by Josh Dean
Kimberly did fine with Jack—if you were watching and didn’t know her, you’d never think she was nervous (which she was) or not at all accustomed to handling (which she isn’t). Jack stumbled at one point when something momentarily distracted him, but overall he looked good. Maybe he still wasn’t quite in shape, or maybe he was slightly out of coat, or maybe it’s just that Kimberly wasn’t a professional handler in a ring full of them. Whatever the reason, Tuck won. And then won again the next day. On Sunday the winner was a black tri that looked fat and out of shape—that one stung extra hard—and on the final day, Monday, Striker took the breed.
Kimberly’s e-mail recap to Kerry played up the positives while noting her own deficiencies as a handler. “Well, we didn’t win but I felt better about our effort today. I didn’t start off so hot.” She had, she said, forgotten to pick up her number until the ring steward gently reminded her. “And I didn’t have Jack’s front feet set perfect,” and by the time she realized it, the judge was upon her, and “it was too late to fix. It wasn’t horrible. When we did our down and back we got lots of compliments from the Judge. He said ‘You surprised me, young lady, your dog is a beautiful mover.’ I’m feeling more and more confident each time we show.”
Kimberly had noted that all the winners were big, mature dogs—emphasis on mature. And the matter of age was increasingly of note. Tuck was a year older than Jack, as was Striker. Kimberly told me that Tuck’s owner, Kathy, put it best. “She said all of a sudden he came into himself. That’s what Kevin and Heather keep saying about Jack. He’s doing good, but they think he’ll really come into himself at two and a half years or three. They still maintain that this could be a good year, but next year would be the ultimate year for him. I tell you—Jack looks a world better than he did the last couple weeks. The breeding, the showing, I don’t know. He was not well.”
But on the final day of May, she had bad news, and as usual it arrived via short e-mail. “Kerry is reconsidering the financial arrangement.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ludwigs Corner
* * *
You have to understand, going into a show, that it is all bullshit. These judges are people you wouldn’t ask how to cross the street, much less which is the best dog in the ring.
—JANE HOBSON, HANDLER, AS QUOTED BY JANE AND MICHAEL STERN, Dog Eat Dog
* * *
Kimberly’s experiment as dog handler was not a tremendous success. She and Jack went 0 for 7 at the shows in Springsteen country, and the experience led to an insight that wasn’t exactly a surprise. “Looking at my competition the last two weekends, I find that there is no point in my showing him,” she told me. It was, I realized, a good experience despite the disappointment, because after a few months of waffling over their relationship Kimberly had a refreshed appreciation for Heather. “Specials must have a handler,” she said emphatically.
One undeniable truth was that the quantity and level of competition had risen—and the only reason anyone could figure was that the AKC’s Grand Champion project was working exactly as it had been designed. More champions were coming out more often, many from retirement, unable to ignore the dangling carrot of a flashy new title to add to the résumé.
Heather and Kevin, meanwhile, returned tanned and rested in late June to Ludwigs Corner, Pennsylvania, in the western suburbs of Philly. There, 1,393 dogs came out for the hundredth annual Bryn Mawr Kennel Club show.
Ludwigs Corner is best known for an annual horse show, but the same ground is perfect for dog shows and the sea of RVs they attract. And somewhere in that sea was the summer version of the setup. The setup, warm weather edition, is basically two parts—a white box truck modified to accommodate dogs and a nice trailer that serves as home for the grown-ups. The box truck is a Ford E-450 Super Duty, kitted out with heat, air-conditioning, and extra ventilation. (Coolest spot in camp is in the truck; it’s icy, and powered by “like a ten-thousand-dollar generator,” according to Heather. If Kevin needs a break on a hot day, he sometimes hides out inside.) When parked at shows, tents are stretched out from the vehicles to shade the grooming area and a series of four or five portable ex-pens that the various dogs cycle in and out of for potty breaks and fresh air. It looks quite a bit like a football game tailgate, with dogs.
