by Josh Dean
Jennifer said that the samples will stay viable “indefinitely” in ICSB’s freezers, where they are stored, as they were shipped, in liquid nitrogen, which maintains a constant temperature. “I know of forty-five-year-old semen that’s produced thirteen puppies,” she said.
Jennifer is a great advocate of freezing any champion dog’s semen, and that’s not just because it’s her livelihood. “The reason I got started in this is because I lost a four-year-old dog unexpectedly to Lyme disease.” This particular dog finished his championship in record time and before that had won group placements out of the classes. He seemed destined for greatness. “I didn’t collect and freeze him because he was so young,” she said a little wanly. “I had his whole life to do it. Then he got a rare form of Lyme and he was dead in twenty-four hours. It set my whole breeding program back five years.”
Before she masturbated dogs for a living, Jennifer was a dog groomer, but she gave that up to go into business with the founder of ICSB’s Delaware franchise, a man named Lee Jones. When Lee died suddenly five years ago, she was left with a choice: take over or let it be sold. “I felt an obligation to help his wife keep the business going,” she said. Lee’s wife stayed on to help. She oversees storage and treatment. “I do this end of it,” Jennifer said, and then added, utterly deadpan, “I’m pretty much the hands-on.”
(Un)fortunately, I had just missed a collection from a schipperke, which I imagine is a job requiring steady fingers rather than a whole hand. Jennifer put on a thick rubber glove that stretched to her elbow and looked like something a superhero might wear, then reached into a cooler full of dry ice.
Most reproductive vets, she told me, collect in long “straws” that hold the entire ejaculation in one tube that is all unfrozen at once. ICSB’s clever method is to freeze the semen in pellets that can be portioned out into a number of tiny test tubes and then unfrozen for each breeding in a specific quantity determined by the density of sperm.
To make the pellets, Jennifer placed a bar of dense metal about the size of a brick and covered in centimeter-long pins on the dry ice—she referred to it as “this doofatchet”—where the metal reacted with the ice, burning tiny holes in the surface. The noise was surprisingly loud; it sounded like a cell phone vibrating on a hollow plastic tabletop. Using a very fine-tipped dropper, Jennifer then deposited tiny gloops of semen into those holes and then set a timer that beeps when they’re frozen.*
Jennifer can approximate the density of sperm cells and uses that number to estimate how many pellets are required per breeding. In this case the schipperke’s sample yielded seventy-seven little sperm balls, and she knows from experience that this breed requires 75 million sperm cells per milliliter for a successful breeding (a number based largely on weight). “That’s average for a small dog.” For the smallest dogs, your Yorkies and Chihuahuas, it’s more like 50 million. With a mastiff you need 250 million.* “It’s all a number thing.” She recommends clients store six to eight breedings, but some keep upwards of fifty or sixty. “I recommend keeping twice what you’re realistically going to use. Leave room for error.”
The genius of the pellets is that they can be thawed in batches, and the samples aren’t just useful for breeding. Semen is an excellent source of DNA, and often Jennifer will thaw and dispatch pellets to labs for newly developed genetic tests. “With Portuguese water dogs”—and this is true of all breeds, really—“they’re always coming up with new genetic tests. Even if a dog is dead, you can thaw a pellet and see if he’s a carrier of [now-common genetic health problems like] cardiomyopathy.” If your dog tests positive, you don’t breed him. Simple.
She thawed one pellet so that she could analyze its motility under the microscope. “Whoo-hoo! Take a look.” It was a busy little scene in there, sperms wiggling wildly, and it struck me that this might make a cute cartoon.
Was there at least a private room for the collection? I wondered.
She pointed to the curtain.
Do you set the mood?
Her partner fielded this one. “Sure, whisper sweet nothings, play a little doggy porn . . .” He seemed to take great delight in the mechanics of his wife’s profession and left me with the story of introducing Lee, the founder, to a friend of his who happened to be a prominent judge. “So they shake hands, and Lee says, ‘I should tell you that I jerk off dogs for a living. You never know where that hand has been.’ And the judge looks at him and says, ‘Well, I’m a rancher, and I inseminate cattle, so you never know where that arm has been.’ It took a lot to shut Lee up,” he said between guffaws. “But he was speechless.”
