The Wacky and Wonderful World of the Westminster Dog Show
Kathryn Schulz
audio
A canine campaign can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention all the brushing, trimming, blow-drying, and styling products. Did you think it was easy being top dog?

Bernard de Menthon was born around the year 1000, near what is now the border of Switzerland and France. He was raised in a castle, given a first-class education, and, in time, affianced by his father to a noblewoman, as befit the scion of an ancient and wealthy family. By then, however, de Menthon had grown into a pious young man whose plans for the future did not include marriage. According to legend, the night before the wedding, he fled the castle by jumping out of a high window, whereupon a band of angels caught him and lowered him gently to the ground.

Ordained as a priest, de Menthon began preaching in villages throughout the region of Aosta, a territory that included a mountain pass already in use for at least a thousand years to cross the Western Alps. In de Menthon’s day, it was a popular route for Christians making the pilgrimage to Rome, but the journey was perilous. Bands of brigands routinely staked out the area to attack travellers, the pass itself was harrowing—eight thousand feet high, buried in snow, prone to avalanches—and de Menthon often found himself ministering to travellers who had been subjected to its terrors. And so, when he became the archdeacon of Aosta, he established a hospice in the pass, staffed by monks who offered aid to pilgrims venturing over the mountains.

At first, the hospice simply provided food, shelter, and a reminder to people inclined to make trouble that they did so under the watchful eye of God, or, anyway, of the godly. Over time, though, the monks began dispatching search parties to recover the missing. No one knows exactly when those search parties first began bringing along dogs, but by the early seventeen-hundreds the search parties were dogs—clever, indefatigable creatures capable of smelling a body under twenty feet of snow, who patrolled the area unaccompanied by humans. They generally travelled in pairs, so that, if they found someone too sick or hurt to move, one dog could return to the hospice to summon help while the other stayed behind, lying down atop the stricken person to offer warmth and hope. At some point, the hospice started keeping track of those rescues; by 1897, when one dog found a boy who had nearly frozen to death after falling into a crevasse, the dogs were known to have saved some two thousand people. Also by then, the long-dead Bernard de Menthon had been canonized, which is why the pass, the hospice, and the dogs themselves are all known today by the name St. Bernard.

There is still a hospice in Great St. Bernard Pass, and there are still dogs there as well, but they no longer perform rescue missions. That job was rendered obsolete toward the middle of the twentieth century, partly by a tunnel that routed people away from the pass and partly by inventions, such as the helicopter and the avalanche transceiver, that made it easier to save wayward travellers. Like the phenomenal views of Mont Blanc, the St. Bernards who remain at Great St. Bernard Hospice are now mostly just a tourist attraction.

That transformation, from working dog to pet, life-saving companion to pampered adornment, is, writ small, the story of dogs and humans. Some thirty thousand years ago, when wolves first crept near our campfires, eying the scraps and bones, we made a tacit bargain: food for them, protection for us. Today, the terms of that relationship are no longer quite as clear or, possibly, quite as sane. We are still giving food to the descendants of those wolves—thirty-pound bags of Eukanuba slung into the shopping cart, puppuccinos at the drive-through, human-grade meals flash-frozen and shipped on dry ice to our doorstep. We’ve also let those former wolves into our homes, where they bark in the middle of the night, whine to be let out at five in the morning, eat the new area rug and then vomit it up all over the living-room floor. And we share our wealth with them as well: studies estimate that Americans spend more than a hundred billion dollars each year on all that dog food, plus grooming, boarding, veterinary care, dog toys, dog training, dog walking, and doggy day care. Given all of this, one might reasonably ask what we are getting in return.

Some years ago, it occurred to the journalist and former mutt owner Tommy Tomlinson that one place to look for an answer was a dog show, a forum optimized to display the weirdness of the current human-canine relationship: our lavish expenditure on dogs, our equally outsized emotional investment in them, and the degree to which we have quite literally shaped them as a species. Tomlinson was not, at the time, a fan of such shows; he was just watching TV, hoping to catch some professional wrestling, when he landed on the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show instead. The questions that came to mind, as Shih Tzus paraded around the ring, were not very scientific, but they were very American: Are these dogs happy? Are any dogs happy? Why do dogs make me so happy? Those musings form the kernel of his new book, “Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show” (Avid Reader Press).

The dog-show circuit has come in for long-form treatment before—most famously in Christopher Guest’s 2000 film, “Best in Show,” a mockumentary with an emphasis on the mockery. “Dogland” takes a different approach, presumably because, on the evidence of his writing, Tomlinson is too sincere a guy to pull off satire. His previous book, “The Elephant in the Room,” is a wry, tender, ultimately hopeful first-person account of being, as he put it, a fat guy trying to lose weight in America. This new book is thinner, so to speak, and occasionally suffers from a certain distractibility. Unnecessary listicles (“Dog Haters, Ranked”; “Traveling Dogs, Ranked”) interrupt a narrative in need of no additional comic fodder, and Tomlinson sometimes indulges in lengthy digressions on, for instance, the WeRateDogs social-media empire, or the series of bulldogs, all named Uga, that for generations have been the mascot of Tomlinson’s alma mater, the University of Georgia.

