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New York
City
 uddenly,
John was the favorite to win. “Johnny” could switch from taciturn
to playful in an instant, but he was — above all things —
a fierce competitor, a purebred warrior like his father and grandfather
before him. Only months earlier, he’d been written off as a long
shot whose few wins were undeserved, establishment-bucking flukes.
Now all that stood between him and the brass ring was the “son”:
the pedigreed scion of bluebloods dripping with the sense of entitlement
that comes with the blessing of the establishment. The son had never
suffered, never sacrificed. His victories came easily. Throughout
1999, the pundits had pegged him as the obvious favorite. Still,
Johnny, the outsider, had an uncanny appeal. “There’s just something
about Johnny that everybody loves. I can’t explain it,” said one
experienced observer.
John McCain
versus George W. Bush? A good guess. But while other journalists
were eating Krispy Kremes on the Straight Talk Express, I was wading
deep into the World Series of doggiedom, the 124th annual Westminster
Kennel Club Dog Show held at Madison Square Garden. This is the
second-oldest annual “sporting event” in America, only one year
younger than the Kentucky Derby. This contest was supposed to be
between “Johnny,” a.k.a. Hi-Tech Johnny J of Boxerton, and “Treson,”
a.k.a. Lake Cove That’s My Boy. Hi-Tech Johnny is a boxer, and Treson
is a standard poodle. More accurately, he is the poodle-the “winningest
dog of all time of any breed,” according to Sports Illustrated.
One hopes the
analogy to presidential politics will not hold, since both dogs
were bested by a third contender in a stunning upset. The winner,
the Al Gore of the race, was a springer spaniel appropriately named
“Shameless” — which is especially ironic, because many of the
dogs seem so embarrassed to be here in the first place.
As you walk
through the backstage grooming area, you see maybe a hundred dogs
standing on what appear to be small ironing boards. The longer-haired
breeds — Pekinese, Shih Tzus, sheepdogs, etc. — are so
covered in special dog hair-rollers that, at first glance, the beasts
appear to be under attack by bright blue grasshoppers. One bearded
collie being assaulted by a hairdryer has his bangs bundled into
a rhino horn of fur; he looks up at me with an expression of intense
humiliation. A caged German shepherd is in even worse straits: “Please,”
his eyes plead, “kill me now.”
It’s not an
easy life, and one would forgive the pups for mounting an insurrection.
But the dogs are invariably better behaved than the humans at the
show. The event is crowded, loud, and thoroughly disorienting. There
is a great deal of commerce: Dog-food cookbooks, dog-motif jewelry
(“The Fine Arf Collection”), and even canine self-help manuals (“When
Pets Come Between Partners”) are hawked at stalls lining every wall.
In the area where the dogs are put on display, thousands of people
push, poke, shove, and shriek. In this tense, almost gladiatorial
locker-room atmosphere, owners and groomers can get pretty testy.
But-among the
canines, at least-there’s no biting, and no dogfights. Sure, there
is the occasional excretory “accident,” but most dogs wait politely
in long lines with their owners to use one of the sandboxes designated
for that sort of business. In fact, to a dog-lover like me, it is
precisely the un-canine nature of the event that is so disconcerting.
Walking amidst these almost Prozac-calm descendants of wolves, one
starts to worry; the dogs are almost too well behaved. Is that golden
retriever with the ribbons in his hair suffering from what the Marxists
would call “false consciousness”? Or is he just biding his time,
waiting for the right moment to spark the mutiny? “Canines! Revolution!
Throw off your leashes!” Perhaps not. But there is something odd
about 2,600 dogs crammed into a room over two days, without a single
recorded instance of a chewed shoe or nipped ankle. Indeed, this
passivity reinforces the misgivings many dog-lovers have about the
world of dog shows. Westminster rates dogs according to American
Kennel Club guidelines, which judge appearance, not behavior; a
champion dog is simply the one that best conforms to the picture
in the guidebook. In other words, the “best” Labrador retriever
at Westminster may not even know how to swim, let alone retrieve,
but his ears will be the right distance from his nose. This is why,
for example, Border-collie breeders fought tooth and nail against
having their dogs recognized by the AKC. From the day they’re born,
Border-collie puppies herd anything that moves — tennis balls,
ducks, humans. Now, science has proven that a great deal of dog
behavior is genetic. Pointers, for example, don’t necessarily need
to be taught to point. (This fact of science is unappealing to liberal
dog-lovers; when I made this point in another magazine, dozens of
irate readers wrote in to accuse me of being an advocate of eugenics.)
Many Border-collie
breeders feared, and fear, that breeding their dogs according to
a standard derived solely from appearance instead of behavior could
very easily result in dogs that look great but are useless for herding.
Border collies remain the unparalleled champions in the burgeoning
world of agility trials, contests that measure a dog’s intelligence
and athletic ability; breeding for looks might attenuate the breed’s
natural gifts.
But there is
a second objection, which even many Westminster breeders will (secretly)
endorse: The horrible dogs tend to win. “It’s always the dogs with
the ribbons in their hair that win,” says the breeder of a big floppy
hound. Indeed, since each dog is judged against the standard of
its own breed-is the resemblance of Dachshund A to the Platonic
ideal of Dachshunds greater than that of Rottweiler B to the über-Rottweiler?-the
judging couldn’t be more subjective. “It’s all politics here,” a
veteran dog journalist confirms. “The judges don’t like hounds.”
Indeed, a cursory study of the statistics shows that doggy dogs-the
kind of dogs that catch Frisbees, drink out of toilets, or appear
in dogs-playing-poker paintings-do not fare well at Westminster.
The judges prefer small, malleable, and exotically groomable dogs
— the ones that are not only small enough to be carried in
a purse, but also behave as if they belonged there. Last year, for
example, the runaway winner was a papillon, a homely, twin-ponytailed
dog with a face that looks as if it had been pushed in by a pastry
chef’s thumb. The dog weighs less than an overripe honeydew and
has fewer uses.
One does not
want to traffic in stereotypes, but it remains a fact that as one
walks from what amounts to the big-dog section to the small-dog
section, the number of men practicing alternative lifestyles seems
to rise dramatically. Indeed, one gets the sense that for men and
women alike, many of these dogs take the place not so much of children,
but of Barbie dolls. Treson, to take a notorious example, is a classic
dog-as-dress-up-toy. This legendary “winningest” poodle is shaved
down to his death gray skin on legs, rump, and snout. What fur he
has is largely in snowball-shaped puffs that look almost glued-on,
except above his eyes, where there is a shelf of white hair crowned
with a huge white Afro. “Westminster is pretty much a competition
among hairdressers,” snorts a disapproving veteran. The assumption
permeating Westminster is that these are the best dogs in the world,
which prompts the obvious question, “Best for what?” Breeding dogs
for their appearance is a relatively recent phenomenon. The original
Westminster Dog Shows were contests for gentlemen and their hunting
dogs; winning owners received pearl-handled revolvers. It looks
as if dog-show culture is on a track parallel to that of the culture
as a whole, demonstrating yet again the pertinence of the maxim,
“It shouldn’t happen to a dog.”
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