“Show dogs are just pets that get to go to dog shows. The ring is just a small part of their lives.” —Bill McFadden, dog handler

The parking lot outside the Convention Center in Wildwood, New Jersey greets visitors with a sign that reads “No campers, RVs, buses.” But that hasn’t stopped the lot from filling up with all three. The dog show has come to town.

If you were to arrive between Memorial Day and Labor Day, this famously kitschy Jersey Shore town would be packed with sun-scorched families gnawing at clouds of cotton candy as they prowled the boardwalk from musty fun house to rickety carnival ride, between stops for funnel cakes and olde time-y photos. But in early February it is a ghost town of more than 200 shuttered-for-the-season ‘50s era “Doo Wop” motels and motor inns with names that seem to have been plucked from whatever list casino builders use: Lu Fran, Star Fire, Jolly Roger, Sand Dune, Sea Chest, Ala Kai, Beau Rivage, Tangiers, etc.

Though the town’s population can swell to 250,000 or more over the 4th of July weekend, the year-round residents number just 5,436. And if dog show week is any indication, 5,400 or so of those must fly south for the winter. Wildwood in winter is so deserted that the city actually turns off the street lights and you could take a nap in the middle of the main beach road and probably only have to get up once or twice a day to let a car roll by.

So there’s more than enough room in the convention center parking lot for the SUVs, vans, box trucks and RVs that ferry around America’s show dogs and their human attendants. To walk the parking lot at a dog show is to see every possible seven-or-less letter dog related word applied in license plate form: DOGRUN, DROOLRS, PAWSRUS, LAB LVR, FIDOFUN, DOG MOM…

If the plate doesn’t give it away, you can almost always discern a vehicle owner’s breed of choice by the silhouette stickers that adorn it — hulking Great Danes, elegant Afghans, the wispy Gremlin ears of a Papillon. The lot is also a good place to tour the taxonomy of America’s recreational vehicles, many hooked up to power — usually in limited supply, and only by advance reservation — and most adjacent to sawdust-lined pens that serve as combination exercise area and dog potty. (Dog shows have official, shared-use versions of these fenced areas, by the way. They’re known as “ex-pens,” and are used as indoor bathrooms. They are unisex, though at bigger shows there’s sometimes one reserved exclusively for bitches in heat.)

Other vehicles come emblazoned with the names of professional handlers, or of kennels, or of the many businesses that chase show dogs and their owners around. For instance: Lil’ Pals, “a pet portrait studio that comes to you” offering the sort of high-concept photography displayed on the side: say you’d like to see your Pomeranian with angel wings, or your Bichon Frises imagined as a blissful couple on their wedding day, complete with tux and veil.

The convention center itself can’t be more than a few years old. It’s a concrete and steel leviathan parked on the precipice of Wildwood’s famous 1.4-mile boardwalk and you have to imagine a few Doo Wop motels came down to make room for it. Inside, it’s vast and sterile, and the most complimentary thing you can say about its architectural design is that there really isn’t any.

Outside, the beach was still covered from the last unexpected snow and inside people were muttering into cell phones about contingency plans if the local weathermen were right and a giant storm that newscasters had already dubbed “the Snowpocalypse” (or “Snowmageddon”) were to arrive.

People will often refer to a dog show by a singular name — in this case “the Wildwood show” — but that’s actually not at all accurate. Each day is its own show, sponsored by a different kennel club, and so even a single weekend combines two shows into what has become known as a “cluster,” a trend that arose in the 1970s in response to the Arab Oil Embargo. Prior to that initiative, exhibitors had to pack up and move to a new location every day, but the gas crisis caused the AKC to ask local kennel clubs to work together so that two or three or four of them from a particular region would meet and stage shows at a single, central location. Hence, the cluster.

The five-day Wildwood cluster was, then, actually five separate events, meaning that a dog entered all five days could win five purple Best of Breed ribbons — or lose five times and get nothing.

It’s common practice to enter a particular dog in all the events and then pick and choose which ones to actually compete in. Experienced owners and handlers, for instance, tend to know which judges favor which types of dogs so if you have a slighter Dalmatian and you know Saturday’s judge has a particular fetish for larger dogs, you might opt to skip that day.

Being new to the game, Kimberly Smith tended to follow her handler Heather Bremmer’s lead and so sent her new champion Australian Shepherd, the 20-month-old Jack, off to the Jersey Shore unsure of how many times she’d actually have him shown. He was entered all five days — the $75-per-day fees must be paid at least 18 days in advance, so, on Heather’s advice, she hedged her bets — and for sure she planned to let him show Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. But if he were to struggle those days, she was unlikely to throw him to the wolves over the weekend, when the field would swell with the entries of owner-handlers whose day jobs preclude participation on weekdays. Momentum would dictate events.

