Travels with Casey Read online

  After dropping off Casey at James’s apartment, I took a taxi to Madison Square Garden. I made my way to the arena floor, which was covered with green carpeting and divided into six roped-off show rings for the breed competitions. Each breed winner goes on to one of seven group finals—sporting, hound, working, terrier, toy, nonsporting, and herding. The seven group winners compete for Best in Show.

  A large crowd of onlookers had gathered around Ring 2, where the Xoloitzcuintli breed (Xolo for short, pronounced SHO-lo) appeared in its first Westminster since 1955. A rare, ancient breed dating back some three thousand years, early Xolos were believed to be hairless mutations of indigenous dogs. The Aztecs considered the Xolos to have healing powers, and effigies of the dogs have been found in Aztec tombs.

  Partly because of this mystical history, and partly because we’re suckers for strange-looking dogs, the breed had commanded much of the media’s attention in the lead-up to Westminster and was even featured in the Fashion & Style section of The New York Times.

  “Admirers of the Xolo concede that the dog is plug-ugly,” the Times noted. “One description of this hairless canine of ancient lineage, a national treasure in its native Mexico, characterizes the Xolo as a hot water bottle with pig eyes, bat ears and a rat tail. That is being polite.”

  The breed comes in toy, miniature, and standard sizes, though they were all pitted against each other at Westminster. The favorite was a sleek standard-sized Xolo named Giorgio Armani, a fitting name considering it was also Fashion Week in New York City. The dog didn’t disappoint. When the judge pronounced him the breed winner, he posed stoically for photographs while the rest of the Xolo handlers wondered what might have been.

  “She decided to be goofy today,” one handler said of her three-year-old Xolo, whose jocular temperament had failed to charm the judge. “She wasn’t herself in the ring, so it threw me off.”

  But the woman didn’t seem heartbroken, and she echoed other handlers who knew their dogs had little chance at winning. Though every dog that competes at Westminster has earned enough points in previous breed competitions, there are clear favorites. “It’s a cliché, but I’m just happy to be here,” she told me. “And I love this dog, so even though she didn’t show well today, we’ll still take her home!”

  The mood was significantly less carefree around Ring 1, where Poodles pranced across the carpeted floor, their heads held high in a seemingly conscious display of their rarefied status. Though the breed’s popularity has decreased since its peak in 1969, it’s still the show dog of the One Percent. Not coincidentally, the breed always seems to be an early favorite for Best in Show.

  This year was no exception, and the only question seemed to be which of the two marquee Poodles—a black dog named London, or a white one named Ally—would represent the breed in the group competition. There was an audible gasp, then, when the judge selected a long-shot Poodle from Canada.

  “What just happened?” one shocked onlooker asked her friend.

  “I think the Canadian dog won,” the friend said, shaking her head.

  “The Canadian dog?” she sneered, her face contorted in disgust.

  Was the Canadian dog really better? I had no idea—the Poodles all looked the same to me. Even for those with a trained eye, show judging is highly subjective. Judges are supposed to decide which dog best represents the breed standard (a written blueprint for how a dog should look), but barely an hour goes by at Westminster without someone whispering that a particular dog won because a particular judge is friendly with a particular handler.

  As you know if you’ve seen the film Best in Show, what happens in the ring isn’t even the most interesting part of Westminster. The real action happens in the benching area, where handlers frantically prepare their dogs for competition while thousands of fans shuffle through armed with cameras, questions, and requests to pet the merchandise.

  The benching area is not the place for the claustrophobic or the easily irritated. Nowhere else on earth do so many humans and dogs convene under one roof, and to call the result a clusterfuck is to understate it. In the hour I spent back there during the first day of competition, I saw a small child run facefirst into an unsuspecting Rhodesian Ridgeback, a humorless female handler curse out her assistant, a self-described pet psychic hawk her services, and two invasions of personal space that nearly escalated into blows. I also nearly stepped on a Beagle, who was busy sniffing something under a dog crate. (Dog trainer and animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell calls the Beagle, which has an uncanny sense of smell, “the nose with paws.”)

