The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  Frei stepped down from the media booth and onto the green carpet, flashing his credentials as he ducked under the rope and took his place among the dignitaries. The scene looked like a banquet hall after the buffet shuts down, with lots of older men slapping one another’s backs and talking about how to settle up the bar tab. Classical music returned over the loudspeakers, and the losing dogs vanished back into the bowels of Madison Square Garden. As the cameramen began to break down their equipment, a proper receiving line took shape waiting for Sky to finish his photo shoot and prance into history. His owners would win no cash prize on this evening, but their rewards would surely come for years, if not decades, in the future.

  In the stands, people rushed for the exits, jamming the escalators that led down from the arena and into the wide concourse hallways. Most were putting back on their thick boots, wool coats, and warm scarves, about to head into the cold February night air, happy they’d gotten their money’s worth at a good show. A few stopped at the official Westminster booths to buy commemorative shirts on the way out.

  One woman, though, wearing a fine evening gown of neutral color, stood off to the side, clearly growing upset as the crowds passed her by, often without even noticing her. She appeared to be in her sixties, with makeup perfectly applied and lipstick recently freshened. She had an entourage around her of four, maybe five other people, some younger and others her age. She was miffed to the point of tapping her toe as a security guard blocked her from the small side door she was trying to access.

  The guard looked tired, as if it had been a long night and he just wanted to get home to his kids. He held a walkie-talkie up to his mouth with the cool indifference of a man who had been asked “Do you know who I am?” more times than he cared to remember.

  “Yeah,” he told an unseen gatekeeper listening on the other end of the radio, all the while keeping his imposing, six-foot-plus frame between the woman and the door. “I have a lady here with some people. She says she’s the owner of the dog that won the whole thing.”

  Behind that door, for the cognoscenti allowed inside the golden ropes, the party was just beginning. The woman was keen to join them, and she likely planned to wait there, aggrieved with her lips pursed and her toe tapping in the public hallway, until her rightful place was acknowledged and she was allowed to enter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BRANDING, BY BREEDING

  “Business opportunities are like buses: There’s always another one coming.”

  —Sir Richard Branson

  How modern society got to a point that includes huge dog auctions and globally attended dog shows is a story that can be told beginning about a week before Christmas in 1798, when a group of like-minded men got together for an invitation-only meeting in England. They were led by Francis Russell, the fifth person to hold the title of Duke of Bedford. He was an aristocrat through and through, albeit one with a penchant for carving his own side paths in life, a quality perhaps best displayed when he abandoned the tied-back hairstyle of the day in protest of a government tax on hair powder. Russell also owned and bred racehorses, and he had a general interest in agriculture. On the day he sat down to chat with his fellow bluebloods near the turn of the nineteenth century, dogs weren’t even an afterthought, but the ideas discussed in that room would lead to what we know today as dog breeds in the auction houses and show rings and breeders’ kennels alike—all because these men of the highest standing, back in their day, wanted to tap into the public’s insatiable curiosity about fat cows.

  That’s right: much of it started with fat cows. Dogs weren’t the stuff of the moneyed class at the time. Instead, agricultural animals like oxen, pigs, and cows dominated the public discourse. The heftiest heifers, when put on display, drew record attendance among curiosity seekers of all economic means in England. Commoners handed over shilling after shilling to stand five deep and crane their necks for a glimpse at the most swollen, fattened cattle the patricians could produce. The fact that the wealthiest men of the time got together in a backroom and decided to charge attendance was pretty much inevitable. Their first livestock shows were so successful that the exhibitions became annual events, adding pigs and hens and other barnyard brethren into the judging mix, with the cattle bulging farther and farther beyond their natural bone structures every year, so that the crowds grew larger and larger all around them.

  By 1843, no less than Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha—the husband of Queen Victoria—was a participating exhibitor in the open fields where people gathered under the sun to view the newest specimens. It fast became fashionable for people of means to commission portraits of their cattle in bucolic settings, always with the animals’ bodies turned broadside, to show off their most valued physical quality: girth. Stud books were created to record bloodlines, and lineage was seen as more important than the animal’s usefulness or practicality on the farm. Breeding options were no doubt negotiated and settled over dinner parties at long tables and while gentlemen sipped properly aged Scotch in private studies.

  The backlash started with butchers, who protested that the meat from the behemoths was too fatty to eat, although, as Harriet Ritvo writes in The Animal Estate, choice cuts from show-winning carcasses “were purchased by great ladies who liked to serve roasts that could be identified by name.” The weekly magazine Punch started publishing articles about how breeding for looks made the animals sickly, sometimes barely able to walk or even move under the mass of their own midsections. Critics complained that judges were rewarding animals whose existence was at best ridiculous and at worst detrimental to livestock as a whole.

