by Josh Dean
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Deep into the Heart of Texas
* * *
She doesn’t know how lucky she is. Her first-ever show dog and she gets this?
—SPECTATOR AT THE ASCA NATIONAL SPECIALTY, IN WACO, SPEAKING ABOUT KIMBERLY AND JACK
* * *
The plan, as much as there was one, had been for Jack to take September off to grow coat, lose flab, and get his mojo back, but the nature of show entries (which require a decision weeks in advance) and her ongoing consternation over whether to take Jack to the ASCA Nationals in Waco (which would cost a bundle) meant that Kimberly entered Jack in only a single weekend of AKC shows between mid-August and October. With all the excitement over the puppies, the time had just flown by.
The cluster at Wrightstown, Pennsylvania, was the first time Heather had seen Jack in over a month, and she declared the weekend “phenomenal.” Facing the year’s deepest field, Jack took the breed the first day over ten specials, including, as Kimberly pointed out, “that beautiful bitch Aster”—the country’s number-two female and the third-ranked Aussie overall. The next day he went Best of Opposite to Aster, and “it could have gone either way,” Heather said. As she told Kimberly, “There’s no shame in that.”
Jack’s harshest critic seemed satisfied that his sometimes reluctant owner had followed her instructions. “I think she stopped Frisbeeing him, so his topline looks better. His coat is coming back in, and surprise—she’s giving him Dyna-Coat again. Everything I told her to be doing, she’s finally doing, and it’s coming all together. It’s just a little frustrating that she didn’t do this before.”
Heather wasn’t quite ready to declare him 100 percent back—to the level he’d been at Westminster, which was Heather’s high-water mark for Jack—but she was pleased. He could still use a series of adjustments, she noted. “But I’m a lot happier. Let’s just say that. This is why people pay us to do what we’re doing. Part of it is the guidance of it. I want him to be successful, too.”
As parents of an athlete often hunger for the approval of his coach, so did Kimberly seem to be buoyed by Heather’s enthusiasm with regard to Jack. Hearing a handler she obviously respected speak so positively about her dog, particularly after the lows of late summer, was enough to reenergize Kimberly, and as September turned to October, she was back to believing that Jack needed to pursue his destiny as a show dog.
Kerry, too, seemed to be feeling good. Other than directing the wheres and whens of breeding, she hadn’t asked for much in return for sharing the burden of Jack’s costs. But she’d made it clear, on and off throughout the year, that she hoped Kimberly might bring Jack to the ASCA Nationals in Waco. Though Kerry often enters AKC events and recognizes how important that is in a dog’s overall value, she is at heart more of an ASCA person. This isn’t unusual among Aussie breeders, because it is where the breed was truly born, and in California especially, Kerry was active in ASCA; she was even a judge.
“I think if we can get him to Nationals, we can kick some ass,” she told me in August, and when Kimberly finally agreed at the end of September, Kerry was thrilled. She admitted, after that fact, that she’d paid his entry fees months before, just in case.
Because Jack wasn’t an ASCA champion* and because the organization does not recognize AKC titles (or vice versa), the experience at Nationals would require starting over. As an unfinished dog, Jack would have to win a class in order to have a shot at Best of Breed, and at the Nationals even the classes were stacked with top dogs. For the main event, the actual National (which takes place on the final day of a week of shows), Kerry had considered her options and entered him in Open Blue Merle instead of Bred by Exhibitor, because the latter, she said, was the hardest of all to win; it was where breeders introduced their future stars. And though Jack was very much Wyndstar’s future star, Kerry wanted to maximize her chances and avoid as many of the best young dogs as possible.
Being a good and dutiful husband, Don drove Kerry’s RV two days across California, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas in convoy with another RV filled to the brim with the Churchill family—Kerry’s good friends and frequent buyers of her dogs—while Kerry flew in and hopped a cab to the event’s site. By the time she arrived at the Waco Fairgrounds, her shade tent was up, her ex-pens were out, and the RV was hooked up to power and comfortably chilled. Don, however, had already flown home to take over care of the brood.
