by Josh Dean
Dottie didn’t set out to become a dog-show person. (I’ve found that with the exception of people who were born into the life, it wasn’t a childhood dream for most.) She had always admired a Great Dane owned by the head of her school’s English department, and when the time was right, she sought one out from a friend. “I’d only ever had one dog, a boxer, and that wasn’t quite big enough for me. That’s why I went to Great Danes—they’re plenty big enough.”
That first Dane, a bitch named Penny, came from a show home, and so it was kind of inevitable that Dottie would end up showing. She discovered quickly that handling wasn’t her thing. “I wasn’t comfortable in the ring,” she explained. “For three years I was president of the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English, which encompasses forty thousand teachers. I could get up in front of them and it didn’t bother me one ounce worth. But put me in a ring with the dog and I was a freaking nervous wreck.”
Dottie got her start in stewarding because she thought she might like to judge, and every judge must steward while pursuing a provisional license. That was fifteen years ago. “I can help sixteen times as many people by stewarding as I ever could by judging,” Dottie explained. “When you judge, you have Winners Dog, Winners Bitch, and Best of Breed. Those people are your best friends. And everyone else thinks you did a real shitty job. And do I need that at my age? I don’t think so. I think I have found my niche.”
She certainly doesn’t miss breeding Great Danes, “which is honest-to-God hard work.” For two weeks a breeder of Danes has to sit with the puppies twenty-four hours a day, almost literally. “You can’t leave the bitch with the puppies, because she’ll lie on one and kill it. Not intentionally, but they’re just too big. So what you have is a mattress beside the whelping box, and you live there. Every three hours you take the puppies out of the box, bring the mother down, put her in the box, put them on her, let them feed, take them out, take her out, clean the box again, and put them back in. You do that every three hours for two weeks.”
Because being a ring steward is just a step—an annoying step for most ambitious types—toward becoming a judge, Dottie is surely one of the (if not the) most experienced stewards around. “I think I’m real close to the oldest. I’m seventy-eight. I’m so close to eighty you can spit on it.”
She doesn’t travel alone, or even drive, to shows anymore. She shares a motor home with Doug and Kris Cash. Doug is chief of police in another Pennsylvania town but moonlights as the Guy in Charge of Parking. He is hired by the local kennel club to manage the flotilla of RVs and box trucks that descend upon the local fairground/convention center.
Dottie doesn’t count the number of shows she stewards in a year, but for most of the year it’s one weekend on, one weekend off. In the summer, though, she packs the schedule; it could be four weekends a month. The truth is, she could work every weekend—she’s particularly valuable, as she works both the breed ring and the group ring, where mistakes are common. Because handlers work with multiple dogs, they’re constantly putting on and pulling off armbands, and it’s easy to show up with, say, a Great Dane while wearing the number of a Doberman. Dottie’s job is to check the dog against the number in the catalog. “It’s kind of important what I do, and I take great satisfaction in doing it right.” She also makes sure the judges record their decisions. And, of course, she keeps the candy bowls stocked.
Dottie can’t remember exactly how long she’s been supplying sugar to America’s dog shows, but the story goes back at least as far as the early 1970s, when she realized she was bad at handling and hired a professional to work with her Danes. Like many handlers, hers used liver to bait the dogs, and also like many handlers she stored this bait in her mouth when it wasn’t in use, and one day she came out of the ring with pursed lips and said, “Do you have anything to take this liver taste out of my mouth?” Dottie didn’t, but that would be the last time she was unprepared to deal with such a crisis. She arrived at the next show with a package of the green gummies known as spearmint leaves and put them out in a little container.
“They went within fifteen minutes,” Dottie recalled. “So I increased the number”—and then also the kinds of candy—“from spearmint leaves to orange slices to cherry slices to little black bears,” all of them gummies. If you sell only white cars, no one asks for black, but as soon as you offer white and black, someone wants yellow, and next thing you know, you’re selling cars in ten colors. Requests poured in. Not everyone was satisfied with gummies. “Somebody wanted chocolate, so I started bringing chocolate. Now I don’t do chocolate in the summer”—it melts and makes a mess of her bowls—“but any other time of the year there is a container of chocolate and a container of gummies.”
Dottie now arrives at shows with a rolling suitcase full of candy bags bought from one particular Giant supermarket near her home. She’s such a voracious consumer of bulk candy that she has the cell-phone number of the candy’s distributor, in case the store is running low. For a three-day weekend, Dottie spends about a hundred twenty dollars on candy, which just about cancels out the thirty-five to forty dollars she earns per day for serving as ring steward (not to mention gas and food).
Occasionally someone slips her a twenty, she’s received “innumerable thank-you notes,” and the idea of a donation box is often raised. “The AKC would have a stroke,” she said, and laughed. “And not only that, they’d want either a cut or the whole thing.”
Money, though, has nothing to do with it. “I not only enjoy doing it—they so enjoy having it,” Dottie said. “I’m retired; my children are all over the place, I’m seventy-eight years old. Why not spend the money I have? If I didn’t have the candy, I might as well not go.”