  At this time of the copious cows in England, social hierarchy reigned. There was virtually no chance that working-class people could rise and join the ranks of the elite. They could attend all the exhibitions they wanted, and they could have all the talent in the world for breeding livestock, but at the end of the day, raising prizewinning oxen and cows was expensive. Big animals needed big land, big food, and big transport systems that cost far more than everyday people could ever hope to invest. One had to be wealthy even to consider partaking in the game, a roadblock that bothered, quite terribly, those who saw a future of fairer standards among all people in society.

  The concept of prizewinning animals, though, was free for all to consider—and it was far more easily and economically applied to the dogs of Victorian England.

  Before this time, hardly any average people kept dogs in their homes. Some of the elites did, though, and in that sense they could be copied. Dogs may have been a part of people’s lives dating from the earliest days of hunter-gatherers, but it wasn’t until this point in history that dogs started to become what we know today as pets. By the mid-1800s from London to the suburbs, everybody who dreamed of being anybody was getting a dog, naming her, and taking her home.

  Shows comparing dogs with one another became popular in the same vein as the livestock exhibitions, and the value of purebred dogs shot skyward in England around 1880, with kings and queens and dukes and duchesses and other royalty positioning themselves to decide which dogs deserved to win and pass on their bloodlines. The upper class anointed itself as the controlling membership in the earliest breed clubs, which were groups created to define what made, say, a Great Dane a Great Dane, and to help set the standards by which all dogs of their particular breed would be judged. (Today, these groups are often called breed parent clubs.) “It was almost as though members of the decadent upper classes, whose real influence was declining rapidly, were struggling to keep an upper hand in the only way they still knew how: as arbiters of taste,” writes Michael Brandow in A Matter of Breeding. The trend made its way across the Atlantic Ocean, too, with fanciers copying the same blueprint for financial success. The dog shows began in New York and grew throughout the late 1800s. Up-and-coming socialites formed parent clubs for various breeds. P. T. Barnum’s Great National Dog Show, held during the 1860s, became a precursor to today’s Westminster version
. By 1908, when a Model T Ford automobile cost $825, top purebreds were being sold to the wealthiest Americans for $1,000 to $5,000 apiece.

  The initial dog breeders in England fast became outraged that working-class people were breeding dogs to enter into what had always been “their” animal shows, but the average people loved the idea of being able to hobnob with the elites and saw their dogs as no different. (Sound familiar?) It all became a bit unwieldy, with the earliest dog show rules being rather willy-nilly, and for order of some sort to prevail, a classification system had to be devised. That is how more than two-thirds of the breeds recognized today were created, just a century and a half ago. Prior to this time, dogs had been characterized not by their looks but by their purpose, be it hunting, herding, or something else. That changed in 1874, a full decade before the AKC was formed, when the first edition of the Kennel Club Stud Book was printed in Britain. Whereas in 1800, when dog shows were unheard of and a fancier could almost count on two hands the number of dog breeds recognized in the Western world, by 1890 about sixty breeds were being displayed at hundreds of dog shows annually, sometimes with nearly 1,500 dogs competing. This was the same era when Barnum—against cries of animal cruelty by Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA—created a circus that displayed exotic animals like elephants all around the globe, and a time when the first world’s fairs were being produced throughout Europe and the United Kingdom to show off the newest products for consumers on a global scale. As the dog shows became more standardized, they, too, introduced new products in the form of new breeds, and it seemed natural to put the dogs, like so many other animals, on display for the public’s entertainment.

  How were the breeds defined? The same way the four hundred or so recognized breeds in the world today are created: through negotiation and petition among breeders. Were those standards ideal for the dogs? Sometimes no more than they were for the morbidly obese cows. At this time in England, for instance, breeds like the modern Bulldog were born—complete with traits that, still today, cause the dog to suffer, including making it hard for the dogs to walk, breathe, or give birth to puppies. The critics saw this many, many generations ago, right at the start, with one describing the Bulldog craze in the 1800s by writing, “The disgusting abortions exhibited at the shows [were] deformities from foot to muzzle.” Today’s critics are only slightly less biting, calling the Bulldog “a curious blend of Victorian sensibility and gothic horror” before adding that Bulldogs are among the most expensive breeds for veterinary care today.

  But the shows went on, and the common people figured out how to breed and own dogs that looked the same as the ones the rich people possessed. Consumer demand only grew as society continued its shift toward economic mobility among the classes.

  “They wanted people to know at a glance that they had a first-rate dog which had cost a lot of money and had impeccable lineage,” says Vanessa Woods, a research scientist today at the Duke Canine Cognition Center and co-author of The Genius of Dogs. “The easiest way to broadcast this was by the dog’s appearance.”

  The majority of breeds, in other words, were developed just like today’s Louis Vuitton scarves or Jimmy Choo shoes or Fendi clutches that visually announce a person’s economic standing—or at least what the person wants other people to believe about her economic standing. When average, aspiring people in mid-1900s America started watching the Westminster dog show on television and buying purebreds in such great quantities that they led to puppy farms and dog auctions, they were only furthering the mentality begun a century earlier in England, that the breed of one’s dog was an extension of oneself within the growing middle class.