I found Tom and Cindy outside the ring watching Jack and Heather take on Tuck and Kevin and six other dog-handler combos. Tom, I guess, hadn’t watched Jack much before—at least not in the recent past—and he was puzzling over Jack’s topline, which seemed to slant down ever so slightly. Cindy thought it could be Heather’s styling; she often poufs up the hair on his rump with hair spray, but that wasn’t the area Tom was referring to. “See the black spot?” he said, meaning a patch of color just past the midpoint. “It looks off.”
Not to the judge, who gave Jack the breed. But when Heather came out to hand Jack to me, Tom pointed it out and said that to him the topline looked imperfect.
“It is,” Heather answered. “He’s roached. He looks better after an adjustment.” That didn’t bother her. What did was his behavior, which wasn’t improving. “He’s just so bad.” Better than yesterday? Considering the lull in his show schedule, it wouldn’t be surprising for Jack to need a couple days to regain his composure. “Worse,” she said. “Maybe the same. Tell Kimberly her handler isn’t getting paid enough.”
In the group, however, Jack was a different dog. “Look at him,” Cindy said. “He’s so focused on her.” The edge from earlier was gone, and he stacked perfectly, despite all the dogs and people and activity. The judge seemed to like him and picked Jack along with five other dogs in her first cut, but that’s it—there’d be no group placement.
I told Heather I couldn’t believe that this was the same dog I’d watched in the morning, a dog that had won despite looking as if he might leap upon and commence humping the judge. “So much better,” she said. “So much better. He’s always better in groups. I do think maybe he doesn’t take it seriously unless it’s big.”
For this to be true would require a level of understanding—of quantifying importance and allocating his attention selectively—that seems impossible for a dog, but, having watched it happen time and again, I couldn’t totally discount it.
On Wildwood’s final day, Judge Lydia Coleman Hutchinson picked Tuck. This was disappointing, sure, but I also felt happy that Steve and Kathy, who in a month would be committing thousands of dollars a month to handling and travel for Tuck’s campaign, would at least end the weekend on a high note.
Kimberly packed Jack’s things and was gone within a half hour. But it was only 10:00 A.M., a little too early to leave. How could I make best use of my time? And then I saw him, enjoying a rare moment of rest: Kaz! With Westminster on the horizon, it seemed like a good time to finally meet Kaz Hosaka.
It would be impossible to choose the best dog handler working today—attempting to assign a value to such a mystical art is impossible—but one man who is always in the conversation is Kaz Hosaka, the master poodle craftsman.
Hosaka was newly started in the business in his native Japan when the legendary handler, breeder, and judge Anne Rogers Clark and her husband discovered him while judging a show. At that time he was working with a Doberman. “I had never showed a poodle in my life,” Kaz, who is very friendly and speaks excellent, accented English, told me. “Never groomed one either. And of course I didn’t win nothing [in their rings].” But after the show, he said, Mrs. Clark called him and said, “If you want to become a professional dog handler, you should come to the United States and I’ll teach you how to show dogs.”
So at the age of nineteen, and speaking no English, Kaz packed
up for the United States, moved in with the Clarks, and studied the art of poodles. “They said I was terrible at that time but they liked my hand when I was touching dogs. That’s why I came to this country and worked for Mrs. Clark for many years.”
Thirty years later Kaz is unequivocally the top poodle groomer and handler in America. How long did it take him to become good?
“Still I am not good,” he said.
You’re the best there is, aren’t you?
“People think so, but I don’t think.”
How could you be better?
“If I get new glasses, I can see better.” He laughed heartily. “Still I’m not comfortable with it. Still I’m losing lines,* and that’s why I ask my assistants, ‘What do you think?’ every time I groom a poodle. They watch every day, and they know if it doesn’t look right. I need a third eye to help. Otherwise you start losing lines.” He took a breath. “I will always get better. I will never be perfect.”
