The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  Peter and Gordon, of course, could not live forever, so Blackie and the dog owner Miriam Thomas contracted with Mount Nittany Veterinary Hospital in State College, Pennsylvania, to store more than a hundred semen samples from five of their champion Standard Poodles. Four of the semen samples reportedly came from dogs sired by Gordon and bred to Peter’s daughters. The fifth was reportedly a son of Peter—a direct descendant of the Westminster winner.

  The freezing of champion-dog semen may sound like science fiction to the uninitiated, but it is old news in the world of purebred shows. The AKC first recognized a litter of puppies conceived from frozen semen in 1981, a full decade before Peter took the top prize at Westminster. The Kennel Club in the United Kingdom has a preinsemination application it asks breeders to use. The FCI allows some national kennel clubs to permit insemination of dogs even if they’ve never bred naturally. It’s what breeders all around the world want, because it makes the process easier. Frozen semen can be shipped for breeding dogs on opposite sides of oceans or used when male and female dogs have conflicting show schedules or just plain won’t, well, get their groove on in the flesh. One storage company says an added benefit is eliminating the risk of a valuable purebred dog getting herpes. The practice of freezing dog semen is so common today that its marketing has, in some circles, become cutesy: Vale Park Animal Hospital in Valparaiso, Indiana, explains the process on its website under the headline “Freezing Future Friends (or How to Make a Pupcicle).”

  Despite the everyday use of the procedure, though, things can and do go wrong, and they did for Blackie and Thomas in 2010. That’s when they were told 122 of their frozen semen samples from Mount Nittany hospital had been accidentally thawed—and thus ruined.

  The lawsuit Blackie and Thomas filed became a precedent-setting case when it was argued before a jury of nine women and three men in 2012. The veterinary hospital didn’t argue that it hadn’t destroyed the samples, but it did argue that the amount of compensation the women wanted—widely reported as more than $300,000—was far beyond the samples’ actual value. It was the first time a jury had ever been asked to determine the value of a dead Westminster winner’s future generations.

  Arguably, the financial damages could have been in the millions. Using the same type of math that turns a $650 West Highland White Terrier from a dog auction into more than $60,000 of income in just a few years by breeding litter after litter, these Standard Poodle aficionados could have proved quite easily that 122 champion-lineage semen samples—even if half of them didn’t work during insemination—would have produced more than $1,000,000 worth of puppies sold at $2,000 apiece.

  Instead, Blackie and Thomas sued for the value of the samples alone, not the value of the puppies the frozen semen could have produced. The women determined the value was more than $300,000 by claiming they could have made $5,000 for every two frozen samples, according to multiple news reports. That is six times the annual median income in the United States or in England, where Peter and Gordon originated, all for the frozen semen of five dogs from their bloodlines.

  The attorney Louis Glantz of Glantz, Johnson & Associates was hired to argue their case. He wasn’t an expert in animal law. Instead, he had a background in real estate, elder law, estate planning, and corporations. He was about as average as people can be when it comes to understanding the inner workings of the dog show and breeding worlds, but even he knew the sway the word Westminster could hold with the general public. During the trial, he displayed a poster of Peter after his big televised win. He also used a poster of Gordon with Betty White, who, in addition to being an award-winning actress, has a long history of being involved in animal welfare causes. And to drive home the point to the jury that Peter and Gordon weren’t just any dogs, he showed a poster of the Triple Crown–winning racehorse Secretariat, the stuff of Hollywood films and best-selling books with reverent titles like The Horse God Built. Destroying these semen samples, the argument went, was nothing short of denying everyone the potential to enjoy a future Secretariat of the dog show universe.

  “These dogs are the equivalent of Secretariat, not like the dogs we have at home,” Glantz is quoted as saying in the Centre Daily Times, adding separately, “Peter and Gordon were the two best Poodles the world has ever known.”