But, whatever the weaknesses of “Dogland,” Tomlinson is a very funny writer, and he has the right relationship to his subject: equal parts dubious and generous, with a pleasing mixture of conviviality and comedic distance. Christopher Guest made the strangeness of dog shows more pronounced by populating his fictional version with a bunch of oddballs; Tomlinson makes the strangeness more interesting by introducing us to real people who, despite dedicating their lives to dog shows, do not seem particularly unhinged. For much of the book, we follow a woman named Laura King, who co-owns a show-dog kennel with a long string of accolades to its name. King, a second-generation dog aficionado who learned to walk by holding on to the tail of a Belgian sheepdog, projects the contentment of someone who can’t believe she gets to do what she does for a living. She is so convincingly sane that it takes a while for readers to agree: the more we learn about “the fancy,” as insiders call the dog-show world, the more we can’t believe anyone does this for a living.

To outsiders, the weirdest thing about the Westminster Dog Show is that the dogs don’t actually do anything. This is not because they aren’t capable of remarkable feats—witness the St. Bernards of St. Bernard Hospice—or because those capabilities can’t be channelled into audience-friendly competitions. As the Internet will be happy to show you, dogs routinely vie for prizes in hunting, herding, scenting, Frisbee, and dock diving—a kind of canine long jump into water, the world record for which is held by a whippet named Sounders, a thirty-six-inch dog able to leap nearly thirty-seven feet.

Nothing even remotely that entertaining happens at Westminster, or at any of the other “breed shows” held across the country. The dogs mostly stand around being admired, and occasionally go for a little trot around a ring. Imagine Nascar, if the cars just sat there on the track, and from time to time the race officials checked under the hood. In this sense, dog shows are less like, say, the Preakness and more like a county fair, where rabbits and heifers who excel at being rabbits and heifers are given blue ribbons.

As with those creatures, all the dogs at a dog show, from the Tibetan mastiff to the toy fox terrier, are judged by the same single criterion: how well they conform to the standard of their breed. Like written language, record players, and robot vacuum cleaners, those breeds are a product of human ingenuity. Without exception, every dog breed in the world started out its evolutionary journey as a wolf and then got tinkered with by us, bit by bit, until it could do some useful and specialized thing. Dachshunds were designed to wriggle into a badger den, seize the badger, and drag it out—or, if necessary, be dragged out by their owner, which is why they have unusually strong tails. The Norwegian lundehund, which boasts extra toes and a notably flexible neck, was bred to hunt puffins on the island cliffs of Norway. The bulldog, as you might guess, was built to control bulls, by latching on to their faces and dragging them to the ground. An easier lot fell to the many dogs bred to do nothing but amuse the wealthy and powerful, including the Maltese, which seems to have been luxuriating in royal laps since the time of Julius Caesar.

Today, the American Kennel Club officially recognizes more than two hundred dog breeds, and some of the fun of “Dogland” comes from Tomlinson’s reactions to them. The one shown by Laura King, a Samoyed—a dog from Siberia, bred to pull sledges and help hunt polar bears—is so dazzlingly white as to resemble “a walking snowbank.” A Neapolitan mastiff possesses “the build of a fullback and the face of a thousand-year-old man.” A long, low-slung breed called a Skye terrier “looks like it ate a Slinky.” Tomlinson’s pithy assessments stand in sharp contrast to the breeds’ official descriptions, which can exceed two thousand words and read like a cross between a love letter and a coroner’s report. Of the American English coonhound, for instance, it is specified that “a line from occiput to brow is a little above, and parallel to, a line from eye to nose,” and also that its facial expression is both “kind” and “houndy.”

The people who obsess over these standards form a subculture of impressive vitality. The American Kennel Club sanctions thousands of dog shows each year—enough that more than a hundred are likely taking place during any given week. “Every day,” Tomlinson jokes, “my dog-show Google alerts unroll like a CVS receipt.” A few of these shows are famous—including the National Dog Show, which is sometimes confused with Westminster, because it airs on NBC on Thanksgiving Day, making it the most watched dog show in America—but the vast majority take place out of the public eye, at hotels, convention centers, and fairgrounds around the country.