Hosaka travels the East in a box truck with two assistants, both of them young Japanese girls summoned from the homeland to learn the way of the poodle as he did three decades ago. “I think learning never ends,” he said. “Especially with poodles. It is very important, this grooming the hair and trimming. Also, we have to show good—and this breed is not easy. Poodle is not easy.”
Poodles—America’s ninth-most-popular breed—can be quite independent. The Poodle Club of America says that “the poodle is ‘a person’ and expects to be treated as one.”
“Basically they are a one-person dog,” Kaz explained. “Everyone says poodle have wonderful temperament. I don’t think so.”
Then why do you love them so much? I asked him.
He smiled wide. “To be honest, I love to win dog shows. That’s why I came to this country. It took me twenty-three years to win Best in Show at Westminster. I guess I’m lucky. Everyone tries hard. And I have seven group firsts and a Best in Show.”
When Kaz won the Best in Show in 2002 with Spice Girl, it was his third appearance in the final seven. He has since won three more groups, but still lacks a second title. This year he had his work cut out for him. His main dog, a white toy named Walker, was good, he said, but not great, and the Toy Group was stacked with David Fitzpatrick handling Malachy and Ernesto Lara on Banana Joe.
“My big hope is I get third behind them,” he said.
The reason he’d spent three decades perfecting the style and care of arguably the most difficult breed in the show is simple: “I like to win dog shows, and in order to win dog shows I have to groom better than other dogs, trim better than other dogs. I work very hard for that.”
It must be frustrating, then, when he loses to, say, a pointer, a dog that requires no grooming whatsoever. “Sometimes I get so mad after Best in Show,” he said. “Because no matter what happened, I have to wash them, every night.” That’s because three times a day—before breed, before group, and before Best in Show—Kaz hair-sprays his poodle. And because that’s not good for a dog’s coat if left in, “we have to take it out. So every night we wash it.”
Kaz is also a firm believer in a daily brushing. Every day he and his assistants brush every dog in the kennel back home in Delaware—currently that’s about twenty dogs, though it’s sometimes closer to thirty. Now, brushing a toy poodle isn’t bad—it takes about five minutes. But Kaz doesn’t just have toys. For Wildwood, in fact, he had three standards—and those take twenty minutes or a half hour. And after the brushing you have to apply bands to all the long hair to keep it from tangling and then add a topknot on the dog’s head.
“This breed we have to crimp, we have to trim, we have to grow coat.” With a shih tzu, another seemingly complicated grooming job, “the most important thing is growing coat. You just trim the edges. Cutting is everything. We do crimping, growing coat, trimming—and the style. It’s the most complicated.
“To me the poodle is challenge. I can see a picture and know which handler trimmed it. And people probably know, ‘That’s Kaz’s dog.’ To me it’s art.”
Poodles under a year can have what is called a “puppy cut,” which is basically minimal grooming. After a year, though, the dogs must be trimmed into one of two patterns:* Continental, which is mostly naked on the back half, or English saddle, which Kaz describes as “party pants and pom-pom.” Each of these cuts can take hours—“an hour if you’re good”—but it’s the maintenance that really takes time.
“If it’s early in the morning, I cannot sleep. I have to wash the night before, after Best in Show”—which he’s often in. “Everybody knows I’m the last person usually at shows.” That’s why when he’s finally done, Kaz likes to cut loose. A friend of his told me if I wanted to break the ice with him, I should come bearing Hennessy and then added, “You should see that man play beer pong.” Maybe my greatest dog-show regret is that I didn’t.
Every year after Westminster, Kaz retires the previous year’s special. He was about to say good-bye to Walker. But already there was a new one in the wings: Sugar Baby, the granddaughter of his Westminster winner, Spice Girl. Kaz bred them both, and also Spice Girl’s mother, who won the group at the Garden.