Only one question remained. What is the Candy Lady’s favorite candy? “I’m not a candy person,” she said, then qualified her answer. “But every once in a while, in the middle of a long afternoon, I’ll eat one of the mini Milky Ways.”
The following day’s array of Aussies was even weaker—it was a rough-and-tumble, snipey field that an in-form Jack would have trounced easily. Only a single dog looked worthy of him—or of the him I still had in mind: a red merle that won Winners Dog out of the classes. Figuring it couldn’t hurt to mix things up, Heather sent Kevin in with Jack, and the experiment backfired badly—he galloped into the ring and hopped onto Kevin in plain sight of the judge. A man, Kevin later told me, “who doesn’t tolerate misbehavior.”
With his thinner coat, Jack did look tall and leggy; from the front he was fluffy enough, but the back looked like another animal entirely. A motley-looking black tri bitch won, to great applause (she was apparently a hometown girl), and the Best Opposite went to the red merle. Once more Jack was shut out.
Back at the setup, Heather and Kevin didn’t even bother to mask their disappointment. They were in agreement that they didn’t want to keep showing a lackluster dog, and the truth was, I think, they’d have kicked him out of the truck sooner if not for me and my notebook.
“I have homework for your dog,” Heather told me. “Write this down.”
This was her prescription:
1. Twenty to thirty minutes of biking five times a week.
2. He needs to get his thyroid checked out.
3. He needs to get on a supplement for his coat.
4. A chiropractor should be adjusting him twice a month.
She and Kimberly had already discussed giving him a break from shows. “If he just goes away for a month, then comes back the same, it’s a waste,” she said. “But this could be an opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with the dog. But right now he’s in terrible shape, and it starts with conditioning.”
She pointed out that she was not trying to pick on Jack. In her capacity as dog coach-manager-trainer, she gives instructions to any client who’s got an out-of-shape dog, and as proof she asked a Bernese owner sitting nearby if she hadn’t been right when she’d asked the woman to have her dog lose some weight. “I thought that was crazy,” said the ow
ner. “But she dropped twenty pounds and we started winning.”
“It’s one thing to lose to good dogs, but we’re losing to crappy dogs,” Heather said. “And that’s not good for anyone.”
I promised to relay this information but pointed out, again, that Jack wasn’t actually my dog. Kimberly lived two hours from me and was about to be caring for a houseful of puppies she never planned to breed. She was more than a little distracted.
Heather shrugged. “It’s like seeing the doctor—you can either listen to what he says and get better or ignore it and don’t.”
Kimberly, as I’d suspected, wasn’t entirely receptive. Her first response was that Jack is just fragile, and she seemed to be taking Heather’s criticisms personally—as parents of troubled schoolkids often take teachers’ observations. “I know Jack, and he can be emotional,” she told me. His hyper persona, she explained, tended to mask any signs of stress, but she could tell that he wasn’t his usual self. She was certain the puppies were the cause of it.
She said she’d been finding clumps of hair around the house and assumed they came from Summer. “Pregnant dogs drop hair right and left.” But when she rousted Jack from a nap on the hassock for a recent bath, she noticed that the hassock was covered in hair. “He’s always had the nicest, easiest, most cooperative coat. It’s nice and smooth.” She was clearly upset that her dog was not in great shape. “I’m going to get him back to where he was.”
She insisted that he “hates” the Taste of the Wild food that Heather prefers, but she admitted that the Purina FortiFlora—a dietary supplement for digestive problems that Heather had insisted upon—was working. It hardened his stool.
And she refused to give up Frisbee—“He loves Frisbee”—but said that she would schedule adjustments with the chiropractor to correct his topline, which she admitted was looking rounded and out of form.
She also planned to get back to what she called the basics. “Sometimes I think when a dog is losing is that much, you overthink the answers. My plan is to work on the diet. Work on the coat. Work on the mind. He needs to be happy. I want to take him back to agility. He loves agility.”
Her pride was definitely wounded, and she was pulled in two directions. On the one hand she worried that showing a dog in bad shape would reflect poorly on her and Heather, as well as Kerry, as Jack’s breeder. On the other hand, she was worried that taking him off the circuit for too long would damage his reputation and the progress he’d made on his focus by working with Heather. “I want him happy and feeling good again,” she explained. “I want to get him back to how he was before.”
I was getting the sense that she might be dancing around something here; it just seemed like she’d at least sort of decided to give up on him. And that Kerry, who had the most to lose by having a dog from her kennel show poorly, was also thinking the same thing.
Kimberly’s words, though, said otherwise. “What I want to do more than anything is redeem myself with my peers. I think he’s been out too long not looking good. He does not look like he used to. So let’s take him away for a little bit. Work hard on what we can control, get back to where he’s stunning in the ring.”
As proof that she wasn’t giving up, Kimberly said she’d decided to send Jack to the Australian Shepherd Club of America Nationals in Waco, Texas, in October, and that she was “talking to Heather” about the year-end Eukanuba AKC National Championships, which is open only to the top twenty-five dogs in each breed or to any dog that achieved its grand championship. At this point, however, neither of those was a certainty.
“I really think if we give him a proper break and don’t rush him back, he will come out smoking again,” she said. “He’s a young dog.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Hey, Puppies!