***

Heather Bremmer and her husband and handling partner Kevin Bednar tend to arrive at a location just about the time it opens so they always have prime real estate as near as possible to the show rings. Once a beachhead has been established, Kevin—who carries at least 200 pounds on his square-shouldered, six-foot frame—will begin the manual labor. He’ll roll in the crates and kennels and assemble them so that the smaller boxes, for the smaller breeds like Corgis, sit atop the jumbo boxes, which house big dogs like the Bernese Mountain Dogs, Bullmastiffs and Akitas. Next, he’ll set up two or three grooming tables, plug in the generators that power the industrial, cool-air hair dryers, and make sure each crate has a towel and a water bowl.

All around them, other owners and handlers do the same so that within hours the convention center is transformed into a warren of crates and tables and supply boxes — a quick-rising temporary dog town with all the supplies necessary to feed and house 1,000 animals, most of which will also sleep here in their crates.

The actual competition rings don’t open until 8am but by 6:30 in the morning of the first show everyone will be showered and dressed and at work bathing and blow-drying the first breeds on the schedule.

Depending on the size of a show, Heather and Kevin will have at least 10 and sometimes 20 or more dogs in their care. To make their lives easier, they specialize in working, sporting and herding dogs — dogs like Jack the Aussie, Rita, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and Tanner, a Bernese Mountain Dog, plus assorted other Golden Retrievers, Corgis, and Mastiffs. These breeds require pretty minimal grooming, as compared to Malteses or especially poodles, which have such outlandish and time intensive hair styles that poodle handlers work exclusively with that breed. These specialists arrive early and work furiously, with the help of trusty assistants, on however many poodles they have in their care, and aren’t distracted by other dogs that might have to be shown in the meantime as breeds are scattered across the day. A complete poodle grooming can take upwards of two hours and you’ll rarely find poodles competing first thing in the morning; organizers aren’t that cruel.

The most famous poodle handler in all the land — in fact, the world — is Kaz Hosaka, an immaculately coiffed Japanese man who moved to America at age 19 speaking no English and now handles anywhere from 5 to 25 poodles, including for 2010, Walker, the nation’s top-ranked toy poodle. Walker, like many of the country’s best dogs, handlers and owners, was in Wildwood for his last tune-up before the Super Bowl of dog shows, the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York City. Judges and crowds both love poodles, toy and standard-sized, and if you can get past the ridiculous hair, it’s not hard to see why: more than almost any other breed, poodles exude an air of confidence in the ring. You don’t want to give too much credit to an animal’s awareness of what’s going on at a dog show, but it’s easy to watch a poodle trot around and think it is very consciously performing for the crowds.

It certainly seems like good show dogs know what’s expected of them. To see Kimberly Smith’s dog Jack under normal conditions is to see an animal that takes great joy in tackling life. If he’s not sleeping, he’s playing, and he radiates energy to such a degree that his hair almost stands on end. But once Heather snaps on his show lead — a thin gold choke collar at the end of a thin piece of blue kangaroo leather decorated with silver and blue glass beads — Jack transforms into something else: a willing, almost subservient participant in a game he seems to enjoy. That is, when he’s focused.

Jack loves a challenge and this clearly is one. It probably takes every ounce of composure to suppress his urge to jump up and kiss the judge, or to romp with a ring full of his peers, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him when he’s at his best in the ring. He follows Heather’s direction, eyes locked on her hand, and when it’s time to move, he moves smoothly, with no hitches. Some of this is learned, sure — and both Kimberly and Heather will tell you that Jack is still a puppy, and has learning to do — but there also seems to be something less tangible at work here. Could it be talent?

***

Kimberly wasn’t able to get the day off from work, so she missed the first day of the Wildwood cluster. Jack was no worse for it. He was selected Best of Breed out of 12 champion Australian Shepherds, beating a solid field of six dogs, including a black dog named Shocka (full, registered name: Ch Heatherhill Shock N Awe) that won the breed at Cruft’s, the world’s largest dog show, held every June in England, as well a solidly built red dog named Striker (Ch Schaefer Vinelake Impulsive) who had beaten him back-to-back days at some recent shows in Westchester County, New York.

The losses to Striker, Kimberly felt, were indicative of a potential problem that no handler can correct for. Striker is a solid, blocky animal, with “more bone” than Jack, who has a lithe and athletic build that would seem to be an asset for an animal designed to be agile while herding around uncooperative flocks of sheep. But size is a bias you can’t overcome and much to the frustration of Kimberly and Heather—who runs into this issue in all the breeds—some judges just prefer it. Once you’ve learned that about a judge, the strategy is simple: you do your best to avoid him.