  Today’s high ratings for televised dog shows like Westminster and the continued existence of groups like England’s Kennel Club, the AKC, and FCI confirms that, as the calendar now turns closer to the mid-2000s, society has hardly changed its thinking at all.

  “To me, breeds are like a designer handbag,” Woods writes. “People like the way they look and the hype behind them. They buy into stereotypes (Border Collies are the smartest, Labs are the most faithful, etc.) and then they match up how they see themselves with the marketing behind the dog.”

  Why should anyone believe Woods’s opinion about breeds? Because she’s among the first people in history to study the scientific evidence behind the marketing that today’s dog owners, their parents, their parents before them, and their parents before them have been presented for more than a century and a half.

  Woods’s co-author and husband, Brian Hare, founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center and teaches in Duke University’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Hare had the chance to study monkeys, which humans have long considered closer to their own genetic makeup than dogs. He happened to notice something surprising while working with the supposedly superior animal species: his dog, Oreo, could understand human gestures the monkeys didn’t even notice. This random observation made Hare curious about studying how dogs think and act, a practice that had long been considered unworthy of serious researchers’ time and effort.

  Hare and Woods, who is known for her research of bonobos, or great apes, joined a growing number of cognitive scientists and ethologists who, only since about the mid-1990s, have been shaping the modern study of dogs and trying to prove, or disprove, what most everyday dog lovers take for granted when talking about dogs and breeds. These experts are applying the scientific method to stereotypes, and they say they’ve learned more in the past decade about how dogs think than mankind learned in the entire previous century.

  Given the history of how most breeds came to be, perhaps there’s not much need for a spoiler alert here: The early science shows that, contrary to popular belief, modern dog breeds are almost exclusively about looks and hardly at all about temperament or what makes a dog a good addition to a family.

  “Science is still really at the frontiers of answering what traits are inherited and when this occurs,” Woods says. “We know through [Russian experiments with silver foxes] that aggression is hereditary, but not enough to be able to predict the temperament of a dog. For example, some of the sweetest dogs are rescued fighting dogs. Scientifically, there is really no way to know for sure, and it certainly isn’t by breed. A Rottweiler puppy has an equal chance of being a loving member of the family as a Golden Retriever puppy.”

  Janis Bradley, another early adopter into the first generation of canine science, agrees. She has been trying to separate fact from stereotype since 2001. That’s the year a thirty-three-year-old San Francisco woman named Diane Whipple became news across America, when a neighbor’s pair of Presa Canarios mauled her to death while she was entering her apartment after grocery shopping. According to an expert’s testimony, one of the dogs, weighing 125 pounds, stood on its hind legs and used its forelegs to pin the five-foot-three, 110-pound woman against a wall. The second dog, of similar size, heard the commotion in the building’s hallway and joined the frenzy. After about six minutes, Whipple was on the ground, stripped of her clothes and unable to move, having been bitten seventy-seven times. She died several hours later from massive blood loss and asphyxiation from a crushed larynx.

  The horrifying death, Bradley recalls, spread paranoia about dogs across Northern California the way an earthquake spreads fear of aftershocks. It was almost as if the entire human population was showing signs of posttraumatic stress, triggered by the mere sight of some dogs—and Bradley wanted to know if the reaction was warranted based on a single, highly publicized event.

  “I was working at the San Francisco SPCA, teaching dog trainers and working with dogs who were being referred to me with aggression issues,” she says. “People were getting afraid of dogs. My friends with German Shepherds would walk down the street, and other people would cross to the other side. People were really sensitized. I was scratching my head. I work with the supposedly high-risk dogs, and most of the people I know professionally do this, and I don’t know anybody who has been seriou
sly shredded by a dog. I started looking into the research to see if I was aberrant, if my experience was unusual.”

  Today, Bradley is director of communications and publications for the National Canine Research Council in the United States. The group’s mission is to synthesize the most current, most scientifically defensible information about the human–canine bond, from researchers at places like the Duke center as well as the Family Dog Project in Hungary, and then to share it with decision makers and everyday dog lovers.

  Like Woods, after looking at the current scientific studies, Bradley could not be any clearer in her opinion of modern-day breeds. The notion is pure folly, she says, that a dog’s breed indicates much of anything beyond the way it looks. As much as breeders and kennel clubs worldwide may advertise outright or imply quietly that certain breeds are likely to have predictable temperaments when brought into homes or to serve our families better as pets, the science thus far simply does not support that assertion.

  “Nobody was ever breeding for the kinds of things that pet owners care about anyway, for lack of a better term, for personality traits, they’ve never been bred for it,” Bradley says. “Nobody has bred for general friendliness or unfriendliness or playfulness or any of those things. Nobody has ever tried to breed for those things.”

  She adds, “The inclination among geneticists now is that it wouldn’t be practical to do anyway, because most likely, a low threshold for getting angry, those kinds of things, those are what geneticists call polygenic traits. There are a whole bunch of genes involved, so you’re not going to find that it’s anything you can breed for. It’s going to remain more complicated than that.”