Heather and Kevin’s setup is never hard to find. It’s always close to the exit, so that when the weekend is finished, they can easily depart without risk of getting stuck in RV traffic. On the final day of a show, Kevin will begin to pack up in late morning, and by midafternoon only the absolute essentials remain.
Indeed, in Ludwigs I found Kevin and the crew as close as possible to the action, right across a small culvert from the rings. As I strolled up, Heather was just taking Jack out for grooming.
How’s his coat? I asked. Kimberly had been complaining that he looked “awful,” so I half expected that Jack would appear naked or mongrelly or as if he’d just returned from ten days at Bonnaroo.
“Not bad,” she said. “Kimberly’s a little dramatic, as you know.”
The day’s show had fifteen Aussies entered but only two specials in the ring of Judge Brian Meyer, a strapping, handsome fellow in a green blazer, a light green shirt, a green tie, pleated khakis, and brown leather shoes. I had no doubt that he also excelled at golf.
Australian shepherds are always grouped with other herding dogs, so I’d spent a lot of time watching breeds like corgis and Australian cattle dogs (which are low-slung and mutty-looking and could pass for dingoes*) and pulik, which appear to be levitating when they run. They look like land speeders with dreads.
And the more time I spent around Aussie people, the more normal they seemed. There’s jealousy and some obsession in the community, sure, but there’s also a noticeable lack of weirdos, at least as far as I could tell. I watched some nervous parents lead their young dogs out into the ring, and it was quite apparent that these were undisciplined puppies; they ambled around a bit aimlessly at times and were prone to breaking stride and cavorting at inopportune moments. A predominantly white fluffy dog hopped around, and then a black tri was a little stubborn, and damn if it wasn’t sort of cute, like watching six-year-olds run the bases backward at T-ball.
Judge Meyer was taking the physical part of his examination very seriously, meticulous with his inspections no matter the quality of the dog. This is the way it should be, of course, but usually isn’t. Judges are on tight schedules and will often move quickly through an exam of a dog they can tell isn’t one of the best. It’s not the kind of thing you’d notice if you hadn’t attended a lot of dog shows, but six months into my tour of the conformation world I was starting to notice these sorts of nuances. In the case of Judge Meyer, I actually caught myself nodding dismissively when he asked the owner of a dog with badly splayed legs to run down and back one more time.
A little after 10:00 A.M., the Best of Breed dogs joined the class winners, and just as Jack was about to make his first circumnavigation of the ring, Heather pulled him out of line and into the corner. What was wrong now? Oh, dear, he was squatting. And then crapping. She motioned me over. “Can you tell the superintendent we need a cleanup?”
Meyer somehow missed the incident and gave the breed to Jack, and as we left the area, a cowboy approached. He was authentic-looking, the kind of guy you’d encounter at the rodeo, and thus seemed totally out of place in this quiet, affluent corner of Pennsylvania.
“I just wanted to say that I don’t know anything about dog showing, but I knew as soon as I saw him that that was the best dog,” he said, pointing at Jack.
Heather thanked him.
“I’m looking for a dog, actually. But more working stock. Anyway, my opinion means squat, I’m sure, but that’s a beautiful dog.”
I gave him Kerry’s number and said good-bye. Once he was out of earshot, Heather handed me the lead. I should have known by now to not expect anything resembling a celebration. “He was so bad.” In addition to the poop, he was, she said, marking
compulsively with urine. “He started doing that in Long Island.” That was when Halle was in heat, and it made sense that Jack’s instinct would be to mark his territory. Recently Summer had come into heat, so the little guy was probably still defending his turf.
“Go put him in the ex-pen,” Heather snapped, and ran off to her next dog.
That afternoon I saw a familiar face back at the setup: Trader, the Akita who’d been banned for allegedly snapping at a judge, had been reinstated and had reclaimed his spot in the truck. Tom Bavaria, Trader’s owner, was happy to report that his dog had been cleared of all charges and had returned to competition with a bang, beating a field of three specials (which he said “was a lot for Akitas”), most notably a largely black dog that was the number-one Akita in the country.