  As I waded through the crowd, I hoped to bump into some Best in Show favorites, including a Pekingese named Malachy. But Malachy’s owners—including Iris Love, a privileged child of the Depression who gained archaeological fame in 1970 as the excavator of the Temple of Aphrodite—wisely kept the eleven-pound dog out of sight.

  The Pekingese, after all, is an easy kidnapping target. For one thing, it can barely move. For another, it can be stashed inside loose clothing. In his book Show Dog, Josh Dean writes that the breed was designed to “fit inside the sleeves of a Chinese nobleman’s robes in the times before central heating.”

  Several legends purport to explain how the Pekingese came to be. My favorite is that a lion fell in love with a butterfly, but that the pair quickly realized their size differential might be too massive a hurdle to overcome. Looking for answers, they traveled together to meet the Buddha, who graciously split the size difference and created the Pekingese. As the legend goes, the dog was kept in palaces and temples to search out and destroy demons that infiltrated them.

  Today, it’s difficult to imagine a flat-faced Pekingese walking around the block—let alone slaying demons. Malachy was by far the least athletic of the seven dogs that competed the next day for Best in Show, among them a Dalmatian, Irish Setter, German Shepherd, and Dachshund. While the other dogs easily navigated the show ring, Malachy moved marginally faster than a snail and needed to rest on a bag of ice when he was done.

  “What do you think of the Pekingese breed?” I asked Josh Dean, whom I sat next to the following day for the finals.

  “It’s not so much a dog as it is a kind of companion for a Star Wars character,” he said. “It can barely breathe, barely move, and looks like something you’d put your feet on when watching television.”

  Still, Malachy went on to win Best in Show. The controversial decision played perfectly into the narrative articulated by the increasing number of Americans who eschew purebreds in favor of rescues and mutts—namely, that breeders and the American Kennel Club are more concerned with aesthetics than health. In their book Dogs, Raymond and Lorna Coppinger argue that breeders and the AKC—which has seen registrations nosedive since the 1990s—are “producing unhealthy freaks to satisfy human whims.”

  Many in the media saw Malachy as a prime example of the problem. In the days after Westminster, the press would go on to dismiss Malachy as a “walking dust mop,” “fuzzy bedroom slippers,” and “Geraldo Rivera’s mustache.”

  Underlying much of the media coverage was a belief that Malachy, though technically a dog, hardly represented an active and healthy pet.

  THE SAME could be said for a number of other breeds at Westminster, including one I’d spent some of the previous two years studying—the Bulldog.

  I didn’t have many friends among the Bulldog breeders and handlers at Madison Square Garden. That’s because three months before the show, I’d written a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about the breed’s health problems. I’d argued that the modern Bulldog is unique for the sheer breadth of its dysfunction. Studies have shown that Bulldogs are significantly more likely than other dogs to suffer from a wide variety of ailments, including ear and eye problems, skin infections, immunological and neurological problems, and locomotor challenges.

  Because of their flat faces, Bulldogs are synonymous with brachycephalic airway syndrome, which comprises a series of respiratory abnormalities af
fecting the throat, nose, and mouth. Dr. John Lewis, an assistant professor of dentistry and oral surgery at Ryan Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, said that the human equivalent to breathing the way some Bulldogs do “would be if we walked around with our mouth or nose closed and breathed through a straw.”

  Yet despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, most Bulldog breeders—including several in attendance at Westminster—flatly reject the idea that anything seriously ails the breed. A typical response came from the Bulldog Club of America, which told me that “Bulldogs today look good, have excellent temperament, and are healthier than in years past as a result of good breeding practices.”

  I found their denials delusional, and my Times story took them to task for turning a once athletic breed into a plodding, dysfunctional mess.

  “Is there a bounty on your head?” Josh Dean joked near the Westminster benching area when I nearly bumped into Jay Serion, a Bulldog handler and breeder whose bulldog had won the breed competition here the previous year. I’d interviewed Serion before and after that victory, but on this day he was too busy to notice me.