To beat Striker, then, was a nice start to the weekend. “I’m a pessimist,” Kimberly said, when informed of the result. “I always expect him to lose.” While this was a common refrain for her, she, like any owner, wanted very much for her dog to win.

Heather and Kevin’s team was off to a good start. Tanner, who had finished 2009 as the number-one-ranked Berner in America, also won his breed, as did Rita the Chessie, Trader the Akita, and Benny the bloodhound, who really only had to show up and not fall over in the ring considering he was the only bloodhound entered. Technically, a judge doesn’t have to reward a dog just for showing up; if he decides that dog just isn’t deserving of a ribbon, he can withhold it, and this rare event is just about the biggest humiliation any owner can experience and should probably be taken as a sign that your dog — and, by proxy, you — might want to look for another hobby. Benny had no such issues; he is 145 pounds of droopy, bloodshot eyes and sagging, drool-laden jowls, the sixth-ranked bloodhound in America, and a few generations removed from Hubert, the bloodhound that starred in the movie Best In Show. Benny enjoyed a few minutes of his own in the spotlight the previous Thanksgiving when he and Kevin won the breed and appeared in the Hound Group at the National Dog Show, held in Philadelphia and aired to a national audience on NBC.

Less popular breeds end up with little or no competition quite often, so anyone looking to create champions and be competitive almost immediately could do worse than to pick a rarer breed like the Pulik or Pharaoh Hound or Komondor, all of which dwell near the bottom of the list of most popular breeds, published annually by the AKC. As of this writing, the breed in dead last was the English foxhound, a hunting dog that looks very much like an overgrown beagle. Considering that the beagle is ranked fifth, this could be surprising until you realize that a) there just aren’t many English foxhounds in the U.S.; it’s primarily a British dog owned by foppish men in jaunty caps and red coats. And b) unlike beagles, which adapt to both country and city, foxhounds, say the breed club, “do best with acreage,” which pretty much rules out apartments.

By the morning of day two, Kimberly and Jack had been apart for nearly 48 hours, and because Jack has a tendency to get overexcited, and is difficult to bring back from that state, Heather asked Kimberly to arrive early enough that her dog could get their joyous reunion out of his system in time for her to steer him back in the general direction of composure by ring-time.

When Jack sees Kimberly after an absence his eyes go a little wide, his head dips and then he begins to vibrate, from back to front. These vibrations become tremors, which become earthquakes, until Jack’s 55-pound form is practically levitating. Because he was on the grooming table when she arrived in Wildwood, and thus had a choke collar around his neck connecting him to a pole, Jack couldn’t really move very far but that didn’t stop his body for spasming around until he was freed from the lead and could jump up and onto his mother for a good hug.

Hugging was a new thing for Jack. He loves affection, and will jump up and paw at you repeatedly, as well as propel himself up and into your midsection over and over until you stoop down to his level and apply pats and rubs. But the full-on paws-around-the-neck hug was something he picked up from his new roommate Summer, a young Australian Shepherd Kimberly had recently purchased from MontRose Kennels in New York state to be his home companion as well as perhaps a future paramour should their respective traits prove to be a good match. Summer was a big hugger and after a few weeks of watching her stand up and hug his favorite human, Jack began to imitate her. It was, for a time, one of his favorite things to do.

Heather looked at both Kimberly and Jack sternly and directed him back to the grooming table. At shows, Heather is in charge and everyone knows it. Being 5-foot-3 and not many pounds over 100, and looking more like the kind of person you’d find at the front of a kindergarten classroom, Heather is easily outweighed by many of the animals at the show but like any good handler she has the aura of an alpha dog. Many times a day I would witness her silence a barking dog simply by saying its name once, in a brusque manner, and sometimes just by staring it down.

Heather has a particular fetish for presentation, and she likes for Kevin’s outfits to color coordinate with hers. For Thursday, it was turquoise. Kevin wore a turquoise shirt and turquoise accents in his tie, while Heather chose a turquoise blazer and black skirt. On the spectrum of conservative to flashy, the two fall somewhere in the middle. You’ll see some handlers in sequins, and others in off-the-rack suits sized for a much larger person.

“So we won yesterday,” Kimberly said, beaming a little, as Heather put her blazer aside and replaced it with a black fleece she wears while grooming.