  While quite a few owners of Poodles might argue that the dogs lapping water from bowls on their kitchen floors are the greatest in the world, the jury agreed with Glantz and bought wholeheartedly into the business model of the global breeding community. A Westminster win, they concluded, adds value. Jurors awarded Blackie and Thomas more than $200,000—far less than what the semen samples could have produced as puppies for sale, but only about a third less than they’d originally requested.

  It was a rare moment, a decision that quantified, for the first time, not the value of an existing dog, but the potential value of a show winner’s offspring and then the offspring’s offspring for years to come, even long after the Westminster winner’s death. While Bob Hughes back in his auction barn might be able to tell buyers of the dogs on his folding table that one litter will recoup the whole purchase price of an individual dog on a particular day, the breeders of champion Standard Poodles and all the other breed champions whose semen was in the liquid nitrogen tanks could now tell buyers that a half-dozen semen samples would equal the cost of a new car. There doesn’t have to be an auction of the Westminster winner to increase the dog’s value. The dog doesn’t even have to remain alive. All that’s needed is an artificial vagina, a “teaser bitch,” or some manual stimulation by a human hand, and the security procedures of a biohazard facility to prevent unintentional thawing.

  As they say at the auctions, it’s money in the bank. A frozen-semen bank, yes, but a bank nonetheless.

  “Sabotage! That’s not fair! Hey, judge, sabotaaaaage!”

  The thirty-something woman in the mid-arena section was fast approaching apoplexy. Perhaps a vocal parent who had been thrown out of more than her fair share of Little League games back home, she was outraged by what was happening in the show ring on Westminster’s closing night at Madison Square Garden. Judging had commenced for the always controversial Terrier group, whose winners have, by far, taken home more best in show honors than any other group’s winners in Westminster history. The Wire Fox Terrier alone has won more than a dozen times, while fan favorites like the Labrador Retriever and Golden Retriever have yet to win even once. The Terrier judging thus had blood pressures rising throughout the arena because those who knew the event’s history knew the winner of this group had a real shot at winning the whole shebang.

  This Little League mom’s favorite, the Miniature Bull Terrier, had endured the misfortune of being called out in alphabetical order after the Airedale Terrier and the Bedlington Terrier and the Cesky Terrier and all the other pre-M Terriers—all of whose handlers had used tasty treats to guide them around the ring. More than a few of the treats had landed on the green carpeting, and they were enough to distract the poor thirty-pound Miniature Bull Terrier, who sniffed at them with total disregard for the enormity of everything else going on. The handler was utterly, visibly frustrated by what was likely a thumbnail-size piece of hot dog or chicken. It might as well have been a steaming pile of excrement, stinking up the dog’s sixty seconds of fame. Whatever it was, it smelled delightful to the Miniature Bull Terrier, who broke proper gait while the judge was watching.

  That was what set the fan off. The crooked madness of it all—the stark raving lunacy—was just too much for the Little League mom to bear.

  “Oh come on!” she shouted, throwing up her hands in disgust and turning to strangers all around her, airing her grievances to anyone who would listen. “How is that even right? Are you people kidding me? This whole thing is rigged!”

  “I’m okay with it,” her friend said, sitting beside her with a smirk and thinking about the Komondor, from the Working group. “I’m still rooting for the one that looks like a mop. This only helps his cause.”

/>   A row ahead of them was a bubbly brunette of a certain age who had made the trip to New York City from Boston, Massachusetts, just to see the Westminster show. For her, it was like going to a movie premiere, getting to sit in the audience and critique the handlers’ outfits as if she were an E! Fashion Police host on a red carpet. The bubbly brunette comes every year and always starts out by scanning the floor seats for faces she recognizes. One year, she says, she caught a glimpse of Martha Stewart. But her all-time favorite year was the one when the arena crowd started doing the wave.

  “You should’ve seen the people down front in the tuxedos and gowns,” she recalled. “They looked around and their faces—oh, their faces—you could just see them thinking, ‘What are the peasants doing? Are they revolting?’”