* * *
Being a parent is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love, you can get a puppy.
—BARBARA WALTERS
* * *
Jack spent Labor Day as he’d spent most of his first few weeks off—at home, alternately sleeping, running, playing Frisbee, seeking out toys, frantically observing action outside the house (in particular the comings and goings of his favorite neighbor, Garth, a Yorkshire terrier), and harassing Summer and his first brood of puppies. No one can ever truly know if a male dog is actually aware that he’s sired a litter, and you wouldn’t tend to make any inferences based on Jack’s behavior toward the six sightless lumps living in a homemade wooden whelping box in the front room of his house. Certainly he was curious, even more so after his former mate nipped at his nose every time he poked his head into the box.
The puppies came, in the end, right on schedule, with signs of labor starting at 9:15 P.M. on August 26. On back-to-back days, Kimberly had stayed up most of the night, compulsively checking Summer’s temperature, and by 7:00 A.M. of the morning of the twenty-sixth, it had dropped a full two degrees in twelve hours, signaling that labor was imminent. Allowing herself only short breaks for food or to use the bathroom, Kimberly sat vigil at the whelping box, and at 10:00 P.M. she noticed a pool of liquid; Summer’s water had broken. After two hours of contractions had produced no puppies, Kimberly called her vet and was told to bring Summer in as a precaution, so that they could try to speed things along. (The worry being that a puppy could be stuck in the birth canal.) At 1:35 A.M., after a calcium shot, the first puppy emerged. It was a red merle boy, and “he was gorgeous,” Kimberly said.
As things seemed to be progressing nicely, the vet sent them all home to let nature finish the job. Three more puppies came by 4:30 A.M., and then labor stalled. Kimberly called the vet and was told to give it time, and two full hours later the last two emerged, with the sixth and final puppy taking the longest of all. “That one took a little work,” Kimberly said, “but she is breathtaking.” As she did with each, Summer licked the pup’s face clean, swallowed the placenta, and nudged it toward her teats. Confident they were all healthy and breathing, Kimberly finally headed to bed at 9:00 A.M., and when she left the room, she looked back and smiled. All six were nursing.
I saw the puppies for the first time just two weeks to the day after their arrival. They were tiny, furry, adorable things that were already starting to develop personalities. In order of appearance (on planet Earth), they were:
1. Cork, a red merle boy so named, according to Kimberly, “because he got stuck and held up the process.”
2. Little Jack, or LJ, a blue merle with a “silver coat” and black eye paint, named for his resemblance to Papa.
3. Breeze, a black tri girl named “because she came in ten minutes” and because of the expression “summer breeze.”
4. Bodi, a big black tri boy who was already active and friendly at two weeks, despite having no sight or hearing and only limited smell.
5. Jackson, a red merle boy. Get it? Jack’s son.
6. Patience, a black tri girl who finally came twelve hours after Cork’s emergence from the womb and who Kim had been told to beware might be stillborn. Hence her name.
I picked them up, but only briefly, and they squeaked so quietly that it was almost inaudible. At this age puppies can be handled, though it should be kept to a minimum. By four weeks, when they’ve entered what trainers call the “early socialization phase,” it’s actually quite important to handle them often and to start broadening their horizons. A dog in its second month needs to be exposed to all manner of stimuli, in particular those things you’ll expect it to encounter, and be unfazed by, later—other pets, farm animals, and especially things that move but are not alive, such as fans, sprinklers, vacuums, and cars. You also need to show them that people won’t always look like you, and that’s okay. The dog-psychology expert Stanley Coren notes, “As a person, you recognize that children, men with beards, men or women wearing hats, people in floppy raincoats, people wearing sunglasses, senior citizens, and people with canes, crutches, or wheelchairs are all humans. To a dog, however, each of these appears very different, moves differently, s
eems larger or smaller, with odd outlines and perhaps unreadable expressions.”
At this stage in Jack’s puppies’ lives, when they still resembled guinea pigs more than dogs, it was also a little early to know which ones might develop into show dogs like their dad. Breeze was the only puppy born with what appeared to be obvious show imperfections—the white on her ear wasn’t necessarily a disqualification, but it was an indicator that she wouldn’t be show quality. “The others are at least show quality in terms of markings,” Kimberly was happy to report.
Jack’s slump had caused him to plummet in the rankings, and the hiatus wasn’t going to help. As of August 31, he was barely hanging on, at number twenty, and there were just a handful of options in October for him to even attempt to win points and solidify his spot in the top twenty-five by the first week of November, when the qualification period for Eukanuba closed. That marquee show had been on Kimberly’s wish list, and a goal of Heather’s, since Jack first started showing promise back in January. It was, other than Westminster, the most important and prestigious show of the year.
“We fell four places, from sixteen to twenty, in the last thirty days,” Kimberly told me. “We need to hold five places in forty-five days! Gonna be really, really close.” There was, of course, one wild card: If Jack could achieve his grand championship, finally, that, too, would qualify him for the show. By this point he had more than enough points for that title, but only one of the three required majors. “If we can get two majors,” she said hopefully, “He’ll be a grand champion.”