Other than Dawn, Tom is Heather’s longest-standing client. Along with his wife, Anne, he has been showing dogs for more than twenty years but took a long break after 1996, when his son was born, to be a dad. Instead of dogs, he said, “we did baseball and all that.” Back before his parenting hiatus, Tom said, he handled his own dogs, but by the time he returned to shows, in 2004, the situation had changed. It was, he said, no longer tenable to handle your own dogs if you had aspirations beyond merely winning your dog’s championship. “It’s impossible for an owner-handler to get out of the group,” he said, if one can even get in the group. “I can finish my own class dogs, no problem.” He had, for instance, brought an Akita puppy to Ludwigs and had won with him. “But I cannot get a group placement anymore. And Trader is probably the nicest dog I’ve ever had.” To give such a good dog his due, he felt he had no choice. He hired Kevin.
Akitas are not an especially deep or competitive breed, so Trader was at that point the nation’s tenth-ranked Akita despite missing two months. “In all honesty, the best Akita in the country is probably sitting home right now because the owners don’t want to deal with this shit,” Tom said. “A shitload of dogs finish”—because finishing is what’s important for breeding. “But few stay out. That’s why they came up with Grand Champion—more money,” he said with a smirk. “Your dog’s a champion? Great. But is he a grand champion?!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Do Dogs
Actually Like
Dog Shows?
* * *
Show dogs should learn that being a show dog is fun and a game—just as herders, retrievers, and go-to-grounders have a good time at what they do for work.
—ANNE ROGERS CLARK, LEGENDARY JUDGE, HANDLER, AND BREEDER OF POODLES
* * *
People who dislike dog shows tend to argue that the practice is cruel, and I admit that before I attended one, I wondered if the dogs were just unhappy participants in their owners’ vanity project. But after spending a single day with Jack, the answer seemed obvious: Jack loved showing.
“Oh, my God, they love it,” said Stanley Coren when I reached him one afternoon at his home in western Canada. “They love the attention; they love the treats.” Few people have obsessed more on the topic of canine happiness than Stanley Coren, a semiretired psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, who made a name for himself studying “handedness”* before moving on to chronicle dog smarts in a series of popular books that has made him a sort of Freud of the canine mind.*
They enjoy two things,” he said. “The first is that they’re social animals, and they’re surrounded by dogs. Also, a dog gets lots of one-on-one attention—and lots of treats.” Which is important, because “a dog’s mind is food-focused. The other thing is, they get extra care. They’re groomed and brushed and stroked. Most dogs take that sort of thing as attention, as a form of affection.”
It’s also fun. “Dogs do tend to look at a lot of this as play as much as anything else. And there’s reward in there for the dog. Whether it’s through the mouth or the brain.”
I actually called Coren because I was thinking about thinking. Jack was always impressing me with his intelligence—or what I perceived to be his intelligence—and I kept hearing myself tell people that he was the smartest dog I’d ever met, without really even knowing if I knew what that meant. What was clear to me was that Jack had an aptitude to learn things and a desire to show that off. Beyond that he seemed to have a need to interact with humans, and in a way that went far beyond the playful give-and-take we have with our family dogs.
“You have to understand that there are really three types of intelligence,” Coren said. “The first is instinctive intelligence—what a breed was bred to do. Aussies were bred to herd.” Using this measure, he explained, “you can’t really compare the intelligence of a retriever and a sight hound. It’s apples and oranges.” I assumed that Jack would be good at herding, but I’d never seen him try it, so this one wasn’t so helpful.*
“The second type is adaptive intelligence. That’s really what the dog can learn to do for itself. And that varies a lot within breeds. Take the Lab—it’s the seventh-brightest dog in dogdom. Somewhere along the line, you’re going to hit a dumb Lab.” This can be measured scientifically, he said, using direct intelligence tests. “I developed twelve of them based on the kinds of things we use for testing preverbal children.”