“He was a nightmare,” Heather answered. Jack’s handler was finding her star Australian Shepherd to be an unfamiliar challenge. Some days, she put on the lead and he was calm and focused; other times, he seemed totally uninterested in playing along. On these days, it took all of her tricks to bring him in line. She felt that he needed more experience still. “I think if he did a whole month with us it would make a huge difference,” she said.

Because Kimberly wasn’t able to afford a full-time handling plan on her own—which could be $2000-per-month or more—Jack was on an erratic schedule and it seemed to Heather that one reason he tends to be unruly the first day of a show is that he forgets how to act like a show dog. Every time, she theorized, Jack had to work through his excitement anew. If you’re a dog who loves dogs, and people — let’s face it, who loves stimulation of any kind — a dog show is pretty overwhelming, and so you can see how Jack could lose his composure so easily.

Still, he had the win, partly due to his presence of mind that day, and partly due to his beautiful appearance. Aesthetically, Jack doesn’t have many flaws. As a type of Australian Shepherd known as blue merle, he has an exotic look, with black, gray, brown and blue patches on his otherwise ivory white coat, but even those spots aren’t really so random. He does have what’s known as a “rose ear,” which causes one of his ears to perk up ever so slightly instead of folding perfectly over in a mirror image of the one on the other side. Unfortunately, it’s his left ear, and the left side is the “show side,” or the side that faces the judge when the animals are standing still in the ring.

It’s a rather weak muscle that causes the rose ear, though, and is quite easily corrected. If this very minor flaw is recognized early enough, a breeder can glue the ear when the dog is 8 weeks old, which is painless, and the problem takes care of itself in a few weeks. Since Jack is older, Heather’s method, which she picked up from an email Kerry sent to Kimberly (including photos), was to apply some thick scotch tape from one ear to the other, under his chin, for an hour or so before show time in the hope that it’ll stay down for awhile. Tape, however, poses problems. Most of it isn’t strong enough to withstand Jack’s violent attempts to shake it off, and the kinds that are strong enough — duct tape certainly is — pull out tufts of hair, leaving bare spots.

Kimberly had come up with an ingenious solution. She researched magnets online until she found a set strong enough to stay together when stuck on either side of a hyper dog’s ear, but weak enough that they’re easily pulled apart and don’t actually hurt the dog. She wrapped two dime-sized magnets in electrical tape, and connected them to another pair using speaker wire, which is both pliable and strong, and covered the whole thing in more black tape. It’s a surprisingly tidy contraption and with Jack’s thick, white ruff , you can hardly tell he’s wearing them. Kimberly was thinking that the next step was to dip the ear holders in liquid rubber and Heather had told her more than once that she should sell a more refined version at dog shows to owners of other breeds that tend to suffer from rose ear: Rottweilers, for instance.

Kimberly reached into a box and picked up the latest issue of the Canine Chronicle. The Chronicle is a glossy, oversized, monthly magazine with a smattering of editorial hidden inside hundreds of pages of vanity ads promoting top show dogs, including, in this edition, a two-pager for Tanner and another for Rita. Virtually every inch of the Chronicle is for sale, including the cover, on which appeared the nation’s top-ranked boxer, Scarlett, who was also the fifth ranked dog among all breeds in all the land. She was in Wildwood for the weekend.

When Kimberly boasted that Jack had beaten a former Cruft’s winner, Heather smacked her lightly on the arm with a grooming brush. “I keep telling you, you have a good dog,” she replied. “He’s crazy, though. He saw somebody yesterday who looks like you” — indicating me, a human he’d previously met only once — “and he went nuts.”

“He remembers people,” Kimberly said.

Heather pointed to some new styling she was trying on his rear. To help even a slight slope in his “top line” — that’s his back, which is supposed to be as close as possible to level, even though very few dogs have this — Heather had fluffed up his fur using water, hair spray and a blow dryer. The effect is a less extreme version of what teenage girls once did to their bangs in the 1980s. Kimberly laughed. “I’ll have to call him poofy butt.”

It’s worth nothing that, technically, much of the grooming you see at a dog show is in violation of rules. Technically, a dog should appear in the ring as he would au naturel. You can wash and brush him, but — technically — you’re not to apply powder, thickener, hair spray, dye or any other product that can artificially alter a dog’s appearance. But stroll around the handling area of a dog show and you will see all of these things in open use. By the time a Bichon is through grooming he will have swollen in size by a third using enough hairspray to style the cast of Jersey Shore. Most black dogs have had any non-black spots, however tiny, blacked in with dye (in the case of fur), make-up (for snouts and whiskers), and even markers (for touch-ups).

