by Josh Dean
Adam’s biggest claim to the smooth fox crown was the fact that he won the specialty in 2010, but even that has an asterisk. Dodger’s team skipped it, Wheeler said, because “they did not think the judge was favorable.” To add a final dash of confusion, “Adam skipped the all-terrier show in Long Beach, in June, which Dodger won, for the same reason.”
Pushed for a conclusion, Wheeler told me this: “Both Adam and Dodger are wonderful show dogs, but I have no problem saying that I think that Dodger is the better show dog.” And then hedged his bets with this: “Is he the better smooth fox? I’ll leave that to those that think such things are important.”
In a follow-up he noted that my interpretation of momentum—that a show dog on a winning streak can’t be stopped because no judge wants to look dumb—wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Momentum simultaneously creates a backlash from the competition, which can work the politics to help build opposition. He said, in fact, that Dodger’s owners asked him “not to make a big deal about him closing in on the all-time breed record, because they feared that there would be a movement to keep him from getting the record.
“By the way, how can anyone claim that the all-time breed winner (and he is only three years old) is not a great representative of the breed? A breed which, as I have pointed out, is the epitome of the show dog?”
Beats me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Go West, Young Jack
* * *
Now tell me, which of these dogs would you like to have as your wide receiver on your football team?
—FRED WILLARD, AS BUCK LAUGHLIN, IN Best in Show
* * *
A few minutes before 8:00 A.M., the PA inside the Long Beach Convention Center clicked on and a man’s voice interrupted the thrum of the room. “Welcome to the eleventh annual AKC/Eukanuba National Championship,” he said, and then “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung, live, by a man in an ill-fitting suit. Blow dryers did not cease for the occasion, but at least most people stopped and removed hats and stared toward the singer, or toward where they thought he might be. Depending where a particular handler was stationed, that might be hundreds of yards and thousands of dogs away.
Outside, the Long Beach Convention Center had been draped in hot pink—the official color of Eukanuba, the pet-food manufacturer and title sponsor whose marketing dollars have paid off so well that the brand is now shorthand for the event, in the way that Kleenex is for facial tissue.
For the 2010 edition of the invitation-only show, some twenty-five hundred dogs from forty-nine states and forty countries had arrived to compete for $225,000 in prize money, the year’s largest purse, and the second-most-coveted all-breed title after Westminster. A show dog’s career can be made by a Best of Breed ribbon at Eukanuba, to say nothing of a group win or placement, and in some years the competition draws more top dogs within each breed than even Westminster.
Jack’s qualification had nearly gone down to the wire. But when the closing date for entries rolled around, a month before the show, his late surge had kept him in the top twenty-five and secured his place in California. Which was fortunate because Kimberly’s fallback—that Jack would get in via his grand championship (for 2010 only, the AKC invited all grand champions)—didn’t pan out, as Jack remained a major short. Nonetheless, this one-time provision explained how there were thirty-one Aussies entered. And the glaring absence of Beyoncé meant that every one of them had a chance.
The two-day National Championship didn’t begin until Saturday, but the convention center began filling with dogs on Wednesday, when the so-called Dog Hair and Eggnog Cluster of preshows took place. Since Kerry lives only an hour or so north of the site, she had driven down that morning to enter another of her dogs—a less accomplished red merle named Bailey—and to stake out a prime RV spot close to the center’s back entrance, as well as a swath of space for grooming inside the professional handlers’ tent out back. For the duration of the preshows, she shared that space with Karen Churchill and her daughters, all three of whom were competing in juniors.
Karen, who we’d gotten to know quite well in Waco, was the first familiar face I spotted on Friday, when Kimberly and I arrived to scout the venue and the other top Aussies that had come early for the practice. She pointed us to a couple of the top West Coast dogs that we’d never seen back East and in particular singled out a red merle. It was Rowan, the red tri who’d stolen Jack’s win at Westminster. “That’s your competition,” she said, but added, “I think Jack will do well.”
“It all depends,” Kimberly said, failing to finish the thought. “Wait until you see him with Heather. She brings out the best in him.”
What Kimberly didn’t add was that circumstances had conspired to seriously complicate things for Jack, who had a tenuous hold on proper ring etiquette even at the best of times. The lesser of the two complications was that Kerry wanted to show him at a nearby ASCA show on Saturday, less than a day before his breed competition at Eukanuba. The more problematic issue was that Halle had come back into season and was currently occupying a crate in Kerry’s RV, awaiting her former mate. “Did you tell Heather?” Karen asked when the subject was raised. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
Appearing for the first time at Eukanuba were the AKC’s six newest breeds, including the Mexican hairless dog, the Xoloixcuintli; the bluetick coonhound (the state dog of South Carolina); and my new favorite breed of the weekend, the Norwegian lundehund.
* * *
LUNDEHUND
Lundehund means, literally, “puffin dog” in Norwegian, and it’s an apt name for this breed, which has what must be the single most specific raison d’être in the stud book. To quote the breed standard: “The dog was used to wrestle and retrieve live puffin birds from the crevices of steep vertical cliffs.” And not just any cliffs—the cliffs of the island of Værøy and its neighboring isles in the Lofoten Archipelago, north of the Arctic Circle. Because of its remote habitat and extremely isolated gene pool (other dogs were banned from the islands), the lundehund is considered by some to be the oldest purebred dog breed on earth. These facts alone make it awesome.
