by Josh Dean
It’s due only to better record keeping that the history of the Australian shepherd begins to crystallize between the world wars. Prior to that, dogs that appear to be Aussies were doing their jobs—accompanying Basque herders tending to the sheep flocks of the West and then being adopted by American ranchers who admired their work ethic—all over the West. It didn’t matter to his owner where a dog came from or who his sire was; it mattered only that he was good at his job. Very often you will find these dogs referred to as “little blue dogs” or “little blue bobtails,” and it’s pretty clear that the two defining physical characteristics of the Australian shepherd, as it developed organically, were a blue coat and bobbed tail. Which makes Jack, accidentally, a perfect exemplar for the breed’s look.
The characteristic that led to the dog’s becoming a formal breed, however, was its ability to “work” livestock—at first sheep, but also horses, cows, ducks, chickens, or any other animal a farmer might need to tend to, including his children.
That’s how Ernest Hartnagle came to the breed. And no family has had more influence over the Australian shepherd than the Hartnagles of Colorado.
After World War II, the family patriarch, whom most people call Ernie, was working on his uncle’s ranch on the steep slopes of what is today the Vail Ski Resort. He had border collies and Aussies, and only the latter were consistently capable of driving the cattle from lower elevations to the rich summer pastures near the mountaintops, then back down again, in any conditions.
His first Aussie, acquired in 1953, was a female named Snipper, and Ernie was so thrilled with her that he began seeking out others like her, laying the groundwork for what is called the “foundation stock” of the breed as we know it today. Ernie selected dogs for working ability, and in the process selected for the traits that accompany that—genes being a messy and complicated business.
Ernie met and fell in love with Elaine Gibson, who just so happened to grow up among Aussies herself. Her godmother, Juanita Ely, according to The Total Australian Shepherd, a book Ernie wrote with his youngest daughter, Carol Ann, was a “salty ranch woman from Idaho” who got her first Aussie, Teddy, in 1928. Juanita began breeding and was one of the eight original members of what became known as the Australian Shepherd Club.
Colorado was the hub of breed activity, mostly because it was a center for American livestock. The Hartnagles’ Las Rocosa kennel—which would become to the first kennel awarded Hall of Fame status by the Australian Shepherd Club of America—provided many of the foundation dogs you’ll find in the Aussies of today. Other key contributors were the dogs of Jay Sisler, renowned rodeo star (more on him later) and Dr. Weldon T. Heard, a Denver veterinarian whose Flintridge line is all over the family trees of America’s top Aussies.
Jeanne Joy Hartnagle, another of Ernie’s daughters and probably the most recognized authority on breed history, told me that Heard’s dogs were especially important in the lineage of Aussies that succeeded in the conformation show ring—especially his two foundation sires, Fieldmaster and Dutchman, the latter of whom was the very first Champion of Record in the ASCA record books.
Whereas Ernie Hartnagle was in pursuit of the perfect herding dog, Dr. Heard was chasing a different sort of perfection, focused more on structure and appearance, that translated well into the conformation ring.
Heard’s impact was huge. “Of all the foundation bloodlines,” the Hartnagles write, “the Flintridge line exhibited the greatest influence on the modern Australian Shepherd.”
If you were to pinpoint a birthday for the Australian shepherd breed, it would probably be May 5, 1957, when the Australian Shepherd Club of America was formed, in Tucson, Arizona, after, according to the Hartnagles’ history, “a notice was posted that a meeting would be held for all who were interested in the Australian Shepherd.” Prior to that date, owners and breeders had to traverse the country to participate in rare-breed shows, but ASCA’s formation unified the dog’s breeders and provided a network of shows at which they could compete against one another in search of titles and find better breeding stock.