Regardless of their size or standing, most of these shows work basically the same way. In the first round, dogs of a particular breed compete against one another. The winners, declared Best of Breed, advance to the next round, where competitors are grouped into seven categories, such as herding dogs, toy dogs, and terriers. That means dogs of different breeds are now competing against one another, yet the standard by which they are judged remains the same: the question is not whether this pointer is superior to that Pomeranian, but whether the pointer is more pointery than the Pomeranian is Pomeraniany. If that strikes you as absurd, you’re right. Nonetheless, winners are chosen, and go on to compete for the over-all prize, Best in Show.

All of this is something of a simplification, partly because, in the early rounds, dogs compete only against other dogs of the same sex. This yields, for each breed, a Winners Dog and—brace yourself—a Winners Bitch. Tomlinson is appropriately and comically uncomfortable with that word (“My interview transcripts all have me stumbling around and saying something like ‘uh, you know, female dog’ ”), but he uses it all the same, arguing that it accurately reflects dog-show culture. That much is certainly true. Here is the A.K.C., describing one of the awards given out at every show: “The Select Bitch is similar to Awards of Merit in that this bitch is the next best as far as the quality of the Bitches in competition.”

Two things can be inferred from this: first, the dog-show community, like all groups obsessed with good breeding, is also obsessed with gender; and, second, every dog show emits a faint aura of campiness. Consider all the primping. It takes hours to get a show dog ready to enter the ring, a process that involves brushing, trimming, shampooing, conditioning, blow-drying, and applying any number of products—hairspray, hair gel, volumizer, whitener, eyeliner, heaven knows what else—many of them from name brands more commonly used on humans. Or consider that, at certain shows, you can hire private security for your pug. Or that every dog invited to participate at Westminster will receive an invitation printed on gold paper in purple ink.

Each year, those invitations are sent to the twelve hundred or so dogs who have racked up the most points on the weekly dog-show grind. To fill the remaining slots, for a total of twenty-five hundred, other qualified dogs, meaning those that have achieved the status of champion, are selected by lottery. Such dogs have a CH before their names, and sometimes a GCH, for grand champion, but many of the dogs who make it to Westminster bear other honorifics as well: MBIS, RGCH, OM, MACH. Some of these are official A.K.C. designations; others, Tomlinson writes, “are more like a celebrity’s honorary doctorate.”

Thanks to those qualifications, plus the nomenclatural practices mandated by the A.K.C. and the aesthetic sensibilities of devotees of the fancy, the average show-dog name is truly preposterous. A racehorse who is known around the barn as Big Red might have an official name like Secretariat, but the Samoyed shown by Laura King throughout “Dogland,” who goes by Striker, enters the ring as MBIS MBISS CAN GCH AM GR CHP Vanderbilt ’N Printemp’s Lucky Strike. In 1943, Westminster was won by one Ch. Pitter Patter of Piperscroft, a miniature poodle. Other winners could be minor characters in “Game of Thrones,” like Ch. St. Aubrey Dragonora of Elsdon, a Pekinese, or hip-hop artists devised by Dr. Seuss, like Ch. Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee, a Sussex spaniel.

What do these winners win? Almost nothing. At dog shows, as on “The Great British Bake Off,” the ratio between hoopla and reward is drastically and rather charmingly askew. If your horse takes top honors at the Kentucky Derby, you will bring home more than two million dollars and can anticipate many millions more in breeding fees. If your dog takes top honors at Westminster, you will go home with some trophies, a ribbon, and a picture frame. Your dog, meanwhile, might be invited to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, which is as close to serious money as it will ever bring you.

In fact, if a dog is at Westminster, you can bet that the serious money has flowed in the other direction. Every dog that has won the show in recent memory has been “campaigned,” meaning that a professional handler has taken it around the show circuit for anywhere from one to three years, at a cost that owners don’t like to discuss but that can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The handlers get some of that money, while the rest goes to food, fees, veterinary care, and glossy advertisements intended to impress judges, which may or may not work but do at least shield dog magazines, unlike the rest of print media, from a life-threatening drop in ad revenue. (The integrity and inclinations of judges is a hot topic at dog shows, but one thing is clear: whatever their other biases, they favor terriers, which have won more than a third of all Best in Show prizes at Westminster.)

When Tomlinson first learns what it costs to be a serious contender in the dog-show world, he is so incredulous that he suspects the owners of having some kind of side hustle. “Surely,” he writes, “they weren’t spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to prove that their Yorkshire terrier was better than everybody else’s Yorkshire terrier.” Actually, that’s exactly what they are doing—and, if this seems crazy, bear in mind that it is different only in magnitude, not in kind, from what many regular dog owners do. Even middle-class families with mutts treat their pets like children these days, pushing them around in strollers and bringing them along to the grocery store. (In fairness, dog owners are not unique in this respect. According to the American Pet Products Association, twenty-four per cent of reptile owners regard their pet as “like a child.”) Show-dog owners merely take the analogy further, treating their dogs not like any old children but like the kind of children who get private SAT tutors, one-on-one soccer coaching, and four years at an élite prep school.

