by Josh Dean
Because Kimberly had already left to take the puppies home, Heather told me to go meet Mandy by the truck, where Jack was napping in his crate.
“Hi, Jack!” Mandy said as he shot up from his slumber and began to wiggle and then thrash with excitement. “Jack, stop.” She fixed him with a stare. “Let’s walk him.”
Within a few steps, she suspected he might have to poop. He’d gone three times already, I told her. “Stress,” she answered, and thirty seconds later he popped a squat and left a steaming pile in the grass. Mandy patted him on the head. “Good boy!” she said.
“Now he’ll relax,” she pronounced, and began to push on his side and topline, not firmly but not softly either. Jack stood there looking unbothered.
Mandy’s mother, father, and brother are all chiropractors, and she followed suit. “Only I hate people. I prefer animals.” Mandy’s card reads VETERINARY CHIROPRACTITIONER,* which she compares to a dental practitioner. She is certified in Veterinary Orthopedic Manipulation. “Vets give me the right to do this.”
I had distracted her from her work with my questions, and Jack began to wander off. “Jack!” she yelled. “Hang out, dude!”
There are, somewhat surprisingly, “quite a few” people like her out there. “But I’m probably one of the few that uses my hands.” Most veterinary chiropractitioners, she explained, use something called an activator; “it looks like a gun with a doorstop on the end. What they do is, they tap the vertebrae, and it’s supposed to make all the muscles jiggle and then relax. Then the bone goes where it belongs. I don’t find that always to be true. . . .”
Jack had begun to whimper a little. “I know, I know,” she said, and moved her hands to his head, where she commenced another series of adjustments. “Let me get your head on right. I know. Hi! It’s me, isn’t it? Did you just get it?” She soothed him with some baby talk, and he began to settle a little. “Come here, Jack. Let’s finish you. Right here. Stop. Jack!”
Don’t be offended, I told her. The only person I knew who could consistently make him stand still was Heather.
“Now, that’s good—stop! Stay. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.” And then, “No rolling in the dirt!” She coaxed him up. “Now you’re okay, I know.”
He showed little sign of settling.
“Actually, in about ten minutes he’ll feel drunk,” she said. This particular adjustment “gives them a head rush. That’s what brings their focus in.” Then to Jack, “This is your spot—let me fix it. This flattens out your topline.” The roached back is a common one among show dogs, she said; fortunately, it’s easily corrected.
What causes it?
“If I knew that, I’d be a billionaire and I’d do this for free.” But it’s not just dogs who need this, she said. “Everybody’s goes out of whack. I get adjusted at least once a month.”
She finished up and gave Jack a belly rub. “Where does Jack go?”
I pointed out his crate, and she returned him to it.
Mandy’s business isn’t exclusively for dogs. She sees cats and pigs, as well as goats and horses. “Horses are a little harder on my body,” she said. “Cows are the worst, especially after birthing if they can’t get up. It’s hard for me to move a hip if they’re lying down. My father was taught to use the rubber-mallet-and-two-by-four method. I have a two-by-four wrapped in lambskin so it’s nice and padded. I line it up and DOINK! it with a mallet.” This knocks the dislocated vertebra back into place.
“I have a group of chickens I work on,” she continued. “Their necks go out. Have you ever seen a chicken breed? It’s like rape. They grab the female’s neck. I had an ornamental chicken come in that got raped by a rooster. It twisted her neck so bad that her eyeball was looking up. She was so relieved, the next day she laid an egg.”
Mandy does have limits. A zoo recently asked her to work on an elephant, but she refused. “All I could picture was myself getting hurt. And then many other clients would be upset.”
Even before she was certified, Mandy used to observe and study her mom’s work. “I think the body always knows where the vertebrae should be, but sometimes the muscles won’t let the bones align. The body responds to movement, to age, to environment, to stress, or to chemicals. I help the body maintain balance.”
So what exactly did you just do to Jack? I wondered.
“I moved”—and she looked up and counted on her fingers—“two, three, four, eight different bones. It’s very fast, very quick, very effective. The faster I’m in and get it done, the faster they get back. Watch, he’ll be out cold in fifteen minute. They sleep like babies.”