  Of course, none of this shouting and commentary had gotten onto the television broadcast from night two of the show; instead, the viewers at home had once again been duly informed about the epic nature of what they were witnessing. Erica Hill talked about how Westminster was “one of the world’s greatest events on one of the world’s greatest stages,” working with her co-host to mix the words venerable, esteemed, admired, and loved into sentence after sentence. David Frei, meanwhile, encouraged the audience to believe that they, too, could have a purebred just like the ones in the ring. “They’re doing the same things at home that your dog is doing: stealing food off the counter and shedding on your black clothes,” he said. Occasionally, viewers got to see NBC television personality Alicia Quarles interviewing the handlers of dogs who won their groups, with Quarles’s African American skin supersized on the screen, offsetting all the lily-white faces in the crowd and giving viewers at home the sense that Westminster was a multicultural event.

  The on-air banter continued straight through the night’s judging, stopping only for commercial breaks. One of those was at 9:38 P.M., when the people inside Madison Square Garden got to hear something that was not aired for the public at home. Michael LaFave, over the arena’s loudspeakers, addressed the Garden crowd directly, telling them that if they had come to see the best of the best, they were in the right place—and that if they were looking to add a dog to their lives, they should note that none of the dogs here at Westminster came from a pet store or a puppy mill. These dogs came from breeders who care.

  The announcement was unexpected, and it shot many people in the arena to their feet, making clear what they saw as an absolute distinction between what they were doing and what went on in places like Bob Hughes’s barn. The applause hit a crescendo so loud, so fast that it nearly drowned out LaFave’s last few words. Nobody appeared to feel a sense of irony about the fact that Madison Square Garden’s address was Seventh Avenue, also known as Fashion Avenue in Manhattan, or about the fact that the purebred dogs Westminster held up for the world as the most stylish—the “must haves” on television—would soon be churned out in big quantities by those puppy mills they disdained and sold as knockoffs just like the handbags on city corners at the end of Fashion Week. If they felt a sense of complicity in the big picture of the world’s dog industry, they didn’t show it, although the self-congratulatory applause was kept off-camera, just to be on the safe side of hubris. The breeders and fans at Westminster seemed proud to be recognized for doing an entirely different thing, as opposed to doing the same thing differently, from the people back in Missouri.

  Another commercial break hit after the final judging of the groups, and with no announcement from LaFave to rile them up, the crowd took matters into their own hands by starting this year’s attempt at the wave. Unlike during the year the bubbly brunette had first seen the wave receive shunning glances from the elites down in front, this year, some of the women and men in gowns and tuxedos joined the fun.

  “Oh look!” the brunette cried from high above them, pointing and gasping. “Look at that! They’re doing it!” She clasped her hands with delight, as if watching a baby take her first steps. “I wonder what they’re saying to each other,” she mused to nobody in particular. “Like, is there a wife down there going, ‘Reginald, darling, just do it. Lift up your arms, dear.’”

  As the cameras prepared to return from the commercial break, security guards multiplied by the dozen. Large men in dark jackets with hands folded in front of them stood not only near the roped-off seats, but also near the bottom of virtually every aisle. It was like the last few minutes of the Super Bowl or the final countdown of a March Madness tournament: They were ready to use bodily force, if necessary, to stop any overenthusiastic fan from rushing down into the ring.

  “I wonder where the PETA people are,” the brunette said, looking off to the sides for members of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “They try to buy the seats where they know the cameras will be pointing. One year they got on TV for a few seconds. That’s why all the extra security is here now. Nobody wants that happening again.”

  It was ten thirty P.M., and though the house lights had been on throughout both nights of Westminster judging so far, they now dimmed, making the arena as dark as the streets outside. The dogs selected as finalists for best in show were about to come out for the grand finale. LaFave—before the television returned—told the crowd, “We highly encourage you to cheer on your favorite.” Madness ensued as spotlights began to swirl around the ring. Flashbulbs from cellphone cameras twinkled like stars throughout the arena. Anyone looking carefully, down in front, could just make out the small red lights turning back on atop the television cameras, with the place in a frenzy as seven dogs reentered the ring.