While Heather was whitening Jack’s feet with chalk, Kevin was blacking in the pink spots on an especially blonde Golden Retriever’s nose using a Q-tip dipped in De Nose Nos, a two-stage product specifically designed for darkening the pigmentation on a dog’s nose — and which is one of about 1,000 canine beauty modification products you can buy from concessionaires on-site at any dog show. Similar things were taking place on every grooming table in the building. So, you know — technicalities.

***

Not to pick on all-white breeds, but to look at a dog ring full of Samoyeds or Bichon Frises as an abject amateur is to be thoroughly baffled. They look identical — white and fluffy and, well, mostly white and fluffy. I have no idea how a judge can tell them apart, let alone which is best.

In the case of Aussies, a typical ring offers great variation. There are four recognized color patterns, the most common known as the Black-Tri. These dogs are mostly black with some white and red around their necks and faces and they often have white circles around their eyes that look like reverse panda masks. Red-tris have a similar look, only in place of all that black, the dogs have a rusty, red coat. Jack is what’s known as a Blue Merle — a striking pattern that is haphazardly spotted in gray, black, brown and white, with gray and white being the most dominant colors. The final type is the Red Merle, which has the same type of pattern as the blue, only instead of gray patches, it has red. Truly, it’s rare to find even two Tris that you couldn’t tell apart, even though their markings are fairly consistent, but you will never have issues distinguishing any two merles. Such apparent randomness like you see in their coats is typically a quality we associate with mutts, but you don’t have to know anything about Australian Shepherds to know that when you see a beautiful merle, like Jack, you are looking at a special kind of animal.

By the time Jack was due to show on day two, the judge had already cast aside a good dozen lesser dogs from the lower classes that precede the Best of Breed competition. Being so new, I couldn’t help but obsess over aesthetics — I was looking for the dog whose appearance looked best to my subjective eye — but Kimberly pointed out that the more knowledgeable observer of Australian Shepherds keys on movement. “Jack is a good mover,” she would say, over and over (and over). And as he stacked up behind the Crufts dog, noticeably larger in juxtaposition, she patted my shoulder. “I have butterflies.”

The common belief about dog shows is that they are a beauty pageant but that’s only sort of right. A beauty pageant as we humans do it is a competition that sets out to judge some entirely subjective idea of beauty — hair, eye and skin color hardly matter; height and weight do, to some degree, but what’s perfect, exactly, is never clear. What matters, really, is that the judges — using gut instinct and fuzzy logic, plus their own inclinations — decide that one human is more “beautiful” than the others, whatever that means.

In a dog show, it’s a lot more scientific, at least in theory: the judge sets out to identify which of the dogs assembled best represents a very specific ideal that is articulated quite explicitly in print by the parent club of a particular breed and then backed up by American Kennel Club. It’s known as the breed standard and you can find it on the AKC website, as well as on web and print materials published by each breed’s parent organization. It’s not necessarily which Australian Shepherd, then, is the most beautiful but rather which one looks the most like the theoretical perfect dog as defined by the small group of humans who founded the breed and maintain its definition.

How a breeder knows that a puppy will grow up to be perfect, or at least potentially so, is pretty fuzzy too. (No pun intended.) It’s not at all a science and is at best a mix of instinct and guesswork. Basically, that breeder is looking for clear markers of future flaws that would disqualify a show dog. In the case of Aussies, one would be white splashes “between withers and tail”.

Some of these markers are apparent early — those white splashes, or some badly splayed back legs — but often it’s more like an educated guess, and if a statistician were to get ambitious and track an appropriately giant sample set to match predicted success to actual success we’d probably find out that breeders are wrong as often as they’re right. Go to a dog show and talk to enough people and you’ll find plenty of examples of people who “had no idea” their dog would become a champion, and each year at Westminster the PR machine trots out examples of dogs that were abandoned, or left for dead, or considered too ugly or lame or stupid that grew up to become top show dogs. Kimberly chose Jack, for instance, primarily to be a house pet, as well as an occasional agility competitor.

Each breed also has a standard for movement, and because Aussies have such disparate looks, and the breed was created to be agile, the movement is especially critical in judging. Kimberly explained it this way: “You need to move fast enough so you can get that flow-y movement but not so fast that you lose foot-timing.” “Flowy movement” is a bit of an amorphous idea but is more or less an elegance of motion that looks both athletic and effortless. Foot timing refers to the four feet being in perfect alignment so that one front and one rear work together, as if joined on a string. “That’s all the handler,” she said.

When directed by the judge, a handler will lead her dog straight ahead and then back. This is known as “down and back” or “coming and going” and if you hang around show people you will often hear them say things like “I wish he was better coming and going.” Handlers will next run their dogs around the outside perimeter of the ring to give the judge a look at the “side gait.” These are two different measures of perfection in movement and different breeds weigh the value of each pattern differently.