Mandy explained that she knows how the skeleton is supposed to feel, so she feels along the spine for muscles that seem wrong and manipulates them to slip bones back into their proper places. “Some I have to move harder than others. With Jack we’ve gotten to the point where I don’t have to fight with his body.”
So it just feels as if a bone is out of place?
“I am feeling muscles, and they sometimes feel like a rubber band or a hose. Depends on which muscle is reacting. I work five layers down below their structural muscles—those are spinal muscles. I do knees, hips, toes, whatever. My lure coursers and racers”—meaning the speedy sight hounds—“they need their pasterns* done. A lot of the sight hounds flex at the pastern stop. Not all dogs use it.” One of her most unusual clients is a weight-pulling dog, a thirty-five-pound pit bull capable of moving three thousand pounds on a sled. “He came in to see me because he was stuck at eleven hundred pounds. But eight months later we’ve now broken three thousand. I think he’s close to being number one.”
Then there’s the Chihuahua with no front legs; it stands up on its hind legs and runs around. “If I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t have believed it. I put it down in my office, and the lady said you have to catch it. It took off across my office and looked like a flying squirrel. It was just this Hail Mary flying across my office. What it does is push itself up, using abdominal muscles, and then goes.”
Great Danes put on weight so quickly—six pounds a week when they’re young—that “they end up getting very knock-kneed. I palpate the socket. I’ve got ways to fix many things. Agility dogs will come in because they can’t hit a jump right. It’s their eyes. I can work an eye nerve that controls depth perception.”
How?
“It’s in the neck. Every bone in the spine feeds a nerve that goes to somewhere in the body. One of my favorite ways to describe chiropractic is to think of a garden. It’s required to have ten gallons of water every day. And your well has a hose that feeds the garden. If you put a rock on that hose, eventually the garden could wither and die. Let’s turn to the dog. The brain is the well and the spine is the hose. When the vertebrae move, it’s called a subluxation—that’s the rock. Their body’s the garden. I remove the rocks off the hose. That’s all I do.”
Jack’s situation was that he was playing too much Frisbee, she explained. “He would get his rear tucked under and leap up in the air. He’d rock his hips, so his topline had to come up—cause and effect. It’s called a roach. If you play Frisbee, keep it low. What I don’t want is for him to jump up and twist. It throws the body off.”
Mandy has no time for doubters. “People who say, ‘My dog doesn’t need it’—that’s ignorance. I have found one dog in all my years doing this who didn’t need it, and I did not charge the owner for touching her dog.”
Business was booming, Mandy said. And she’d never felt healthier.
“Because I’m balanced, I haven’t been sick since I had my nine-year-old. I don’t get colds.” Adjustments, she said, aren’t just physical. They’re therapeutic. “You flush out, you go to bed, and you feel great. It’s amazing the things that chiropractic does.”
By this point another client was waiting. It was Claudette, whose bloodhound Benny was one of Kevin’s specials last year. (He’s the one who descends from the dog owned by Christopher Guest’s character in Best in Show.) These days Claudette w
as more of a part-timer, and she’d brought one of Benny’s sons, Solo, for a test run—and, since she’d spied Mandy, also an adjustment. Claudette told me Mandy had worked wonders on many of her dogs. For Benny, it helped him fight his tendency to drop his tail in the ring.
“A lot of the dog-show stuff is not natural to them,” Mandy said. “We’re asking them to stand in a position that’s not comfortable.” She recalled the case of one of Claudette’s bloodhound bitches. “She didn’t want to poop. She hadn’t gone in like two or three days.”
Claudette nodded. “Mandy came over, did her magic-fingers thing, and said, ‘Go for a walk, and she’ll go in about five minutes,’” she recalled. “Five minutes later she went.”
I was with Mandy to this point; in fact, I was ready to sign up all the pets in the neighborhood. Then things got a little metaphysical.
“I’ve done a phenomenal amount of stuff to understand them,” she said, meaning the animals. “And what’s happened is, I can hear them. Like Jack—he came out and he was a little weird. I knew what to do because I could hear what he was saying. I could feel what he felt.”
