heather will not tolerate a dog that can’t control its bowels.
Among current clients the Cardigan Welsh corgi Thor was in danger of making the list—he’d shit not only in his cage but also lately in their house. “On my carpet!” Heather said, and glared at Kevin.
“I left him for like fifteen seconds!” Kevin responded.
“A minute, fifteen seconds—two seconds. It’s too many,” Heather snapped back. “What is our rule?”
Their rule, for the record, is that no dog is to be left unattended in the house until he or she has been proven to be trustworthy. Whereas many handlers let their dogs run relatively free and have houses that you would not want to enter without wearing scrubs, Heather and Kevin require that all client dogs go through a trial period wherein they are given a tiny section of the house to roam freely. (This tiny section is floored in linoleum and easily cleaned.) If a dog doesn’t soil it, his universe is expanded slightly. Still, most dogs are not to be trusted. Jack was one of only four dogs to have free rein in the house. Which spoke volumes about how much she trusted him, because Heather really does not like mess.
“People always claim their dog is ‘mostly housebroken,’ and almost always that means—not really,” Kevin said. A prospective client had recently come by with a King Charles spaniel, and Heather’s first question was, “Is he house-trained?” Oh, yes, replied the owner, who was then to leave the dog for a trial visit. As she was about to go, the owner handed Kevin a bag of diapers.
“What are these for?” he said.
“When he’s in the house, he wears them in case he has to go,” she answered.
“So he’s not house-trained!” Heather howled. They were not currently showing a Cavalier King Charles spaniel.
The relaxed weekend seemed set to culminate on a high note for Jack, as all signs pointed to an excellent shot at a Group 1, which would land him in the Best in Show ring for only the second time all year. He easily won the breed again, and the male judge who’d be handling the group not only loved Heather (according to both Heather and Kevin) but had gone out of his way to compliment Jack the day before. Kimberly was giddy at the possibilities, and I felt myself getting excited that finally momentum might be tipping in Jack’s favor. Maybe, just maybe, he could win a dog show.
I should have known better. With thirty minutes to spare, Heather went to retrieve Jack to groom him for the group and discovered a problem: He’d had the runs in his crate. Since Jack would rather burst than have an accident, Kimberly was immediately concerned. “No wonder he wanted out so bad,” she said, and took him for a short walk.
She returned with news that he’d had more diarrhea—lots more—and Heather seemed especially serious as she urged Jack onto the table. He seemed not right. It’s hard to say exactly what that looks like, but he was maybe a step slow and his ears hung lethargically. She felt his belly, and an expression of worry creased her face. I’d never seen this expression. “I think he might be bloated.” At Heather’s instruction she and Kimberly pressed on Jack’s belly simultaneously, and vomit sprayed violently from his muzzle.
Heather was suddenly panicked. “I think you need to get him to a vet, and tubed, immediately!” she said, and began to run off. She turned around to see us still standing there, a little stunned. “You should be in the car!”
Kimberly, as the owner of a dog whose never-flustered handler was suddenly panicking, turned white. She ran to her car, rushed Jack into his crate, and waited for Heather, who was now jogging from some distance away with a show steward in her wake. She was already on the phone with a vet explaining the situation as the steward attempted to explain to us the location of the clinic, supposedly less than a mile away.
The car’s GPS, naturally, directed us in an utterly ass-backwards manner, around the park the long way so that one mile turned into three, then four, then five, and the tension in the car rose as what was supposed to be a two-minute drive stretched to ten. Compounding the stress, Heather was calling one or another of our phones every two minutes while Jack puked repeatedly all over the back of the car, and the whole interior smelled like shit, literally; it seemed, impossibly, as if the poor dog’s digestive system was so distressed that it was working in reverse.
By the time Kimberly screeched into the lot of the local animal hospital, both she and I were beyond frazzled. Heather had instructed us to barge in and tell whoever greeted us to “tube him” right away without bothering to explain what that even meant. But this being Sunday, there was just one vet on duty, and he was with another emergency. No matter our obvious distress, the receptionists couldn’t have been more nonchalant. “Fill out this paperwork,” one said between chomps of her gum.
In retrospect I know why Heather was so freaked out. Bloat is the second leading killer of dogs, after cancer. The technical term is “gastric dilatation-volvulus,” and it refers to a condition when there’s an abnormal accumulation of air, fluid, and/or foam in the stomach and often involves a twisting of the stomach at the esophagus. The twisting stomach traps air, food, and water, which causes bloating, which causes a further spiral of nastiness, obstructing veins in the abdomen, leading to low blood pressure, shock, and damage to internal organs.
On an informational Web page titled “Bloat in dogs” is the bold-faced warning: If you believe your dog is experiencing bloat, please get your dog to a veterinarian immediately! Bloat can kill in less than an hour, so time is of the essence. Call your vet to alert them you’re on your way with a suspected bloat case.
Heather wasn’t overreacting.