One tip-off that a judge doesn’t like a dog is when he or she stops watching before it has completed the movement — she might watch it down, but will then turn to analyze the next dog by the time it’s coming back. Very often, the judge will watch only half of the run around the ring and then will turn back to the next dog in line.

Before the test of its movement, though, a dog must “stack.” This is that statuary pose you’ll know if you’ve ever watched Westminster on TV. The dog stands dead-still, front legs under its chest, back legs slightly splayed, staring straight ahead at the fixed palm of its handler, which may or may not contain treats, known as bait. Treats come in many varieties, the most popular being hot dog chunks, Purina carvers, and dried liver. Some dogs love mozzarella cheese sticks.

Unlike movement, stacking is not a natural act for a dog, and each one must be taught. Some pick it up easily. In Jack’s case, he was already good at tricks and obedience, and was adept at something called “targeting” — putting a paw on a fixed object — so Kimberly just had to teach him to set all four paws in a stance and “stay”. Once he got it, he got it.

Nearly all dog behavior is relatable to wolves (after all, they are just evolved wolves) and if you think of all dog activity in the context of their wild ancestors you will realize that standing stone still is not so natural; it’s hardly biologically advantageous in a world where other things want to stalk and kill you. And yet it is a critical ability of any show dog — to not just stand still, but stand still in a very precise way that accentuates structure, and to do so for an extended period while an unfamiliar human molests you.

Plenty of dogs flunk conformation before they’ve attended a single show because they are unable to master this seemingly simple skill. And plenty of others owe their aptitude to impersonate a statue to something called Happy Legs, a contraption devised for the very specific purpose of teaching dogs how to Stand-Stay in a correct show pose. Basically, the Happy Legs looks like a box with four “stilts,” or paw-sized platforms, on which a dog balances. After some time and ample treats, a dog will come to see this as a trick he can do on command, like fetching or rolling over. Happy Legs comes in three sizes, costs $200 and if the “barkimonials” on the website are any indication, purchasers of the Happy Legs see results within minutes.

Happy Legs is the invention of Mr. and Mrs. Happy Legs, a.k.a. David and Susan Catlin of Kennesaw, Georgia, an exurb of Atlanta so conservative that local lawmakers — in reaction to a nationwide movement for increasingly stringent gun laws — passed a town ordinance in 1982 mandating that all residents own “at least one firearm with ammunition.”

Happy Legs “has revolutionized the way that people teach the stand for examination,” Mrs. Happy Legs told me . She said it is such a staple of the show world that it is now “standard equipment, just like a grooming table, or a brush.”

Happy Legs works for the same reason any obedience trick does — and for the same reason Jack will gladly do things: For the satisfaction of successfully completing a challenge. Susan said in the very early days there were people who accused her of dog torture. “People said it was cruel. But dogs think it’s a game. It’s muscle memory. And it’s a quick, easy game. You stand up on these four things that won’t tip over and you’ve won. They’re like, ‘Really?’ You’re happy, I get food and you’ll pet me? That’s it?’”

Prior to its invention, she said, “We just yelled at the dogs.” Which in addition to being cruel is actually detrimental because one common purebred dog flaw is an insecure temperament and if you hell at an insecure dog it’s only going to intensify his shyness around humans. “So we would slowly but surely lose the show attitude,” Mrs Happy Legs said. “You tried to teach them this concept that they never really got. A certain amount of dogs are so correct in structure they can’t stand any other way. Others are ever-so slightly-off. We simply lost dogs much, much sooner.”

On her contribution to the service of show dogs, Mrs Happy Legs isn’t modest. “It has changed the face of the show scene,” she told me. “I would argue that point with any high-profile judge or handler.”

In Jack’s case, he was both structurally sound and willing to play the game of standing still. There was no need for Happy Legs, even in the beginning. And he looked good in the ring on Wildwood’s second day but for whatever reason, the judge preferred the Crufts dog that day. Judges have no obligation to explain themselves. If you ask nicely, some will gladly elucidate their rationale; others choose to keep their reasons private.

“He showed well today,” Heather said, as she walked out and handed the dog to Kimberly. Within minutes, she’d be on a new dog, in a new ring. “I could tell she liked big dogs. And she didn’t want them to move too fast.” Both things did not favor Jack.

Kimberly seemed to be accepting of her fate. “I said before I got here that because he won yesterday the weekend is a success, no matter what happens,” she said, but I didn’t totally buy it.

***

At 9:23am on Friday, day three at the Wildwood show, a PA crackled to life and a tinny female voice addressed “all the rumors and stories about the storm.”