Did she mean like Reiki* for dogs? I asked, intending it as kind of a joke.
“I’m through Reiki three,” she said.
It works?
“Wonderfully. What a difference it has made.”
I was quietly absorbing that fact when Claudette tapped me on shoulder and pointed into the truck, at the crate, where Jack had fallen sound asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Philadelphia
* * *
Remember, folks, he’s a show dog. He loves the applause.
—WAYNE FERGUSON, CHAIRMAN OF THE NATIONAL DOG SHOW AND EMCEE OF THE EVENT
* * *
On November 19, at 2:34 P.M., I was at lunch with the director of communications for the American Kennel Club when I felt the buzz of my phone vibrating in my pocket. While my lunch companion excused herself to go the restroom, I glanced at my phone and found the following message from Kimberly, who had sent it to both Kerry and me:
Jack finished his Grand Championship today by going Best of Breed over the number one and number three Aussies in the country! Wooohoooo!
First off, this was awesome news. It meant that Jack had finally gotten the elusive major that would complete his grand championship and that he had beaten the unbeatable Beyoncé in the process. Second, it turned out to not totally be the case. He did beat the country’s number-one and number-three dogs—one of whom was Beyoncé—but there were only ten dogs entered, so it wasn’t a major after all. The fact that these ten dogs included many of the best Australian shepherds in America, gathered in Philadelphia for one of the biggest shows in the country, didn’t change that fact. It was a huge win, but Jack still wasn’t a grand champion.
The next day I joined the party in Oaks, Pennsylvania, where the Kennel Club of Philadelphia was staging its annual cluster of shows that culminated with the self-proclaimed National Dog Show Presented by Purina, and taped by NBC to be broadcast on Thanksgiving.
“We will have America’s top dogs,” Wayne Ferguson, the Kennel Club’s president, told a local reporter. “A win at Philadelphia is considered one of dogdom’s best.”
The National Dog Show is probably the third-most-important show in the country after Westminster and Eukanuba, and it is as famous as it is thanks solely to a Eureka moment on the part of NBC Sports executive Jon Miller. Ten years ago Miller’s wife brought home the movie Best in Show, and he loved it. He was taken, he said, “with how entertaining the whole concept was,” and when he got to work, he assigned an intern to find out what the second-oldest dog show in America was, thinking that surely Westminster was oldest. The intern came back with surprising news: Westminster was the second-oldest show, and the oldest was one the Kennel Club of Philadelphia first staged in 1876.*
Miller called Ferguson, recruited Purina as a sponsor, and convinced his bosses to try a bold experiment: to air a dog show after the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The company’s research department expected the show do at best a 2.0 rating. It got a 7 and had a total audience of more than 19 million.
A decade later the show is a fixture on Thanksgiving Day and has attracted an average of 18.5 million viewers. And some of that success is owed to its hosts, Westminster’s David Frei and his color man, John O’Hurley, the host of Dancing with the Stars (as well as the actor who played J. Peterman on Seinfeld). When his friend Jon Miller called him with the offer, it was utterly out of the blue. “I answered the phone, and on the other end I heard WOOF-WOOF,” O’Hurley told me. “And that’s how it started.”
Ten years and two bestselling dog books later, O’Hurley says he’s “right in the middle of the dog world,” but that first year he was “a total neophyte.” O’Hurley was the perfect foil for Frei, and made his mark with quips like, “When the judge picks through hair on an English sheepdog and finds only one eye, it’s the wrong end.”
O’Hurley is still funny, playing the role of rube to Frei’s straight man, but he’s increasingly a dog man himself. One of his books stars a Maltese of his that lived to twenty—“One of the oldest dogs on record and a little drill sergeant until the end.”
