When the two-day Westminster extravaganza begins Monday at Madison Square Garden, more than 2,500 purebred dogs will compete to win their breed competitions, which will enable them to vie for supremacy in each of seven groups, from which the Best in Show champion will be chosen Tuesday.  Mick played the Garden in 2001, 2002 and 2003, winning the terrier group each time before he became the first Kerry blue to win it all.  He defeated one of his sons in 2002, and a daughter in 2003. And since his retirement from competition five years ago, 20 of the 45 Kerry blues showing at Westminster were his offspring, including Ch. Sethfield Gazon Mickbeth, a bitch that will be in the breeding ring Monday at 11 a.m.  “He’s my stud of studs,” McFadden, a prominent handler, said Friday from Acampo, Calif., where he and his wife, Taffe, run Bold Oaks Kennel. “I’ve never shown anyone with that kind of impact on the breed.”  Mick’s matings escalated after he won the elite Crufts dog show in 2000 in England and then immigrated to the United States to discover an appetite to produce more just like him — or better.  “The breeders went nuts and his fan base exploded,” McFadden said.  He added: “In the spring and fall, when the bitches were in season, he might have two or three bitches in a day, sometimes two or three a week.  “When I ran his campaign, he was always a stallion.”  Mick’s reproductive toils, which usually took 30 to 45 minutes, slowed because of a prostate condition that led to his being neutered last year.  But, McFadden said, “I don’t think it affected his psyche.”  Perpetuating the bloodlines of purebred animals is as crucial to the dog business as it is to thoroughbred horse racing. If there is money to be made in showing dogs, it is in stud fees and in puppies like Mick’s progeny.  But it is not thoroughbred-size money, considering that cash prizes at dog shows are modest, or nonexistent, and that the costs of travel, advertising, health care, grooming and handlers are significant. Canine stud fees of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars (or, simply, a pick-of-the-litter puppy) are minor compared with the $300,000 required to retain the siring services of thoroughbreds like A. P. Indy or Storm Cat. Storm Cat, now 25, commanded a $500,000 stud fee as recently as 2002.  “It’s a hobby,” said David Frei, the Westminster Club’s director of communications and the longtime analyst for the show’s broadcasts on USA, this year from 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern on Monday (moving to CNBC from 9 to 11 p.m.) and from 8 to 11 p.m. Tuesday. “The only dog that makes money is a great stud dog, but if you’re doing it enough to make money, you’re overusing the dog.”  Pat Trotter, a Westminster judge and a breeder of Norwegian elkhounds, said: “True dog breeders live for their dogs, not off of them. The people who show at Westminster are trying to develop a quality bloodline of dogs, and they recognize that they won’t pay for themselves.”  There are productive studs in every breed. Mick is actually the second-ranked sire among Kerry blues. The top distinction belongs to a star of the 1960s, Ch. Melbee’s Chances Are, who produced 66 champions, said Thomas Rogers, the president of the United States Kerry Blue Terrier Club.  One of Trotter’s Norwegian elkhounds, Howdy Rowdy, produced 166 champions, she said. Ten of his descendants have won the hound group at Westminster, and one was last year’s top dog in the breed nationally.  Ch. Bang Away of Sirrah Crest, or Bangaway, a boxer, won it all at Westminster in 1951 and was a prodigious sire.  “He was the turning point from boxers of yesteryear, who were thicker-necked and chunkier, to the more elegant boxers we know today,” Trotter said in a telephone interview from Antioch, Tenn.  She added: “For each breed, there are only a couple of great sires. There is a difference between being able to produce and being a good sire. The mark of a great sire is his ability to produce dogs like himself.”  Carrying on such genetic production with chilled or frozen sperm is expanding as an impersonal, but scientific, alternative to a live coupling, reducing the cost of flying females hither and yon and the potential of injury.  Chilled semen is used for a quick turnover — a sample is viable for about three days — but the frozen version can last indefinitely.  Chilled or frozen semen is collected from a stud dog egged on by a “teaser” female in heat, a practice similar to what is used in horse breeding. Once the sample is received, it is injected into the female or implanted into the female’s cervix, said Bill Truesdale, a veterinarian who owns the International Canine Semen Bank franchise in Seekonk, Mass.  In Seekonk, stud fees run from $800 to $1,500, depending on the qualities, merits and rarity of the breed.  “The advantage to frozen semen is storing it forever, but the problem is, once you thaw it, the active motility is 12 hours, so we have to make sure the bitch is fertile,” Truesdale said.  Truesdale’s bank holds more than 1,000 cryogenically frozen samples. About half are derived from deceased or now-sterile dogs, including a few collected from a golden retriever 21 years ago and 40 from his boxer Biff (Ch. High-Tech’s Arbitrage), who was profiled in the New Yorker in 1995.  “I’ll be dead before we run out of samples for Biff,” Truesdale said.  Mick, the Kerry blue, is still high spirited, but he is no longer potent and there is not much of his frozen semen left.  “I kind of wish we had more,” McFadden said. “Mick’s owner has opted to keep the last little bit and put it on hold to breed daughters and granddaughters back to him.”
Mick, the most influential Kerry blue terrier alive, is the producer of 61 champions and maybe more if his sperm, frozen for artificial insemination, yields championship-caliber puppies.