“The show will go on,” the voice droned, for once wielding this tired old cliché in proper context. “This building will not close. We are open 24 hours for your and your dogs’ safety.” There was more murmuring that I couldn’t pick up, and the woman finished with this defiant line, using, for the second time in one PA announcement, a cliché in a way that is not only appropriate, but accurate. After a dramatic pause, as in a stump speech, she bellowed: “Together we will weather this storm!”

Kimberly had gone home for the night and returned with Summer, to start the process of getting her second dog used to the chaos, in case Kimberly decided to show her too, even though whether or not she ultimately would was very much in question. Lately, the young bitch had been growing in to her looks. If you’d asked Kimberly in January, she thought Summer was “sweet, but not so smart” and despite the fact that she’d appeared to be “show quality” as a puppy, she looked likely to grow up to have overly short legs and sub-par movement. Lately, however, Kimberly was starting to look at her differently.

The more Jack won, the more valuable his sperm would become. And Summer (whose AKC name is Montrose Sheza Hot Shot), could ultimately be a good mate. Because Jack is a blue dog who is “red factored,” meaning he has red genes in his pedigree, theoretical litters from a theoretical mating with a red dog like Summer could, theoretically, produce puppies in all four color variations, an attractive result in that there’s something for everyone. This was something Kim had considered from the outset, and is the reason Summer is a red-tri and not a red merle.

To protect the gene pool, breeders of Australian Shepherds have learned that it is not advisable to breed merle to merle — no reputable breeder would ever do it. The reason: there’s a 25 percent risk of blindness and/or deafness in the resulting puppies. “What it does is produce too much white,” Kimberly explained, as we waited for Smooth-Coated Collies to clear the ring and make room for the Aussies. Lest you think the breed standards are too capricious and nit-picky — and I certainly thought that — consider that the breed standards have very specific reasons for being. In the case of Aussies, the standard dictates where and how much white a dog can have. In particular, white hair around the ears and eyes is considered a serious flaw. This isn’t because someone decided it looks bad, but because white around the eyes is an indicator of blindness. Similarly, if the ears should be all white, there’s a good chance that dog will be deaf. In the end nearly any specific stipulation of the breed standard is there to protect the gene pool. Because showing dogs is really all about breeding.

Ditto movement; the fact that a judge dismisses a dog for having a less-than-perfect gait really stems from the same place. In the end, the question the judge should be answering is: Can this Australian Shepherd do his job? If he’s built right, and moving right, and can turn quickly, and be light and agile, he can do his job—he can herd sheep. Similarly, this is why you’ll see judges pull on the terriers’ tails. Terriers need sturdy tails that can be yanked and tugged because that’s the way you pull them out of a hole should they get stuck while chasing rats or rabbits or gophers. If one barks or snaps or recoils when the judge pulls, he’s probably going to be a bad terrier.

Jack’s performance on Friday would dictate Kimberly’s schedule for the rest of the weekend. If he won, she’d likely enter him the next day because two wins in a row is momentum and you never stand in the way of that. If he didn’t win, however, she was likely to take him home and skip the weekend. Having a pessimist’s view on Jack’s progress, Kimberly tended to take a loss as more than a loss — as a sign that her dog wasn’t good enough after all, even though anyone who’s been in showing dogs for a long time will tell you not to draw any conclusions from a single result, or even a string of them. Even the world’s best dog will sometimes lose to a clunker.

But a problem seemed to be brewing. Because Jack’s judge was now running 20 minutes late, there was a chance Heather wouldn’t be able to handle Jack at all. So tightly packed is Heather’s schedule at a big show like Wildwood that she can’t really accommodate delays without bumping another dog from the slate. Only the few top dogs on year-long contracts, such as Tanner and Rita, get priority that ensures the proper handler (Heather for Tanner; Kevin for Rita) will be on the leash. In situations where there’s an intractable conflict with newer dogs, like Jack, it’s up to Heather to make a judgement call as to which one has a better chance of doing well with a substitute handler and she’ll recruit a friend to take over.

This informal system of handlers helping other handlers is a critical component of the so called “all-breed” professionals who take a truck full of dogs to the show because there is almost never a weekend, or even a day, when a handler doesn’t need a last-minute substitute. A secondary and no-less-critical effect of this system is that it encourages handlers to be good sports and maintain friendly relations with one another, because gossip is rampant at dog shows, and if you alienate one member of the club you’re much less likely to find a free hand when you need it.