It is easy to object to all this, of course. For one thing, some people take issue with dogs in general. As Tomlinson writes, “Most dogs are not great at first impressions,” and, even if you can forgive the barking and crotch sniffing, they remain a pretty mixed bag of a species: noisy, destructive, oblivious to the notion of personal space, prone to shedding, prone to slobbering, and prone to biting, sometimes fatally. But dog people, too, might not enjoy dog shows; in fact, they may not enjoy them precisely because they are dog people. Many conscientious owners, together with the American Veterinary Medicine Association, oppose the custom of docking tails and cropping ears, practices that are still mandated in dozens of breed standards. And plenty of people object to the whole idea of purebred dogs, with good reason. Because all such dogs must trace their lineage to a small number of approved ancestors, their genetic pool is limited, leading to health problems and shorter life spans. The owners of French bulldogs, for instance, might find their dogs’ flopped-out tongues and constant snoring adorable, but those traits reflect physiological distortions—small nostrils, narrow tracheas, elongated soft palates—that lead to terrible respiratory difficulties. Similarly, distortions in their lower bodies mean that most of them are born by Cesarean section, because otherwise birth can easily kill mothers and their babies. Oddly, these deformed creatures are now the most popular dog in America, an affinity Tomlinson diagnoses concisely: “They’re the perfect dog for a sedentary society.”

Still, it must be said on behalf of dog shows that they seem to be free from the rampant drug use—with all its attendant cruelties and fatalities—that characterizes horse racing, and that show dogs on the whole seem content and well treated. “I saw lots of stressed handlers and groomers,” Tomlinson writes, “but I rarely saw a stressed show dog.” Yet none of this quiets the feeling that, health concerns aside, dog shows are just a bit morally suspect—a little stuffy, a little prissy, a little undemocratic. It is a source of great annoyance to some people, for example, that no Labrador or golden retriever, two of America’s best-loved dog breeds, has ever won Best in Show. As with movies, what pleases critics does not always please fans, and the audiences at dog shows can sometimes get a little unruly. As Tomlinson writes in the unimpeachable opening sentence of one chapter, “They booed the poodle.”

It isn’t hard to guess why: at shows devoted exclusively to purebreds, championing the Labs and goldens is as close as you can get to rooting for the Everyman. If you share my instinctive wariness of any situation that requires you to produce your papers, you could go to England, where the most famous dog show, Crufts, has spawned a counterpart, Scruffts, which is open to what are politely called “crossbreeds.” Or you could just derive satisfaction from knowing that here in our own country, where our better angels are all lined up on the side of mutt-dom, such dogs are technically designated, by the A.K.C., “All American.”

You get the sense, reading “Dogland,” that Tomlinson’s heart, too, lies with all things mixed and mongrel. “If you talk to a dog person,” he writes, “eventually you’re going to hear about their dog,” and the most touching interlude in the book is an account of his own rescue mutt, Fred, whom he and his wife kept in the garage until they could fence in their yard—during which time the dog ate their Shop-Vac attachments, part of a five-gallon bucket, and their drywall. Nonetheless, Fred was soon sleeping in their bedroom.

Whatever Tomlinson’s innate affections, though, he is mostly won over by the fancy, or at least inclined toward forbearance. He watches it bring people fulfillment—“I haven’t had five bored minutes at a dog show in my life,” one of Striker’s owners says—and something more than that as well. At one point, he tells the story of Michelle Parris, an owner-handler he meets at a dog show, whose life fell apart after a series of tough blows in a few short years: an injury, an illness, a breakup, the death of a loved one. What put it back together again was Italian greyhounds. “She had to walk the dogs and feed them,” Tomlinson writes. By the time he encounters her, the dogs have made her do pretty much everything a good therapist would have advised: get a routine that gets you out of bed in the morning; get outside; get a steady dose of something that feels like unconditional love, even if it is really some inscrutable canine equivalent.