After a nerve-racking fifteen-minute wait, during which Jack’s condition seemed to improve while Kimberly’s most certainly did not, the vet arrived. He was pleasant and had a reassuring demeanor. If Jack had been bloated, he said, he no longer was. X-rays showed only a colon full of gas. After pressing for any possible foreign substances Jack could have eaten—“A towel?”—he accepted the news that Jack’s system had to be empty. Kevin and Heather don’t feed the dogs on show mornings, so the most he could possibly have ingested was some bait.
Factoring in all that, the vet suspected that Jack was suffering from bad gastrointestinal distress and hooked him up an IV to rehydrate him without causing stomach upset and also gave him some Pepcid and an antibiotic, just to be safe. When Kimberly informed the vet that Jack was prone to upset stomachs, he recommended that she add probiotics and acidophilus to his diet. “If it’s recurrent, it could be triggered by stress,” he said, and told her he thought it was fine to send Jack home.
His shot at the group, and Best in Show, had unfortunately long since passed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Freehold
* * *
Dogs are a vortex of a powerful emotional force that bubbles up out of its ancient wellsprings and engulfs not just the dog but the dog’s people.
—JON FRANKLIN, The Wolf in the Parlor
* * *
A few days later, I checked in on the patient. “Jack is doing well,” Kimberly reported. “He’s on a new diet—he loves his potatoes! I’m still giving him the diarrhea meds in the morning. He’s asking for his walks. My vet supports the diet change and says that his stool was fine other than being soft. A better diet and managing stress is the prescription for now.”
Kimberly was feeling so confident about his health that during Heather’s absence she planned to show him herself at the upcoming shows in Freehold, New Jersey, hometown of Bruce Springsteen. She seemed more nervous about Halle, who was in her third week in Pennsylvania and was scheduled to go for her ultrasound tomorrow. “Hopefully, the vet will see that she is pregnant and is having a big litter,” she said. An X-ray would follow on June 20, “and that’s when we should definitely see puppies.” Given a good result, the puppies would arrive within weeks.
I started to make mental plans to be there for the birth and for regular visits to Jack’s first brood, to watch for the first time in my life as puppies grew into dogs.
But a day later bad news arrived. The ultrasound was negative.
Kimberly was gutted. And “Kerry is beside herself,” she said. By this point, she figured, Kerry had invested well over a thousand dollars in the attempted breeding, “if not twice that. I keep thinking maybe the ultrasound is wrong. Maybe it was too soon? Wishful thinking. I’m so depressed!”
Already worried about Kerry’s flagging interest due to Jack’s recent inconsistency in the ring, Kimberly was bothered anew about what this blow meant to her dog’s once-promising year. “It’s how little she’s saying that really concerns me.” As for trying again, she didn’t know what came next. “We may not get another shot.”
I told her not to take it so hard, or at least not so personally. “It’s not your fault.”
“That is true, but he’s my dog, and I feel somehow responsible for his not getting a live tie. He did try his little heart out, and they had tons of opportunity.” She sighed. “Oh, well. Need some luck this weekend. Bring all you have tomorrow!”
I did her one better than luck. I brought Charlie, my three-week-old son, as well as his mother (who continued to be a very good sport), to the grassy expanses of East Freehold Park, on a hot but not humid Friday afternoon.
Kimberly told me to meet her at the grooming table, near the entrance and in the shadow of a row of Porta-Potties. To see one woman grooming a single dog in the shade of a tree was quite different from the bustling scene around the typical setup, but this is how most people experience showing a dog: occasionally, and by themselves. Owner-handlers with a single dog (or maybe two), it’s worth noting, make up the bulk of entries at most dog shows.
“The main reason I’m showing him is, why not?” Kimberly said. “If I don’t do well, they’ll
blame it on me. And if he does, kudos!” Really, she also felt she couldn’t afford to stay away and lose valuable points. “I don’t want him to fall out of the stats. You can’t win if he’s not showing. The more you’re out there, the better your chances are in the rankings.”
I’d long mused that having a child and having a dog are similar—both dogs and children are wild and messy and difficult to reason with. But walking around a show with a baby just reinforced the notion that the products marketed to these creatures are remarkably similar. There are toys, sunscreens, solar shields, and plush beds. I bought a squeaky dog toy shaped like an alien for Charlie, and at one point Kim borrowed one of Charlie’s poo bags—for disposing of diapers in public places—to clean up after Jack. You even talk to dogs and babies the same way. There’s lots of “Good boy!” and “No!” delivered in either stern barks or singsongy chirps, all of which I recently learned is an evolutionary phenomenon innate to humans known as “parentese.” The canine equivalent is called “dogese,” and it sounds virtually identical.
With a week of days blurring the memory of the bloat scare, Kimberly was coming to regret the missed opportunity of the previous Sunday. “Honestly, after he got rid of diarrhea, I think he would have been fine,” she said. “So I was kicking myself, because we would have gotten a group placement. I’m so scared Kerry is just gonna bail.”
Among the nineteen Aussies on hand, six were specials, all males, including Striker, always a formidable foe, and Tuck, a nice black tri owned by Kimberly’s friends Steve and Kathy Ostrander and bred by Tom Gerrard, another local Aussie breeder-handler who was one of the few men active in the breed. Tom had beaten Jack a few times over the past month.