In 1975 the Colorado affiliate club, led by Ernie Hartnagle—with the participation of his wife and five children—was appointed by ASCA to “draft a professionally written, concise breed standard in order to create more uniformity in type and standardize the breed.” It was a long, contentious, and tedious process, partly because every breeder had strong opinions and was willing to argue them and partly because the methodology was as scientific as it could be. Starting with each affiliate club’s ideas for what an Aussie “is,” as well as the AKC guidelines for drafting a breed standard, the committee went out and recorded the size of Australian shepherds all over the country, finding that the majority fell into a bell curve between eighteen inches (for a female) and twenty-three inches (for a male). “That’s how they decided the size,” Jeanne Joy Hartnagle told me. “It wasn’t arbitrary.” Committee members also considered such important questions as “What is the function of the head?” Meaning, why is the head shaped the way it is? Each facet of the dog’s structure was broken down and analyzed, then debated and honed.
Two years later, in 1977, the standard was approved in a majority vote by the club’s members and the Australian shepherd as we know it today was born. The registry began with just a few dogs, but by 1989 there were fifty thousand entered.
Because the AKC has and will always be the gold standard for America’s pedigreed dogs—an imprimatur of quality, deserved or not—ASCA’s members sought inclusion in that club’s stud book from a very early point. It just seemed that a breed wasn’t really a breed until the AKC said it was.
Ernie Hartnagle wrote the first letter requesting admission to the AKC stud book in 1976, saying essentially, “Hi there. We’re out here,” and received a polite rejection. The reason was simple: There weren’t enough dogs. Nowhere in the AKC bylaws is there a precise minimum, but apparently 1,518 weren’t enough. ASCA tried again a few years later, when the registry was over 5,000 and was rejected (politely) again. In 1984, at a contentious meeting in Las Vegas, the members voted not to pursue recognition a third time, but according to Jo Kimes, ASCA’s longtime executive secretary, the discussion continued, and it’s very likely the group would have applied yet again and surely would have been accepted.
They weren’t given the chance. In 1984, Kimes received a call late at night from the club’s then-president, and when she growled at him for calling so late, he responded gravely, “We’ve lost the Aussie.”
His choice of words may have been overly dramatic, but his news was shocking indeed. That a breakaway faction of ten ASCA members—calling themselves the United States Australian Shepherd Association (USASA)—had secretly prepared and applied for AKC membership separately from the club was upsetting enough; that they were accepted was gutting.
“The next thing we knew, the breed was AKC-recognized,” Kimes says. Those ten members “wanted it very badly”—so badly that they weren’t willing to wait for ASCA to back them. “For some reason they broke a hundred years of tradition,” she said, solemnly. “They thought it was best for the Australian shepherd.”
And just like that the breed’s community, which was only a decade old to begin with, was suddenly and violently cleaved, never to reunite. It’s not unprecedented for a breed to have more than one parent club, but it’s unusual, and ASCA today is the largest single-breed registry in America. To this day ASCA and the AKC-affiliated parent clubs operate independently of one another. They run their own registries, and accreditations, and dog shows, and though some breeders, owners, and dogs participate in both, many don’t.
“The remaining ASCA members “were very bitter, and rightfully so,” explains Kimes. “Someone comes and takes your toy and doesn’t ask you. They just take it and go.” Times heals most wounds, of course, and the majority of Australian shepherd puppies born today are double-registered with both groups—as Jack and most of Kerry’s dogs are—but resentment lingers. Some ASCA
-allied kennels refuse to sell puppies without a promise that the new owner won’t register with the AKC, while other, USASA kennels consider the rival outfit to represent a different, lesser version of the dog.
Kimes, who has two Aussies that work cattle on her South Texas ranch, says that a few years back she was in the process of buying a puppy from Slash V Kennels—an ASCA Hall of Fame Kennel known for its working dogs—and the proprietor, Terry Martin, asked her if she was planning to register the dog with AKC. “I said, ‘Probably not,’” Kimes recalls. To which Martin replied, “That’s not good enough.”
Kimes was happy to comply.
“I love my dogs. But I also love my friends.”