But the lundehund is a fascinating little creature* for so many other reasons. Physiologically, lundehunds are polydactyls, meaning they have bonus toes—a minimum of six on each foot, instead of the typical four, and in some cases as many as nine—to aid in climbing. On the bottom of the foot, the lundehund has a single elongated pad that serves as a brake when it’s descending cliffs. The dogs also have a unique shoulder structure that allows their front legs to splay out 90 degrees to the side of the body, enabling them to grip both sides of a crevice. What’s more, their ears can close either to the front or the back, to block out any debris that could fall while the dogs are spelunking. Finally, the lundehund is the only breed with an intentional ewe neck* that can turn 180 to either side, or straight back, enabling the dog to touch its forehead to its back—which is both functional and a cool party trick.
The lundehund hardly needs more color, but its backstory is the capper. The dog came about as close to extinction as a breed can come without actually disappearing from the earth—twice!—when, during World War II and again in the 1960s, distemper nearly erased the population. In 1963, the lundehund’s nadir, just six remained in the world, creating what biologists call a population bottleneck. But under the careful stewardship of a Swedish geneticist, the breed was nursed back to viability, and today there are at least fifteen hundred around the world*—two of whom had come to compete in Long Beach.
Meanwhile the back-and-forth race for the year-end number-one ranking grew tighter by the day. The top three dogs—Malachy, Dodger, and Emily—each took a Best in Show at the West Friendship, Maryland, shows, where Jack scored an elusive major, nearly cinching his grand championship in his last outing before heading to Long Beach and where, in the third of three shows, Malachy had beaten a group of six that included Tanner, in his first Best in Show group since returning from Europe.
In att
endance that day, Dawn had let herself think for a second that her dog had a chance at his long-sought-after Best in Show, not knowing at the time that some of the country’s top-ranked dogs were also in the ring. “The judge looked at him close,” Dawn said when we ran into her and her husband, Newell, at the team’s grooming setup. “Then the judge fell on him—on him.” And Tanner being Tanner, a good, obedient, happy old lug, he didn’t budge. “He just stood there, so still. And at the end she looked over at him and was thinking, ‘I like you. You’re a good boy. But . . . there’s that Pekingese. I gotta give it to the Peke.’” Here she paused to set up her punch line. “My son asked if it was a nice dog. I said, ‘It’s a bedroom slipper!’”
To which Heather added, matter-of-factly, “That dog might win the Garden.”
Malachy snatched another Best here in Long Beach, at the preshows, while Dodger jetted down to Savannah, Georgia, and took one himself. All three of the top dogs were entered in Long Beach, but no one yet knew whether Dodger would come to California to face Adam on his home turf.
During a lull in the action on Friday, Kerry decided to give Jack a go at Halle, but considering their struggles during the summer, she first stopped and picked up an artificial-insemination kit “just as a backup.” And it was a good thing, because the two still couldn’t seem to connect. “He’s trying his little heart out, but he can’t hit the target,” Kerry said from her extremely front-row seat on the floor, where she was simultaneous raising Halle’s rear and trying to direct Jack’s aim. After ten minutes of fruitless air humping, Jack backed off, panting, and Kerry performed the AI.
Saturday was an off day, so Kimberly and Kerry took Jack a few miles up the coast to Rancho Palos Verdes for the ASCA show. On the surface it made little sense—to risk upsetting Jack’s delicate psyche for a small show on the eve of a huge one—but Kerry had a broader canvas in mind; she wanted to expose Jack a bit more to her West Coast peers, and though Heather and Kimberly both quietly felt it was probably not the greatest idea to mix signals by putting the lead in Kerry’s hands the day before one of the biggest shows of the year, they both went along with it, because it was important to her. “If Kerry wants to do it, she’s earned that right,” Heather told me.
ASCA shows tend to cluster in a single day, so that there’s one show in the morning and one in the evening. This saves money on location rental and travel for participants and makes sense when you’re talking about small fields. For the morning show, Jack was one of only eight intact class dogs and the only entry in Bred-by-Exhibitor, meaning he was guaranteed to be participating for Winners Dog points unless he peed on the judge.
Ringside, we met the Churchill clan, as well as their friend Jessie, who had brought Jack’s full brother, also named Jack. He was a big, fluffy black tri with a strong family resemblance—he, too, had a handsome, blockish head. In comparison to our Jack, he seemed calm, though Jesse said he’s actually anything but. “We call him Jackrabbit because he loves to jump.” Like his father, Honor, I said. “Yep,” she said. “Jump up, spin. Jump up, spin. Jump up, spin . . .”
Kerry put Jack on his show lead and took him away for a few minutes of practice. “Have a firm hand,” Kimberly said. Just as Jack is unwilling to follow the direction of anyone he sees as a playmate—a group that would include myself, Kimberly, and (at least if Philly was any indication) even Kevin—he seemed to be giving Kerry fits now because he associated her with breeding. If the frantic attempted humping of her leg, back, and arms was any indication, he was blinded by hormones and viewed her as a potential girlfriend.