If you are among the millions of Americans who tune in for the National Dog Show while picking turkey threads out of your teeth, you probably think it’s a haughty affair. Staged by the experienced TV sports operators of NBC, it has the look of a black-tie ball that happens to feature dogs. There is flattering light, purple bunting, and oversize vases of flowers. The reality is a little less velvety. If you pulled back on those cameras, out of the ring, over the low blue walls emblazoned with the logo of Purina, past the spectators, and through the thick black curtains that turn day into night—because it’s daytime, despite what it looks like—you’d find yourself in yet another large, charmless convention center. In this case the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center, in an office park just down the road from Valley Forge.
The National Dog Show doesn’t actually even happen until Saturday, but dogs and handlers arrive on scene Wednesday to primp for a four-day cluster that often attracts many of the nation’s top dogs;* a win on Saturday, after all, means national TV exposure.
Jack’s surprise win over Beyoncé, unfortunately, came on the first day, Thursday, which didn’t diminish it in any way. It just didn’t lead to TV. To get that he’d need to repeat the miracle over the weekend.
Kimberly arrived with some surprising news. She’d managed to get rid of most of the puppies. Two were in “pet homes” in Pennsylvania, and on Saturday she’d drive four more to the airport to ship off to Kerry, who had prospective homes for them out west. That left one. She had decided to keep Bodi.
She was still giddy from the previous day’s win. It was a highlight to take down Beyoncé under any circumstances, even if Jack had missed a major—and the grand championship—by a single absentee dog. Entries were too low on Friday as well, so to complete the title, Jack would have to beat Beyoncé again on either Saturday or Sunday.
Philadelphia is big in every way. The show is one of only six benched shows left on the dog-show circuit, making it popular with spectators, who swarm the floor ogling dogs. Unlike Westminster, which packs dogs into rows that barely allow room for spectators to pass one another without elbowing the dogs in the snout, the Philly show has the largest footprint of any dog show I’d visited. It wasn’t cramped at all.
Heather led Jack into the Aussie ring, and he took the first position in a line of eight lovely dogs. Kimberly said she was so certain in advance he’d have no chance that she didn’t even stick around to watch Jack’s win. She left early to try to beat the traffic.
“I thought maybe Beyoncé was out of coat,” she said when Heather told her about the win. “Heather said, ‘No, she looks phenomenal.’”
And she did—Beyoncé did have a coat befitting her name, shiny and thick and lustrous. Jack, too, was looking great. The white of his ruff shone nearly as m
uch as hers, even without the contrasting black hair.
Kimberly and I were watching from behind a pole, trying to stay out of Jack’s vision, and I was startled by a voice over my shoulder. It was Mandy.
“How’s he doing?” she asked.
“He beat the number one dog, who’s number one by like a billion points,” Kimberly said.
“Heather told me,” Mandy replied. “But she said he’s still not right. She had a list of things for me to work on.” That Heather, never satisfied.
Our grandfatherly judge was thorough. He was clearly not just going through the motions. Beyoncé’s movement was zippy—she wasn’t electric, like Jack, but she was confident. When running, her legs glide and nearly float.
Not surprisingly, she won, with Best Opposite going to Jack. For once no one was disappointed. “He was actually better today than yesterday,” Heather said to Kimberly, and then she gave me a disapproving look. “You missed yesterday. Beyoncé has lost like five times all year”—out of nearly 150 shows.
I said that I couldn’t believe they’d beaten such a dominant dog and then didn’t win, let alone place, in the group. Heather admitted that she’d made the mistake of thinking this very thing and saying it out loud, thus jinxing herself. “Nothing’s for granted, Josh. You just never know. Put that in your book. You just never know.”
After beating Jack on Friday, Beyoncé went on to win the Herding Group over a top-notch field of dogs that included Roy, the shaggy Gandalf look-alike that was still dominating America’s herding dogs. (He was in his second year as the country’s number-one herding dog, in fact.) Winning a group early in a show cluster has some unstated benefits, primarily that the dog is on display twice more for all the judges, who gather for the groups and Best in Show in a special section with padded seats, snacks, and champagne. It’s unusual for a dog to win a group, go on to compete for Best in Show, then lose the following day in its breed. And this didn’t happen to Beyoncé. She won the breed on Saturday, solidifying her appearance on national TV and validating Jamie Clute’s rare trip north.