Of all the dogs under Heather and Kevin’s care, only Jack represents a breed with two parent clubs and two competing sets of events. If he’d been raised by Kerry, who is herself an ASCA judge, he’d probably have shown mostly at ASCA events. But as long as he was with Heather, he’d be an AKC dog. And the reality is, AKC events, which don’t match dogs only against others in their breed but against others in their groups, are a far bigger deal. Jack would be an AKC dog first, with perhaps the occasional dalliance in ASCA. And everyone seemed just fine with the arrangement.
CHAPTER TEN
York
* * *
The first requisite of his service is that he must be alive, for little pleasure can be derived from a dead dog.
—MCDOWELL LYON, The Dog in Action
* * *
The weeks following Westminster make up one of the slower periods of the year. There’s the inevitable hangover, whether or not you won, and, for a significant percentage of the dogs and owners who don’t live close by, the sheer logistics (and expense) of traveling to New York for the show makes it a difficult week. Thus not a lot happens immediately in its wake.
Kimberly and Jack took a few weeks to relax. She helped her son, Taylor, weigh his college options and sort out the financial details of how they’d pay for the one he was leaning toward—a local branch of Penn State, which was just fine with Kimberly. Going there would allow him to live at home, cutting out a huge chunk of the cost, and would also, at least in theory, help to keep him out of trouble. “Most kids party the first year,” she said. Living at home would complicate that at least a little.
The daughter of a close friend was staying with the Smiths, occupying the spare room and helping keep tabs on Taylor while also pitching in with the dogs. Her name is Megan and she had become Jack’s designated running buddy—leading regular mile-long jogs around a local lake.
That was fortunate, because in Heather’s estimation Jack was getting fat. “He could lose a pound or two,” was one of the things she often said about Jack (and other client dogs), and sometimes she was even more blunt. “Your dog is fat,” was how she put it to Kerry. When Kimberly heard this, she thought it funny, and she was not at all offended. In her view he wasn’t fat, and depending on how you look at it, both of them were right. If, like Heather, your perspective is canine excellence, then every extra ribbon of loose skin mars the perfect presentation, even if that fat is largely invisible to the casual observer. If, like Kimberly, you are that casual observer, then Jack looked fine. One adjustment of ceding control to a handler is learning to adhere to the handler’s dictates, even if you don’t fully agree with them. For Kimberly that would take some getting used to.
Kimberly was also struggling with the economics of keeping Jack out on the circuit. With her regular bills—including boarding for a horse she was desperately trying to sell—and Taylor’s college looming, there wasn’t really enough disposable income left to pay Heather a full month’s handling fee, which could approach two thousand dollars, not including entry fees and travel expenses. It wasn’t yet a critical issue, fortunately, because Jack’s early and unexpected success was enough motivation to keep Kerry’s interest. For Kerry, who occasionally did this for owners of promising dogs, the hardship of coughing up an extra thousand dollars or so a month was outweighed by the possibility that a potentially great dog could be retired because his owner didn’t have the financial wherewithal to keep him out on the circuit. So Jack’s breeder and co-owner agreed to pay his fees at least temporarily, to allow Heather to show him for the entire month of March. After that, the two agreed, they would reassess.
The month’s results, meanwhile, were keeping her riveted from afar. An unsuccessful weekend in Harrisburg—Jack was shut out both days—was quickly forgotten by a milestone moment in York, Pennsylvania, home turf to Tanner and Dawn, who sits on the board of the local kennel club.
York was a five-day cluster, and the first days of those tend to have significantly smaller entries, so Kimberly’s expectations, which waver from high to low with great frequency anyway, tended to be higher then. At work she sat and stewed, an anxious owner on pins and needles wishing she could be there and wanting at the least to know how her dog was doing at a fairground less than an hour’s drive away.
It was frustrating to Kimberly that Heather and Kevin didn’t have time to stay in better touch, and she’d been wishing they’d implement a more immediate notification system, say, a method of sending out short texts or e-mails throughout the day for anxious owners. But due to the logistics of Heather’s workday, which rarely even allows time for eating (not that she would eat anyway), she has made it a policy to make all the calls to owners at once, at the end of the day. There were no exceptions, and from a business standpoint this makes sense: Return one call or text and you have to return them all.