“You pissant,” Kimberly said, almost under her breath, as she watched Kerry attempt to get Jack to stack. “He can’t keep his feet still.” Indeed, he was a live wire. “She’s nervous, and he can feel that on the lead. You give him too much and he might misbehave. But act too tense and he feels it and can’t move. It’s such a fine balance.”
A conversation taking place at the truck next door temporarily distracted me, as one woman broached the subject of “Elliot’s semen” with her friend. Apparently someone was flying a little fast and loose with the poor boy’s seed. “I said, ‘Don’t you waste that on just any old bitch!’”
Meanwhile, in the ring, the judge was in no rush. She had the dogs circle once, twice, then a third time, asking for a stack in between laps two and three, then again at the end.
“This is ASCA,” Karen Churchill said when she heard me scoff at the pace. “These are breeders. They really know the breed.” And around they went, again.
“She’s trying to give it to him,” Karen said, meaning Jack’s nephew Click, at the end of Jesse’s leash. Jack, by this point, was over it. He’d grown bored of the whole thing, and his behavior worsened noticeably the longer the judge dragged things out. He lost to his nephew, and by the time Kerry had returned to the grooming table, she was so frustrated she could barely speak.
Things went slightly better at the second show, even though Jasa Hatcher, the blond judge who’d bumped Jack at the last minute during the Nationals in Waco, was an hour and a half late. Kimberly was extra nervous as Kerry headed back for round two. Foremost, I think, she was worried that Kerry wouldn’t like her dog and that the whole point of this exercise—to expose him to other kennels that might want to breed to him—could blow up in their faces.
The key with Jack is always not to panic and to let him think he’s in charge. In his best performances, Heather once said, it’s almost as if he is leading her. And sure enough, once Kerry relaxed a little and gave him a bit more lead, he trotted nicely around the ring, freezing into a perfect stack. “Right there he looks beautiful,” Karen said. Truthfully, he deserved the win, but Jasa gave him Reserve Winners instead.
Kerry at least was smiling again when she walked back.
“Congrats on close but no cigar,” said one rival owner.
“Kerry, does that dog not have an off switch?” said another.
She smiled at both and put him in his crate. “I’m just happy he didn’t hump my leg.”
Back at the convention center, things were off to a good start, as Kevin and Rita won the breed at the Chessie ring. “I like the way this weekend is going!” Dawn howled as she wrapped Cindy in a big hug. Rita’s win meant that she and Kevin would be on TV—ABC airs Eukanuba on tape, a few weeks later—and if anyone deserved some success, it was Cindy, who had long since exhausted any disposable income she had to show her dog. “They don’t know this, but I took out a twenty-thousand-dollar home-equity loan to pay for this,” she said when I congratulated her later. It was a surprising revelation, but not an unusual one among dog-show patrons, who forgo vacations for years in support of their hobby. (One Belgian Malinois owner-handler I met told me she had never taken a vacation—not one day, in more than thirty years of working, was given over to anything but her job, breeding, or dog showing.)
After some discussion of Jack’s lack of focus, it was decided that the best plan to ensure he would be okay for the morning was to have Kimberly take him down the road to the Hilton, to share a room with Cindy and Rita, rather than have him spend another night whimpering in a cage within sniffing distance of Halle. But first Kerry wanted to take another shot at breeding.
Considering that Jack managed to sire a litter of puppies with Summer in a single frantic moment after knocking over his owner, it was obvious that the problem wasn’t just that he was inexperienced. If he did it once, you have to think, he could do it twice. Especially if he didn’t have to rush.
Kimberly took a position toward the driver’s cabin, where Kerry had built a makeshift mating platform with a collapsed crate and a folded-up blue tarp so that Jack was standing a few inches higher than Halle. (Because maybe the problem was height.) Kimberly held the lead tight around her increasingly frantic dog as Kerry backed Halle in front of Jack, who immediately began to hump away even before he was in position and continued to thrust wildly as he jumped up and mounted her—his front paws locking her back legs as tightly as
if he were clinging to a cliff’s ledge.
Kerry, who had one arm around Halle to help calm the nervous dog, reached under to attempt to steer Jack’s aim. And then—bingo, a tie. Kerry hugged the dog. “Good boy, Jack. You’re not on my shit list anymore.”
“Let’s help him over,” she said as Jack began to step gingerly with one leg, which Kerry lifted carefully over Halle’s back so that the two dogs could assume the bizarre and unromantic position of a tie in progress.
“So this means the week before Westminster we should have puppies,” she said. “I hope Don doesn’t have plans.” She could barely contain her happiness over the event, however, as the weight of so much time and money spent on the failed attempts back in the summer fell away. “I’m just thrilled. After all we went through . . . I can’t believe it all worked out now,” Kerry said. “He came out for this show”—something that was very much in doubt until recently. “She came into season.”
Seventeen minutes later Jack began to tiptoe and test whether the doors were unlocked and it was safe for him and his penis to disengage, and then . . . liberation.
Kerry put them into crates; both dogs were ready for a nap.