Kimberly watched the clock and fretted, first over the possibility that she’d driven up, paid for a hotel, and spent the whole day watching other peoples’ dogs, all for naught. Then seemingly over whatever else popped into her head. “One of the things I’m getting worried about is that many of the Best of Breed winners out there are so much older,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Jack isn’t two yet and Aussies don’t fully mature until they’re three.” She said she was constantly asking Heather if she should wait for him to grow up a little.

Heather’s answer?

“No. Every time no.”

Perhaps, at least, this could explain his irrational exuberance, as well as his tendency to get distracted.

“That’s my fault,” she answered and explained that because she bought Jack as a companion foremost, she taught him tricks and commands that were essential (sit, stay), or else fun and cute (do a handstand, find your baby), but because he was bought at show quality, and Kimberly was afraid he might get sick or injured, she neglected to socialize him with other people or dogs—to teach him, for instance, when it is appropriate to jump on a person. (The answer: only when encouraged to do so.) “It’s something I need to work on,” she said. “But he’s smart; he knows. He can learn.”

The judge, meanwhile, finally arrived. She was a plump, elderly woman who both hunched and shuffled. Because she would also judge the herding group later in the afternoon, a win for Jack in the breed ring would be extra nice. But Kimberly’s natural defense against disappointment, pessimism, was getting the best of her, and she had already decided that it was a lost cause, even if Heather did show up, which she was certain wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Now that Jack was a “special”—as champion dogs that continue to show are known—and competing only against other champions, Kimberly was having to adjust her expectations. “Everyone keeps telling me I was spoiled,” she said of the early days when she was working on Jack’s championship. “It’s harder now that we are competing against other champions. They are all nice dogs and most are more mature than Jack.”

I pointed out that no dog can possibly win every weekend and that Tanner’s owner Dawn Cox was a good person to consider as a model. Tanner had lost earlier in the morning, to an unfinished dog out of the puppy classes, which is sort of ridiculous, and Dawn had just shrugged it off. In part because that’s Dawn, whose response to Tanner’s defeat was, “I’m more worried about what time I’m having my first glass of wine,” and in part because that same judge also failed to pick the country’s number-one-ranked boxer and the top-ranked Doberman, the two dogs that bested Tanner in the prior day’s Working Group, which that judged had declared “the finest working group she’d ever judged in her career.” So Dawn just laughed. “This is why you can’t get mad. It means absolutely nothing.”

Kimberly shrugged. She understood, at least in theory. “I know if I really want to be successful I have to accept failure. You win and lose.”

This day’s competition was formidable, with 10 specials entered, including the Crufts dog, Striker, and even Jack’s own father Honor (who ultimately did not show up). Her expectations, she told me, were low. “I figure we have a 1 in 10 chance.”

Back in the ring, if the judge didn’t hurry and clear the collies, Jack might have no handler. Finally, the class dogs entered and a man with gray hair tinted an unpleasant shade of yellow rode over on his red motorized Rascal scooter and parked directly in my line of vision. He pointed at a black-tri. “Two more points and she’ll be our 35th champion,” he said, and swigged from one of two coffees parked in the scooter’s front basket, along with a pack of Kool menthol cigarettes.

Just as the last class dogs were exiting the ring, Heather darted out of the crowd and snatched the lead from Kimberly with a smile. And Jack seemed no worse for the lack of time to practice with his handler outside the ring. While the red-tri next to him fidgeted and had to be re-set, Jack stacked perfectly. “He’s her dog,” Kimberly said, her mood brightening. “Look at that focus.” Almost instantly, her pride and confidence swelled. This was a whole different spectator than the one I’d been waiting with just minutes before. “Jack’s face is so distinct that you have to look at him,” she said. “He dares you to look away.”

A nervous countenance returned briefly as she watched the judge stare at Jack and Heather on the down and back, and then stare even harder when they ran around. She thought a minute, pointed to Heather and said, “One,” and then to a red bitch and said “two”—the second dog picked is always Best of Opposite Sex, which in this case meant the best bitch in the ring—and the whole lot of them trotted around the ring in their perfunctory victory parade.

“Whee! I’m so excited!” Kimberly said, and punched me in the arm.

Jack was two out of three headed into the weekend and, as the storm swirled up the coast, preparing to bury Wildwood and knock out power and water to the convention center, Jack won again Saturday, and Sunday, capping his triumphant weekend, just 10 days before his Westminster debut, with a pair of 4th Place showings (known as “Group 4s”, in show parlance) in the Herding Group, a set of results that was likely to land him in the rankings of the top Australian Shepherds in America for the first time. Jack the Aussie was on the rise.

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Buy Josh Dean's "Show Dog: The Charmed Life and Trying Times of a Near-Perfect Purebred".