Third is the type Coren used in his famous project ranking the breeds from most to least intelligent (or vice versa) based on a questionnaire he sent to the people he felt were most qualified to make such a judgment: dog obedience trainers. Coren sent his test to every accredited trainer in North America, and nearly half of them responded, making the statistical sample quite satisfying to a scientist like himself. It remains the most thorough study of its kind ever done. “This is working and obedience intelligence. It’s really the equivalent of school learning. How much he can learn from training and how well he returns to it. It has the component of good adaptive intelligence. These things can be affected by personality factors and emotional stability.
“The Australian shepherd, for example, has some border collie in him and some other collies, too. That should make him a fairly bright dog, but part of the problem with the breed is that they tend to be quite emotional. They’re easily distracted and sometimes get very worried or fearful, and that makes them perform less well.” He likens the problem to a human with test anxiety. He might be very smart, but when put in front of a test he freezes up and can’t perform.
In Coren’s experience Aussies do better in more reactive situations, where they don’t have time to overthink things—in particular, your athletic pursuits like agility and fly-ball tests. “What I consider to be intelligence is the mixture of those three things. Every dog has an instinctive intelligence.” But one of the breeds Coren owns himself is the beagle, a dog that most people would call smart. And yet, according to one definition, it is not. “The chair you’re sitting on is more trainable,” he said. “They score seventh from the bottom in working and obedience intelligence.”
The Australian shepherd lay smack in the middle—number forty-two. “I’m speculating that they don’t do as well in the obedience ring because they’re so easily distracted.” I told him that Jack was something of a Jekyll and Hyde. He had moments where he was hugely distracted, but when it mattered—when a person he respected (Kimberly or Kevin or especially Heather) asked him to perform, he did.
“The ones who are spooky are going to be spooky about anything,” Coren answered. “But the ones who are good are incredibly remarkable. If you’ve got a good, solid, well-socialized Aussie low in reactivity, then you have a dog who can compete as well as any dog in the top ten.”
Conformation is a skill, explains Coren. “There are learned components to conformation, and a good handler can bring that out. The handler learns what a dog is capable of doing, and the dog learns what the handler wants in order to get the treat. Handling is a skill. It is a partnership.”
There are three things that determine how well a particular dog does in conformation. There’s his physical perfection as judged against an ideal, which we have discussed
previously. There’s how well a dog follows orders, and behaves as directed by his handler. This part is fairly simple, and yet even the good ones screw it up sometimes. Then there’s the more ineffable quality of personality. It’s what Billy Wheeler was getting at with the terriers. Does the dog have a spark? Different breeds express that spark differently: Dobermans stare intensely; dachshunds have a playful bounce; miniature pinschers prance about like tiny Clydesdales. Jack has spunk. He is alternately charged up and obedient, and the fact that you’re never quite sure which version you’ll get makes his character compelling.
Australian shepherds love to show off. The dogs are tireless workers when employed in their traditional job and were selected to be bred for exactly this reason. It also makes them first-rate performers. Jack will sometimes do tricks spontaneously when he’s bored, or maybe hungry, in the hopes that Kimberly—or anyone else who might have treats or at least effusive praise—notices.
The most famous Aussie trainer of all time is surely Jay Sisler, an Idaho farm boy who came of age in the 1940s. Sisler was an aspiring Pony Express racer when a horse stepped on his leg and broke his ankle. While recuperating, he entertained himself by training his two Aussies, Stub and Shorty. The two learned all kinds of tricks and became famous when a promoter paid Sisler ten dollars to bring his act to a local rodeo. Soon Sisler was one of the world’s most famous animal trainers, and he and his dogs toured with Roy Rogers, playing to packed arenas, including Madison Square Garden. The dogs went on to star in several films, most notably the Disney movie Stub, The Best Cow Dog in the West, featuring a famous scene in which Stub chases Slim Pickens and rips off Slim’s pants from behind as he tries to scramble up a tree.