Kimberly and I were to fly in the same evening, from Newark. Which is how I found myself at the Continental Airlines PetSafe desk at 7:30 A.M. on a Thursday, preparing for my first cross-country commercial flight with a show dog.
There are easier ways to do it. One of the top dogs of 2009, an affenpinscher named Taser, traveled largely by private jet. But he was owned by the family that had invented the nonlethal weapon made famous in a thousand episodes of Cops, so there you go. There’s also Pet Airways, a start-up out of Delray Beach, Florida, that is America’s “first pet-only airline.” Pet Airways operates a single nineteen-seat twin-engine Beechcraft to fly its cabinful of pets to and from nine U.S. cities. Says the Web site: “On Pet Airways, your pets aren’t packages, they’re ‘pawsengers!’”*
For the proletarian crowd, it’s commercial aviation or a very long drive. So we left Jack in the hands of a friendly woman at the Continental desk, who passed him on to a porter, who wheeled our boy off on a cart along with a black Lab, six beagles, and a mutt with the raspy bark of a dog who’d had his bark softened via vocal-cord surgery.*
By the time we finally located Continental’s cargo office on the other end, in a far corner of the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport’s sprawling plot, Jack had been on the ground for two hours. Kimberly was understandably worried that he’d be scared and in dire need of a pee, but when we pulled up in a cab, there he was, walking happily in the grass out front along with an airline employee. “He’s beautiful. I was hoping you wouldn’t show up,” the woman said, half joking. “We’ve eaten, we’ve watered, and we’ve peed on everything possible.” She patted him on the head. “Good luck, Jack.”
Driving with a loose Jack is never easy, and on Kimberly’s advice I attempted to placate him by stopping at Wendy’s for chicken nuggets. This worked, for approximately the two minutes it took him to devour all twelve of them. Then he resumed his efforts to distract me from the task at hand, driving, by repeatedly sneaking up and thrusting his nose under whichever arm was resting on the window ledge or center console. “He’s a noodge,” Kimberly said, and laughed at me.*
Jack is also agitated by turn signals—or perhaps the more accurate way to describe his relationship to them is that the sound excites him greatly—and if you are driving him in a car with GPS, you’d best mute it; either sound will induce an incessant, high-pitched, excited whine. Kimberly’s son first noticed this quirk when Jack was a puppy, and the dog has never outgrown it. Her best guess at an explanation is that he’s come to associate the sound of the turn signal with the act of stopping, at which time he can get out and do something more interesting. But I am subject to my own habits and was unable to override a lifetime of driving behavior to appease the quirks of a dog. Over and over the pattern repeated itself: I would click the signal to turn or change lanes, Jack would whine, and Kimberly would say, “See, I told you.” Fortunately, most of the drive to Waco is a ruler-straight strip of interstate highway. I picked the fast lane and stuck with it.
The thirty-seventh annual ASCA National wasn’t expected to be one of the bigger editions of this yearly event. Still, it attracted at least five hundred and maybe as many as a thousand Aussies to the plains of central Texas. No one could say for sure what the precise number was, because unlike the AKC’s Aussie National, which is primarily a conformation event, the ASCA National is more of an all-arounder, and many dogs were double- and triple-entered in events that included herding,* obedience, agility, and conformation. No matter the number, it was easily the largest number of Australian shepherds that would gather in one location in
2010, and to see them all assembled on a single fairgrounds was to glimpse a startling array of colors and variations even within the four basic styles of dog.