This relationship between Parris and her greyhounds doesn’t strike Tomlinson as atypical. He admires how well dogs adapt to our requirements, not only over the evolutionary timescale but over our own human lifetimes as well: “Do you need someone to protect a junkyard? Learn a circus act? Comfort a dying child? Dogs can do that.” But most of all he marvels at their ability to take care of us. Dogs are remarkably attuned to our physical needs, able to assist disabled people and warn us of impending danger, not to mention detect and in some cases help patients manage a wide range of diseases, from epilepsy to lung cancer. In part through these acts of aid and attentiveness but also through their mere presence, they seem to demonstrate two qualities almost all of us crave—adoration and loyalty. Yet the crucial thing is not that they love us, or seem to, but the converse: they give us a way to love the world, our most important bulwark against despair. That makes all of them, not just the St. Bernards, rescue dogs—still showing up to save us, no matter how cold or dark or steep or scary it gets out there. ♦
A canine campaign can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention all the brushing, trimming, blow-drying, and styling products. Did you think it was easy being top dog?
Bernard de Menthon was born around the year 1000, near what is now the border of Switzerland and France. He was raised in a castle, given a first-class education, and, in time, affianced by his father to a noblewoman, as befit the scion of an ancient and wealthy family. By then, however, de Menthon had grown into a pious young man whose plans for the future did not include marriage. According to legend, the night before the wedding, he fled the castle by jumping out of a high window, whereupon a band of angels caught him and lowered him gently to the ground. Ordained as a priest, de Menthon began preaching in villages throughout the region of Aosta, a territory that included a mountain pass already in use for at least a thousand years to cross the Western Alps. In de Menthon’s day, it was a popular route for Christians making the pilgrimage to Rome, but the journey was perilous. Bands of brigands routinely staked out the area to attack travellers, the pass itself was harrowing—eight thousand feet high, buried in snow, prone to avalanches—and de Menthon often found himself ministering to travellers who had been subjected to its terrors. And so, when he became the archdeacon of Aosta, he established a hospice in the pass, staffed by monks who offered aid to pilgrims venturing over the mountains. At first, the hospice simply provided food, shelter, and a reminder to people inclined to make trouble that they did so under the watchful eye of God, or, anyway, of the godly. Over time, though, the monks began dispatching search parties to recover the missing. No one knows exactly when those search parties first began bringing along dogs, but by the early seventeen-hundreds the search parties were dogs—clever, indefatigable creatures capable of smelling a body under twenty feet of snow, who patrolled the area unaccompanied by humans. They generally travelled in pairs, so that, if they found someone too sick or hurt to move, one dog could return to the hospice to summon help while the other stayed behind, lying down atop the stricken person to offer warmth and hope. At some point, the hospice started keeping track of those rescues; by 1897, when one dog found a boy who had nearly frozen to death after falling into a crevasse, the dogs were known to have saved some two thousand people. Also by then, the long-dead Bernard de Menthon had been canonized, which is why the pass, the hospice, and the dogs themselves are all known today by the name St. Bernard. There is still a hospice in Great St. Bernard Pass, and there are still dogs there as well, but they no longer perform rescue missions. That job was rendered obsolete toward the middle of the twentieth century, partly by a tunnel that routed people away from the pass and partly by inventions, such as the helicopter and the avalanche transceiver, that made it easier to save wayward travellers. Like the phenomenal views of Mont Blanc, the St. Bernards who remain at Great St. Bernard Hospice are now mostly just a tourist attraction. That transformation, from working dog to pet, life-saving companion to pampered adornment, is, writ small, the story of dogs and humans. Some thirty thousand years ago, when wolves first crept near our campfires, eying the scraps and bones, we made a tacit bargain: food for them, protection for us. Today, the terms of that relationship are no longer quite as clear or, possibly, quite as sane. We are still giving food to the descendants of those wolves—thirty-pound bags of Eukanuba slung into the shopping cart, puppuccinos at the drive-through, human-grade meals flash-frozen and shipped on dry ice to our doorstep. We’ve also let those former wolves into our homes, where they bark in the middle of the night, whine to be let out at five in the morning, eat the new area rug and then vomit it up all over the living-room floor. And we share our wealth with them as well: studies estimate that Americans spend more than a hundred billion dollars each year on all that dog food, plus grooming, boarding, veterinary care, dog toys, dog training, dog walking, and doggy day care. Given all of this, one might reasonably ask what we are getting in return. Some years ago, it occurred to the journalist and former mutt owner Tommy Tomlinson that one place to look for an answer was a dog show, a forum optimized to display the weirdness of the current human-canine relationship: our lavish expenditure on dogs, our equally outsized emotional investment in them, and the degree to which we have quite literally shaped them as a species. Tomlinson was not, at the time, a fan of such shows; he was just watching TV, hoping to catch some professional wrestling, when he landed on the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show