For an owner who couldn’t attend the show, however, this was excruciating, and Kimberly would fixate on the slow-moving clock hands, wondering how Jack was doing and checking in regularly with Facebook, where owners attending the show would often post results out of pride—or disgust. (Kimberly often provided this service herself.)
On Wednesday, the first day of the York cluster, Heather finally called at 8:00 P.M., and the news wasn’t great. “We didn’t win,” she told Kimberly, who sank down into her couch. Jack had shown well, Heather said, but faced stiff competition, including a nice-looking dog she hadn’t seen before—a blue merle named Bentley handled by the respected professional Jessica Plourde. Heather reported that he had a look similar to Jack’s, though in her opinion he was a bit less “pretty.” But she noted that Plourde is known for handing Aussies (in the way that Heather is known for Berners), and once a handler has a reputation within a certain breed (or breeds), judges tend to pay her an extra measure of respect, in the form of an extra-long look or a touch more forgiveness for a miscue. (Because, the logic goes, a specialist knows a quality dog.)
Bentley won the breed and also took first in the Herding Group. And then won again on Thursday.
But Kimberly learned from Facebook that Plourde wasn’t entered for the weekend, and this lifted her spirits.
Kimberly took Friday off and headed out for York but got caught up in traffic caused by an accident, which meant she was barely going to make it for Jack’s ring time. It definitely wouldn’t allow her to greet him, and they’d been apart for three days. Sure enough, Heather asked her to stay away. “He’s been a real handful,” she told Kimberly, adding that despite the fact that he’d been showing well in the ring, it was requiring extra diligence on her part to focus him. Under these conditions a celebratory romp with his owner was out of the question.
The problem was, Kimberly missed her dog. She hadn’t seen Jack in four days and then arrived to learn she would have to wait at least another couple hours. She stalked the room carefully to locate the Aussie ring without being seen by Jack and found a hiding place with a semiobstructed view. From there she saw a huge field of nineteen good dogs, and her low expectations lowered further when she spied Jessica and Bentley, who hadn’t left after all. Facebook had been wrong.
Kimberly’s deflated feeling quickly subsided, however, as Jack turned on his sparkle and won the breed easily, at least if the swiftness and confidence of the judge’s decision was any ind
ication. Heather, having a date with Tanner at the Bernese specialty being held in the building next door, hustled quickly out of the ring and, spying Kimberly in the crowd, waved her off as she rushed Jack back to his kennel. Only then did she walk back and explain what was happening. “I know you want to see him,” she said. “He was really good. Such an improvement! But I don’t want you to see him until after group.”
It was 10:30 A.M. And the groups wouldn’t begin until 2:30 or 3:30, meaning that Kimberly had four to six hours “to hang around the show and not see my dog.” Despite the fact that she was sure he knew she was there, because “he’s got such a keen sense of smell. But Heather’s Heather, and she’s the boss when it comes to this.”
The hours crept by, and Kimberly passed the time by perusing vendors, downing Diet Pepsi after Diet Pepsi, and chatting with the occasional acquaintance, and then she carefully sneaked back to the ring to find a place where she could watch the group with no danger of being spotted by her dog.
The Herding Group was to be judged by a European judge about whom Heather knew nothing. With familiar judges, professional handlers often have a good sense of their chances, but with this wild card, Heather said, “I have no idea.” What’s more, European judges are known for making unconventional choices, as they are largely uncolored by the influence of advertising or any prior knowledge of a particular dog’s reputation.
And from Kimberly’s secret vantage point, his actions indeed seemed a little unorthodox. Her position afforded her a good view of the down-and-back and from her spot she could see very clearly that this judge was barely watching most of the dogs. He seemed more interested in judging the spectators. But she did notice that he “seemed to definitely be looking at Jack. And someone commented that he seemed to like Heather.”