Despite the sea of RVs parked around the grounds, most owners who attend the National stay in hotels and keep their dogs in horse stalls in a vast barn where livestock is housed and judged during fairs. It was easily the size of a Walmart, this barn, filled with row after row of stalls, each housing one kennel’s worth of dogs—and in the case of some especially frugal folks, even the owners themselves, who’d pitched tents on the loamy dirt and straw floor. Which kennel, exactly, was which was revealed by decorations; the door and outer walls of the stalls were festooned with posters, placards, ribbons, trophies, and, often, a bowl of gratis candy.*
“You’re gonna see all types here,” Kerry whispered as she led us on a tour of the barn. The primary division, she said, was between “big, overdone dogs” and “skinny dogs with very little coat.” The former were bred and groomed for conformation, and this would include Jack. The latter were “Aussies looking like Aussies are supposed to,” if your idea of an Aussie is dog that works for a living on a farm. Kerry said that at the USASA national—that’s the AKC specialty for Aussies, where Beyoncé was the two-time defending champion—you’ll see “great big pouf balls”; here the predominant style was a “rangier” dog that looked as if it had wandered through some briar patches on its way over from the ranch. Working people tend to think conformation dogs are too big and soft and wouldn’t know a sheep from a Bedlington terrier; some conformation people consider working dogs to be scrawny mutts.
“Jack’s too AKC, I think,” Kimberly fretted as we walked past stall after stall of dogs like this. “He looks so different. That could be good or bad.”
The more we surveyed dogs in the barn, though, the more I realized that dividing the animals into just two basic types was a vast oversimplification. There was, in fact, great variety among the dogs—and not just the variance between the larger, more heavily coated AKC-type dogs and the leaner, working-type ASCA dogs. There were dogs with more “stop” (the flat spot where snout meets skull) and others whose foreheads were on more of a slant. There were skinny dogs with dalmatian markings and no brown or tan, one completely black dog that was almost wolflike, and many “bicolors,” which are fully acceptable, I learned, in both AKC and ASCA but which I’d never seen before because they wouldn’t stand a chance at AKC shows. Just when I thought I knew everything about Australian shepherds, I realized I knew nothing. ASCA and AKC will likely never merge, and a hundred years from now it’s sadly possible the two dog types may have diverged so wildly that they’ll no longer look like the same breed.
* * *
BEDLINGTON TERRIER
An AKC show catalog is pretty straightforward. Some of the names might seem ridiculous, but there are only a few titles to dress them up with. The vast majority are prefixed only by Ch (and now GCh). The ASCA catalog, on the other hand, is a regular alphabet soup. Because so many dogs pursue titles in multiple events, the dogs’ names are surrounded. Working titles come at the front, followed by the Ch, then the dog’s name, then after it come obedience and agility titles, and the end result is listings that look like lines of Korean War-era code. For instance, this one, pulled at random from the Waco show catalog: ATCH-II Ch Zarra’s Lone Star Cowboy CD GS-N-OP GS-O-OP GS-E-SP JS-N-SP JS-O-SP JS-E-SP RS-N-OP RS-E-SP. Your eyes would glaze over if I explained every letter in detail, but the sum of it is that ol’ Lone Star is a champion in agility and conformation and has multiple titles in obedience and stock. He is a very well-rounded dog.
Perhaps the most coveted title at the ASCA National is the Most Versatile Aussie, or MVA, and it is awarded to the dog who does best in all four major categories: conformation, stock, agility, and obedience. This requires that a dog be pretty enough to be named Best of Breed, fast and nimble enough to complete agility courses, obedient enough to follow complicated and nuanced commands, and brave and experienced enough to herd ducks, sheep, and cows.
An ASCA show is also the only place you’ll see spayed and neutered dogs competing in conformation, warranting separate categories for “altered” (fixed) and “intact,” and the only place you’ll find the 1970s singing sensation Toni Tennille—one-half of the 1970s sensation Captain and Tennille—a stalwart of the southwestern Aussie community who’d arrived in Waco in a black Chevy Suburban to enter her altered Aussie bitch in conformation; her Captain (and husband), alas, had stayed home in Arizona.
It’s not unheard of to see professional handlers at ASCA events, but it’s certainly more exception than rule. Most dogs are handled by their owners. Jack would be no exception. Had Kimberly given her enough notice, Heather could probably have been available to come to Waco, but this type of special service would have cost fifteen hundred dollars for a day of her time, plus travel expenses. Heather and Kevin do handle at several AKC national specialties a year—the Bernese mountain dog show is a major event on their calendar—but no other breed in their truck has a rival organization that would stage its own specialty show. And since ASCA handlers tend to be owners (or at least breeders), the option wasn’t even considered. There was no discussion. Kerry would handle Jack.