instead. The questions that came to mind, as Shih Tzus paraded around the ring, were not very scientific, but they were very American: Are these dogs happy? Are any dogs happy? Why do dogs make me so happy? Those musings form the kernel of his new book, “Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show” (Avid Reader Press). The dog-show circuit has come in for long-form treatment before—most famously in Christopher Guest’s 2000 film, “Best in Show,” a mockumentary with an emphasis on the mockery. “Dogland” takes a different approach, presumably because, on the evidence of his writing, Tomlinson is too sincere a guy to pull off satire. His previous book, “The Elephant in the Room,” is a wry, tender, ultimately hopeful first-person account of being, as he put it, a fat guy trying to lose weight in America. This new book is thinner, so to speak, and occasionally suffers from a certain distractibility. Unnecessary listicles (“Dog Haters, Ranked”; “Traveling Dogs, Ranked”) interrupt a narrative in need of no additional comic fodder, and Tomlinson sometimes indulges in lengthy digressions on, for instance, the WeRateDogs social-media empire, or the series of bulldogs, all named Uga, that for generations have been the mascot of Tomlinson’s alma mater, the University of Georgia. But, whatever the weaknesses of “Dogland,” Tomlinson is a very funny writer, and he has the right relationship to his subject: equal parts dubious and generous, with a pleasing mixture of conviviality and comedic distance. Christopher Guest made the strangeness of dog shows more pronounced by populating his fictional version with a bunch of oddballs; Tomlinson makes the strangeness more interesting by introducing us to real people who, despite dedicating their lives to dog shows, do not seem particularly unhinged. For much of the book, we follow a woman named Laura King, who co-owns a show-dog kennel with a long string of accolades to its name. King, a second-generation dog aficionado who learned to walk by holding on to the tail of a Belgian sheepdog, projects the contentment of someone who can’t believe she gets to do what she does for a living. She is so convincingly sane that it takes a while for readers to agree: the more we learn about “the fancy,” as insiders call the dog-show world, the more we can’t believe anyone does this for a living. To outsiders, the weirdest thing about the Westminster Dog Show is that the dogs don’t actually do anything. This is not because they aren’t capable of remarkable feats—witness the St. Bernards of St. Bernard Hospice—or because those capabilities can’t be channelled into audience-friendly competitions. As the Internet will be happy to show you, dogs routinely vie for prizes in hunting, herding, scenting, Frisbee, and dock diving—a kind of canine long jump into water, the world record for which is held by a whippet named Sounders, a thirty-six-inch dog able to leap nearly thirty-seven feet. Nothing even remotely that entertaining happens at Westminster, or at any of the other “breed shows” held across the country. The dogs mostly stand around being admired, and occasionally go for a little trot around a ring. Imagine Nascar, if the cars just sat there on the track, and from time to time the race officials checked under the hood. In this sense, dog shows are less like, say, the Preakness and more like a county fair, where rabbits and heifers who excel at being rabbits and heifers are given blue ribbons. As with those creatures, all the dogs at a dog show, from the Tibetan mastiff to the toy fox terrier, are judged by the same single criterion: how well they conform to the standard of their breed. Like written language, record players, and robot vacuum cleaners, those breeds are a product of human ingenuity. Without exception, every dog breed in the world started out its evolutionary journey as a wolf and then got tinkered with by us, bit by bit, until it could do some useful and specialized thing. Dachshunds were designed to wriggle into a badger den, seize the badger, and drag it out—or, if necessary, be dragged out by their owner, which is why they have unusually strong tails. The Norwegian lundehund, which boasts extra toes and a notably flexible neck, was bred to hunt puffins on the island cliffs of Norway. The bulldog, as you might guess, was built to control bulls, by latching on to their faces and dragging them to the ground. An easier lot fell to the many dogs bred to do nothing but amuse the wealthy and powerful, including the Maltese, which seems to have been luxuriating in royal laps since the time of Julius Caesar. Today, the American Kennel Club officially recognizes more than two hundred dog breeds, and some of the fun of “Dogland” comes from Tomlinson’s reactions to them. The one shown by Laura King, a Samoyed—a dog from Siberia, bred to pull sledges and help hunt polar bears—is so dazzlingly white as to resemble “a walking snowbank.” A Neapolitan mastiff possesses “the build of a fullback and the face of a thousand-year-old man.” A long, low-slung breed called a Skye terrier “looks like it ate a Slinky.” Tomlinson’s pithy assessments stand in sharp contrast to the breeds’ official descriptions, which can exceed two thousand words and read like a cross between a love letter and a coroner’s report. Of the American English coonhound, for instance, it is specified that “a line from occiput to brow is a little above, and parallel to, a line from eye to nose,” and also that its facial expression is both “kind” and “houndy.” The people who obsess over these standards form a subculture of impressive vitality. The American Kennel Club sanctions thousands of dog shows each year—enough that more than a hundred are likely taking place during any given week. “Every day,” Tomlinson jokes, “my dog-show Google alerts unroll like a CVS receipt.” A few of these shows are famous—including the National Dog Show, which is sometimes confused with Westminster, because it airs on NBC on Thanksgiving Day, making it the