“Sugar Baby—I think she’s the best mini I’ve ever bred,” he said. “But she doesn’t know it yet.” Part of the thrill for him is to turn an unknown into a known. “I like the people to look at a dog and say, ‘Nah.’ Then a month after, it’s, ‘Wait a minute, she’s pretty.’ Then six months later, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful.’ I can change people’s mind. I love that.”
When he first showed Walker, he says, nobody liked the dog, especially after his 2009 special, Vicky, was so highly regarded.
And Spice Girl: Was she the best ever before this one?
“Spice was the most difficult dog I ever showed.”
Stubborn?
“No, shy. She’s so moody. Sometimes she showed great, sometimes no. It’s amazing we won the Garden. She was perfect in breed, perfect in group; she showed excellent.” But in the Best in Show ring, he said, live on TV, she saw the cameras and “got nervous. She dropped her tail.”
Kaz isn’t just a groomer, of course. He’s a handler, and he was prepared. “I had her very favorite toy.” He pointed to a much-bitten, heavily chewed white cell-phone squeaky toy in his grooming tackle box. “I used it outside with Spice Girl. But never at dog show.” At Westminster, however, he had a hunch he might need a wild card and carried the toy in his pocket. “I knew she was going to spook. I have twenty seconds to show her, and I was the last one in line. I hold her, beg,” and then just before the judge—and camera—turned to him, he played his card: He showed Spice Girl the toy.
“She’s like ‘WHOO!’ Then I give her favorite food, chicken.” (Also not something he typically does in the ring.) “And after that she held her head up, her tail up. Perfect.”
The Garden was the next stop for Kaz, and for me. It would be my second—and for the purposes of this book, last—show and Kaz’s thirty-first.
His big hope for this year was Walker, and Kaz patted the dog gently, his various pom-poms tied back into bands. “He will retire next week,” he said, repeating himself.
Nearby his dutiful assistant groomed a class dog. His only goal on Sunday was to put a point on this young bitch, and, once prepared, he carried the dog off toward the ring like a man carrying a delicate little sculpture—carefully moving her so as to not muss the poufs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Last Stop, Westminster
* * *
We’re the same every year. We’re having a dog show.
What becomes different is what dogs are going to be the big dogs.
—DAVID FREI
* * *
Westminster has always been a media magnet, but it got a gigantic boost in 2008, when Uno the beagle won Best in Show. Uno is “by far” the most famous winner in the twenty years that David Frei has been affiliated with the show, he told me. All Westminster winners become celebrities, at least for a day or two, un
til the news cycle churns on past, but Uno took the fame to a different level. The Best in Show winner was, for the first time ever (or at least the first time in the mass-media era), not some froufrou canine prom queen but just a regular old dog.
Uno hadn’t been a favorite, but he was a top beagle, and when he got into the Best in Show ring, “He did things in the ring that happen with great show dogs,” Frei said. Most famously, he did what beagles do—“he bayed at the right time.” It’s pretty unusual to hear a top show dog bay or bark or vocalize in any way, so when one does, it’s actually quite charming, especially when that dog seems to be doing it not as an act of defiance but as a performance. The only similar incident Frei could recall was in 2004, when the Newfoundland—a black bear impersonator of a dog named Josh*—“barked at the right time and the crowd went nuts,” Frei said, noting that, “I think the crowd loves it when a dog acts like a dog.”
Uno’s owner Caroline Dowell preferred not to travel; she lived on a 200-acre Texas ranch that doubled as a beagle rescue and was far too busy tending to dogs in need. And a falling-out with Uno’s handler left Frei as the beagle’s personal PR rep and wingman. With Frei on his lead, Uno became the first show winner ever to make an official visit to the White House (at George W. Bush’s invitation), the first to ride on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the first to throw out a pitch at a major-league baseball game, something he did twice, in St. Louis and Milwaukee.* Uno walked the red carpet at Matthew Perry’s charity event in Santa Monica and hung out with Snoopy.* “Everybody wanted a piece of him,” Frei said.