Which is why, on the morning of the week’s first preshow—there are three of them building up to the National—you’d have been hard-pressed to find anyone in Waco more nervous than Kerry. The previous night she had spent a half hour on the phone with Heather talking strategy and was now working from a page of hastily scrawled notes, some of which were illegible. Those she could read, she repeated aloud until they were firmly etched in her memory:
1. Don’t let him get into a match of wills—he will try to test you.
2. Don’t let anyone play with him near the ring.
3. No baby talk. No praise—specifically no “Good boy.”
4. He responds well to “with me” (which means heel) and “back” (take a step back, especially during a free stack) and a “tch-tch” sound that works in place of food when baiting.
In the end Jack wasn’t awful for Kerry, but he wasn’t great either. He mostly cooperated fine on the movement portions but fidgeted during the stack. Still, he made the cut and was given fourth out of twenty-three dogs, good enough for his very first ASCA ribbon and hardly a bad showing.
Kerry, however, wasn’t at all satisfied. She exited the ring swiftly, with her head down, her lips pursed, and her dog on a very short leash. ASCA was her realm, and she wasn’t used to having a dog from her kennel misbehave on her watch. I told her that compared to what I’d seen at some shows, Jack had actually been pretty good for her. “Pretty good is not what I want out of this boy. These are important people, and they are paying attention.” Between those lines lies the explanation for why the ASCA National is such a big deal to Kerry. It is the one and only time in a given year when all (or nearly all) of the top breeders and kennels come together to scout dogs for breeding. If Jack impressed, his stock as a stud dog would rise.
The judge really liked Jack, Kerry said, but he also noticed every misstep. “He told me he was a beautiful dog. He also said, ‘He a young dog. His feet are all over the place.’” That snub stung. “I wanted to say, ‘First Award of Merit at Westminster.’” She brushed a wisp of red bangs from her forehead. “But I didn’t. You can’t say that.”
For the second preshow, Kerry changed strategy. She preferred the judge working in Bred By Exhibitor and so entered Jack there, against even stiffer competition. And again he took fourth. For an ASCA unknown, these were encouraging results. At the least it said he belonged. But he could be better.
“Kerry is disappointed,” Kimberly whispered as we watched her lead Jack out of the ring. And then added, as if I hadn’t spent the past year attending shows with her, that the results didn’t affect her. “I’m not that competitive.”
The main reason Heather has always badgered Kimberly about keeping Jack in competition week in and week out, rather than entering most
ly shows convenient to his owner’s schedule (because his owner likes to have him home as much as possible), is that she thinks he gets better as his comfort level increases. Over a cluster of shows, Heather says, Jack always improves.
Except in Waco. Jack’s third and final preshow before the National was a fiasco. Going into it, his prospects seemed good. The judge, according to Kerry, “was really into cutesy.” And, Kimberly said proudly, “it’s hard to get a more cutesy face than Jack’s.” To avoid distracting her dog, she said this from our hiding spot, behind a woman with a walker in a hallway adjacent to the ring. In an exception to Heather’s theory, Kimberly had a feeling that Jack’s willingness to work with Kerry was about to regress. She had, as owners do, an intuition about her dog, and it told her that Kerry had gotten as much cooperation as she had so far only because Jack had been jet-lagged. But now, with two solid nights of rest under his belt, Kimberly feared trouble. “I think he’s going to be the Jack I expected him to be yesterday.”
And her maternal instincts were spot on; out in the ring, Jack was giving Kerry fits. “He’s being so bad,” Kimberly said only seconds after the start, and her spirits sank as her dog failed to make the cut. Already she was working out a justification. “I think Jack’s the kind of dog who will tell you when he’s had enough,” she said, then suggested that this was precisely what had happened in Middleburg, when Heather’s patience finally broke.
Kerry was downtrodden. She never knew what hit her. When the judge, a young woman no older than thirty with the countenance of an owl, dismissed Jack, she whispered to Kerry, “At least you can take him outside now.”
“He and I have some work to do,” Kerry said as we all headed for the RV. Kimberly was sullen.