most watched dog show in America—but the vast majority take place out of the public eye, at hotels, convention centers, and fairgrounds around the country. Regardless of their size or standing, most of these shows work basically the same way. In the first round, dogs of a particular breed compete against one another. The winners, declared Best of Breed, advance to the next round, where competitors are grouped into seven categories, such as herding dogs, toy dogs, and terriers. That means dogs of different breeds are now competing against one another, yet the standard by which they are judged remains the same: the question is not whether this pointer is superior to that Pomeranian, but whether the pointer is more pointery than the Pomeranian is Pomeraniany. If that strikes you as absurd, you’re right. Nonetheless, winners are chosen, and go on to compete for the over-all prize, Best in Show. All of this is something of a simplification, partly because, in the early rounds, dogs compete only against other dogs of the same sex. This yields, for each breed, a Winners Dog and—brace yourself—a Winners Bitch. Tomlinson is appropriately and comically uncomfortable with that word (“My interview transcripts all have me stumbling around and saying something like ‘uh, you know, female dog’ ”), but he uses it all the same, arguing that it accurately reflects dog-show culture. That much is certainly true. Here is the A.K.C., describing one of the awards given out at every show: “The Select Bitch is similar to Awards of Merit in that this bitch is the next best as far as the quality of the Bitches in competition.” Two things can be inferred from this: first, the dog-show community, like all groups obsessed with good breeding, is also obsessed with gender; and, second, every dog show emits a faint aura of campiness. Consider all the primping. It takes hours to get a show dog ready to enter the ring, a process that involves brushing, trimming, shampooing, conditioning, blow-drying, and applying any number of products—hairspray, hair gel, volumizer, whitener, eyeliner, heaven knows what else—many of them from name brands more commonly used on humans. Or consider that, at certain shows, you can hire private security for your pug. Or that every dog invited to participate at Westminster will receive an invitation printed on gold paper in purple ink. Each year, those invitations are sent to the twelve hundred or so dogs who have racked up the most points on the weekly dog-show grind. To fill the remaining slots, for a total of twenty-five hundred, other qualified dogs, meaning those that have achieved the status of champion, are selected by lottery. Such dogs have a CH before their names, and sometimes a GCH, for grand champion, but many of the dogs who make it to Westminster bear other honorifics as well: MBIS, RGCH, OM, MACH. Some of these are official A.K.C. designations; others, Tomlinson writes, “are more like a celebrity’s honorary doctorate.” Thanks to those qualifications, plus the nomenclatural practices mandated by the A.K.C. and the aesthetic sensibilities of devotees of the fancy, the average show-dog name is truly preposterous. A racehorse who is known around the barn as Big Red might have an official name like Secretariat, but the Samoyed shown by Laura King throughout “Dogland,” who goes by Striker, enters the ring as MBIS MBISS CAN GCH AM GR CHP Vanderbilt ’N Printemp’s Lucky Strike. In 1943, Westminster was won by one Ch. Pitter Patter of Piperscroft, a miniature poodle. Other winners could be minor characters in “Game of Thrones,” like Ch. St. Aubrey Dragonora of Elsdon, a Pekinese, or hip-hop artists devised by Dr. Seuss, like Ch. Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee, a Sussex spaniel. What do these winners win? Almost nothing. At dog shows, as on “The Great British Bake Off,” the ratio between hoopla and reward is drastically and rather charmingly askew. If your horse takes top honors at the Kentucky Derby, you will bring home more than two million dollars and can anticipate many millions more in breeding fees. If your dog takes top honors at Westminster, you will go home with some trophies, a ribbon, and a picture frame. Your dog, meanwhile, might be invited to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, which is as close to serious money as it will ever bring you. In fact, if a dog is at Westminster, you can bet that the serious money has flowed in the other direction. Every dog that has won the show in recent memory has been “campaigned,” meaning that a professional handler has taken it around the show circuit for anywhere from one to three years, at a cost that owners don’t like to discuss but that can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The handlers get some of that money, while the rest goes to food, fees, veterinary care, and glossy advertisements intended to impress judges, which may or may not work but do at least shield dog magazines, unlike the rest of print media, from a life-threatening drop in ad revenue. (The integrity and inclinations of judges is a hot topic at dog shows, but one thing is clear: whatever their other biases, they favor terriers, which have won more than a third of all Best in Show prizes at Westminster.) When Tomlinson first learns what it costs to be a serious contender in the dog-show world, he is so incredulous that he suspects the owners of having some kind of side hustle. “Surely,” he writes, “they weren’t spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to prove that their Yorkshire terrier was better than everybody else’s Yorkshire terrier.” Actually, that’s exactly what they are doing—and, if this seems crazy, bear in mind that it is different only in magnitude, not in kind, from what many regular dog owners do. Even middle-class families with mutts treat their pets like children these days, pushing them around in strollers and bringing them along to the grocery store. (In fairness, dog owners are not unique in this respect. According to the American Pet