The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show kicks off in Queens next month.
It's considered the most prestigious canine competition in the United States, and exemplifies the national obsession with dogs. The animals are beautifully groomed and highly trained, they follow special diets, and their obstacle courses are intricate.
Years ago, journalist and author Tommy Tomlinson was watching the show on TV and a question popped into his head: Are those dogs happy?
What began as a dive into the world of dog shows led to a broader inquiry about man’s best friend, namely: Is a regular dog happy?
“Obviously, they seem happy,” said Tomlinson, noting the affection a dog might provide an owner after a day apart.
“But is it just like a ploy for treats?” he wondered. “Or is it some real deep-seated love and affection for each other?”
He spent years researching the science of dogs, and attending dog shows, and the result of this effort is his new book, "Dogland."
Tomlinson spoke to WNYC’s Kousha Navidar about dog shows, unusual breeding strategies and more on a recent episode of “All of It.” Below is an edited version of their conversation.
Kousha Navidar: What was it like for you when you entered a dog show for the first time?
Tommy Tomlinson: I'll tell you the funny thing: it's very clean and quiet. These dogs are supremely well trained. And even though there might be a thousand dogs in the same little space, they generally don't bark at each other and they don't sniff each other's butts.
They don't do all the things that you think of normal dogs doing. And so that's what I first noticed, but as I got further into it, I noticed the incredible level of grooming – they get bathed for hours a day. To make a show dog look “show dog ready” takes an incredible amount of work.
I was thinking about one of the characters in your book. You focus on one particular show dog, Striker. But I understand that Striker is just a nickname. Can you tell us about Striker's full name?
If I remember right, it's Vanderbilt ‘N Printemp’s Lucky Strike. And that's actually a fairly short official name for a show dog.
If you look through a catalog at a dog show, you'll see all these wild names that got to be so crazy that the AKC (American Kennel Club) had to crack down on the number of letters that you could use.
But that's their registered name. Dogs also have a call name, which is just what you call them. And this particular dog's name is Striker. He's a Samoyed. He's a huge, white Siberian Husky-ish dog, looks kind of like a snowman, just pure white with fur that kind of blurs to silver at the edge.
It's an absolutely gorgeous dog and sort of Zen-like in his stillness. And I think that calmness – with the chaos and the dog show all around him – is probably one of the things that made him a champion.
I understand that show dogs basically have one goal and it's not about how pretty they look or even how well they jump. Can you tell us the sole purpose of a dog show?
So these dog shows are called “conformation shows.” Dogs technically are not competing against each other – they're competing against the breed standard of what the perfect dog of that breed is supposed to be.
These are written standards done by the clubs for each breed. Sometimes they run to thousands of words, get into minute detail about the dog’s eye color, how high they should be, the proportion of the shoulders to the back end … all these very, very precise measurements and thoughts about how a dog should look and behave.
And what a judge is supposed to be looking for is how closely the dog in front of them conforms to the standard for that breed. So they're not really looking at like, a bloodhound versus a poodle. They're looking at: how close is that bloodhound to the perfect bloodhound? And the one that's the most perfect in that sense is supposed to be the winner.
It seems to go against the idea of this mutually beneficial relationship between man and dog. What did you make of that?
Well, I think it comes from how these things have evolved.
In many cases, these breed standards used to have really practical applications because they wanted dogs that were able to do certain things. A dog was bred a certain way to be a champion hunting dog or a sled dog or something like that.
People discovered over time that the best dogs might have, say, a certain eye color or certain – the icon wasn't important, but it was a marker for the best of that breed.
Now it's much more about how the dogs look because by and large, we really don't use dogs as power tools anymore. They're more like our companions, our roommates. As I put in the book, they're all therapy dogs now.
Can you talk about one of the more peculiar things that you write about in the dog show world, which is a breeding group called the Sperm Girls. Can you tell us more about what they are?
Yes. Their company is called Infinity Canine. They're outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, and they go to dog shows across the country and collect and freeze semen from dogs that are owned by people who want to preserve that semen for potential breeding down the road.
A dog can theoretically father other dogs many years after it's dead because of this practice and it's very popular and they have people lined up at their tents every time they go to one of these shows to do this work, which is done manually.
There's no machine to do it, as one of the women told me. And as I was interviewing her, she said, “If you had told me that this is how I’d end up making a living, I would have slapped you.”
Many people, including Barbra Streisand, for example, have actually cloned their former dogs and they have cloned versions of their old dogs that are alive and well now.
You take us to shows across the United States and the United Kingdom. But if you go to other parts of the world, dogs are not treated in the same way as maybe folks in the West do. Did you look into how dogs are perceived and treated in other cultures?
I did. I don't dwell on it in the book that much, but certainly in other cultures, dogs are mainly street dogs.
There’s a couple of really interesting studies and some interesting thinking about how dogs find happiness. Street dogs have more dangers in their day-to-day life, and they probably don't live as long as the average pampered indoor dog, but they have agency in their lives that a house dog doesn't. They can go wherever they want. They can mate however they want. They can eat whatever they want. And if you thought about it in human terms, and you got to pick one of those lives or the other, you might pick the street dog's life.
We think of domestication for dogs as a pretty good thing because we generally treat our dogs pretty well here, but they don't have the same choices that a stray dog or a street dog in another country might have.
The annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is taking place right here in New York in a few weeks. Are you going?
I'm not going this year. I'll be on my book tour then, but I will definitely be watching. And now it's a little better for me because I know some of the people there and have a little bit better sense of what's going on. So I hope I'll be able to watch with a little better eye.
The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is May 11-14 at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens. Tickets start at around $33.