  Yawning Bloodhound number 5 was back and still clearly the fan favorite based on the rise in decibels his presence created. Applause was strong, too, for the Wire Fox Terrier. Also running into the ring one after another were an Irish Water Spaniel, a Portuguese Water Dog, a Miniature Pinscher, a Standard Poodle, and a Cardigan Welsh Corgi. Again, they all were called by number, not by name, though this time their names did flash on the Jumbotron for everyone in the arena to see.

  On television, viewers were told about the awe-inspiring achievements these seven dogs had made. Together, they had more than 520 best in show wins from other events. Four of the finalists had more than one hundred wins apiece on their résumés. The handler of the Wire Fox Terrier had won a Westminster best in show before, and the dog at the other end of his leash, nicknamed Sky, had already taken the top honor at both the National Dog Show Presented by Purina and at the AKC/Eukanuba National Championship. “A win here,” Frei told TV viewers, “would be sort of our triple crown of dog shows.”

  Nobody mentioned on television that Sky was about as big money as dogs could get, a dog in whom wealthy people owned shares, like a corporation, with financial backing that had originated among the upper classes in South America, Europe, and beyond. They included Victor Malzoni Jr., a construction magnate and owner of Hampton Court Kennels in Brazil who sponsors the campaigns for a half dozen show dogs a year in the United States plus more at shows in Europe. (If the name Malzoni sounds familiar, it’s because it graces the towering symbol of big business in Brazil, a 786,000-square-foot, black-mirrored office building on São Paulo’s Faria Lima Avenue, which is that nation’s version of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.) Another of Sky’s owners was Torie Steele of Malibu, California, who made her fortune helping Italian fashion designers such as Valentino and Versace enter the US market with her flagship Torie Steele Boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, and who was the second wife of the billionaire Sam Wyly, who has owned everything from the craft store chain Michaels to the Maverick Capital hedge fund.

  Tonight, though, for the viewers at home, the dog was simply Sky. Inside Madison Square Garden, he was Wire Fox Terrier number 11. And having achieved his star-studded entrance along with all the other dogs, he now stood with his handler and awaited the arrival of Betty Regina Leininger. The Canadian native and former breeder of German Shepherds was some 1,500 miles away from her adopted hometown of Frisco, Texas, serving as best in show ju
dge in New York City that night. As the house lights came back up, Leininger was escorted into the ring as if coming down the aisle at a wedding, “looking quite regal,” as Hill told the audience at home, in her Westminster purple gown with rhinestone-bejeweled straps and matching high-heeled shoes. Her posture was absolutely perfect, as if she’d been taught to balance a book atop her blond coiffure by lifting her nose and chin into the air, just so.

  And then the dogs were judged, one by one, just as they’d been in the previous rounds. Bless the heart of that Bloodhound: This time, instead of stretching, he shook his head and flapped his ears for the camera, sending the crowd into spasms. When Sky “stacked”—stood proudly on all fours as if he owned his tiny piece of the green carpet—fans cheered as if he’d done a backflip on command. “Coooorgieeeee!” a man shouted from somewhere in the arena, quickly drowned out by dozens of people screaming, “Blooooodhooooouund!”

  Leininger was unswayed by the heckling, walking calmly to the judging table to write her selections for the record. When she revealed the Standard Poodle as the runner-up, the crowd went against the tide and booed. “Nobody likes the Poodles,” the bubbly brunette quipped in the stands. “It’s those haircuts. Really, what are they thinking?”

  And then, Leininger pointed to Sky, the big winner of the night. LaFave announced him over the loudspeakers as “the Wire Fox Terrier,” and again, the crowd exploded in cheers.

  Sky’s handler lifted him into the air, as exuberant as a man who’d just won the lottery. People with security passes rushed in to congratulate him while Frei and Hill bade goodnight to the television audience, and the little red lights atop the cameras went dark for the last time. Large men in suits then strung a gold-colored rope around Sky and his handler, a demarcation line not to be crossed by anyone, including the journalists pacing impatiently with cameras in hand. Just before Sky’s official photograph was taken for posterity, his handler gave him a quick brushing to be sure every hair was in place.