Products Association, twenty-four per cent of reptile owners regard their pet as “like a child.”) Show-dog owners merely take the analogy further, treating their dogs not like any old children but like the kind of children who get private SAT tutors, one-on-one soccer coaching, and four years at an élite prep school. It is easy to object to all this, of course. For one thing, some people take issue with dogs in general. As Tomlinson writes, “Most dogs are not great at first impressions,” and, even if you can forgive the barking and crotch sniffing, they remain a pretty mixed bag of a species: noisy, destructive, oblivious to the notion of personal space, prone to shedding, prone to slobbering, and prone to biting, sometimes fatally. But dog people, too, might not enjoy dog shows; in fact, they may not enjoy them precisely because they are dog people. Many conscientious owners, together with the American Veterinary Medicine Association, oppose the custom of docking tails and cropping ears, practices that are still mandated in dozens of breed standards. And plenty of people object to the whole idea of purebred dogs, with good reason. Because all such dogs must trace their lineage to a small number of approved ancestors, their genetic pool is limited, leading to health problems and shorter life spans. The owners of French bulldogs, for instance, might find their dogs’ flopped-out tongues and constant snoring adorable, but those traits reflect physiological distortions—small nostrils, narrow tracheas, elongated soft palates—that lead to terrible respiratory difficulties. Similarly, distortions in their lower bodies mean that most of them are born by Cesarean section, because otherwise birth can easily kill mothers and their babies. Oddly, these deformed creatures are now the most popular dog in America, an affinity Tomlinson diagnoses concisely: “They’re the perfect dog for a sedentary society.” Still, it must be said on behalf of dog shows that they seem to be free from the rampant drug use—with all its attendant cruelties and fatalities—that characterizes horse racing, and that show dogs on the whole seem content and well treated. “I saw lots of stressed handlers and groomers,” Tomlinson writes, “but I rarely saw a stressed show dog.” Yet none of this quiets the feeling that, health concerns aside, dog shows are just a bit morally suspect—a little stuffy, a little prissy, a little undemocratic. It is a source of great annoyance to some people, for example, that no Labrador or golden retriever, two of America’s best-loved dog breeds, has ever won Best in Show. As with movies, what pleases critics does not always please fans, and the audiences at dog shows can sometimes get a little unruly. As Tomlinson writes in the unimpeachable opening sentence of one chapter, “They booed the poodle.” It isn’t hard to guess why: at shows devoted exclusively to purebreds, championing the Labs and goldens is as close as you can get to rooting for the Everyman. If you share my instinctive wariness of any situation that requires you to produce your papers, you could go to England, where the most famous dog show, Crufts, has spawned a counterpart, Scruffts, which is open to what are politely called “crossbreeds.” Or you could just derive satisfaction from knowing that here in our own country, where our better angels are all lined up on the side of mutt-dom, such dogs are technically designated, by the A.K.C., “All American.” You get the sense, reading “Dogland,” that Tomlinson’s heart, too, lies with all things mixed and mongrel. “If you talk to a dog person,” he writes, “eventually you’re going to hear about their dog,” and the most touching interlude in the book is an account of his own rescue mutt, Fred, whom he and his wife kept in the garage until they could fence in their yard—during which time the dog ate their Shop-Vac attachments, part of a five-gallon bucket, and their drywall. Nonetheless, Fred was soon sleeping in their bedroom. Whatever Tomlinson’s innate affections, though, he is mostly won over by the fancy, or at least inclined toward forbearance. He watches it bring people fulfillment—“I haven’t had five bored minutes at a dog show in my life,” one of Striker’s owners says—and something more than that as well. At one point, he tells the story of Michelle Parris, an owner-handler he meets at a dog show, whose life fell apart after a series of tough blows in a few short years: an injury, an illness, a breakup, the death of a loved one. What put it back together again was Italian greyhounds. “She had to walk the dogs and feed them,” Tomlinson writes. By the time he encounters her, the dogs have made her do pretty much everything a good therapist would have advised: get a routine that gets you out of bed in the morning; get outside; get a steady dose of something that feels like unconditional love, even if it is really some inscrutable canine equivalent. This relationship between Parris and her greyhounds doesn’t strike Tomlinson as atypical. He admires how well dogs adapt to our requirements, not only over the evolutionary timescale but over our own human lifetimes as well: “Do you need someone to protect a junkyard? Learn a circus act? Comfort a dying child? Dogs can do that.” But most of all he marvels at their ability to take care of us. Dogs are remarkably attuned to our physical needs, able to assist disabled people and warn us of impending danger, not to mention detect and in some cases help patients manage a wide range of diseases, from epilepsy to lung cancer. In part through these acts of aid and attentiveness but also through their mere presence, they seem to demonstrate two qualities almost all of us crave—adoration and loyalty. Yet the crucial thing is not that they love us, or seem to, but the converse: they give us a way to love the world, our most important bulwark against despair. That makes all of them, not just the St. Bernards, rescue dogs—still showing up to save us, no matter how cold or dark or steep or scary it gets out there. ♦