  I’d first become interested in Bulldogs back in 2009, shortly before attending a football game between the universities of Georgia and South Carolina in Athens, Georgia. I spent much of that game on the sideline next to the air-conditioned doghouse of Uga VII, the school’s Bulldog mascot. The dog wore a red Georgia jersey and spiked red leather collar, and every once in a while he would be led onto the field to pose for pictures and model his wrinkly, smooshed Bulldog face for ESPN’s cameras.

  At the game I met Sonny Seiler, a lawyer and the mercurial owner of the Georgia Bulldog mascot dynasty. Sonny bore a striking resemblance to the mascots—all called Uga—he has cared for since 1956. He had a round, droopy face and wide, slumping shoulders, and his courtroom antics have often been described in words associated with Bulldogs: Georgia Magazine said he possessed a “barrel-chested bravura,” while John Berendt wrote that Sonny “thunders and growls” in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in which Sonny is a character. (He defended a wealthy antiques dealer charged with the murder of a young hustler.)

  Sonny wasn’t in the best mood during my visit to Athens; he was tired of journalists asking him about the health of the Bulldog breed. Earlier that year, Adam Goldfarb of the Humane Society of the United States had told The Augusta Chronicle that Bulldogs were the “poster child for breeding gone awry.” Goldfarb’s quote came in response to a scathing British documentary, Pedigree Dogs Exposed, which highlighted the health and welfare problems of purebred dogs and claimed that breeders and the Kennel Club (the British equivalent of the American Kennel Club) were in denial about the extent of the problem.

  Broadcast on the BBC, Exposed spawned three independent reports into purebred breeding, each finding that some modern breeding practices—including inbreeding and breeding for “extreme traits,” like the massive and short-faced head of the Bulldog—are detrimental to the health and welfare of dogs. All three reports called the modern Bulldog a breed in need of an intervention.

  “Many would question whether the breed’s quality of life is so compromised that its breeding should be banned,” Dr. Nicola Rooney and Dr. David Sargan concluded in one of the reports, “Pedigree Dog Breeding in the U.K.: A Major Welfare Concern?”

  Sonny dismissed any talk of changing Bulldog breeding practices, and he insisted that Uga VII was a vigorous animal who enjoyed his mascot duties. I wasn’t so sure. During my visit, the dog seemed most comfortable in the back corner of his doghouse—or, better yet, outside the stadium entirely. A few minutes before halftime, Seiler’s adult son, Charles, led Uga VII off the field by a leash to a waiting golf cart. The dog hopped on, and a young woman drove us out the stadium’s back service entrance, up a hill, around some bends, to an unspectacular patch of grass that doubled as his game day bathroom. When the cart came to a stop, Uga VII bounded off it and spent the next few minutes happily sniffing the grass, urinating on a tree, and defecating behind a bush.

  When the dog was done, Charles ordered us all back on the cart. “All right, let’s go,” he said, and before I knew it, we were speeding back toward Sanford Stadium, Uga VII’s droppings (Charles didn’t pick up after him) a reminder to all that the world’s most famous mascot was here—and that celebrity dogs, like their human counterparts, get to play by different rules.

  But Uga VII’s celebrity life would be short-lived. Six months later, while lounging at home, he died of heart failure. He was four years old.

  When I returned to Georgia the following year to meet the school’s newest mascot, Uga VIII, Sonny insisted that the eleven-month-old was “a damn good dog. He’s healthy, and he has all the attributes we look for in a Georgia mascot.” But by the time he turned two, Uga VIII came down with lymphoma. Two months before I embarked on my cross-country trip, he died.

  Despite their health problems, Bulldogs have skyrocketed up the AKC’s most popular breed list, from No. 41 in 1973 to No. 5 in 2013. James Serpell, the director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, partly blames the breed’s fame on a phenomenon called “anthropomorphic selection.” He argues that we’ve bred dogs like the Bulldog (and other short-faced brachycephalic breeds, including the Pug and the French Bulldog) in ways that “facilitate the attribution of human mental states to animals.”

  “We have, to some extent, accentuated physical characteristics of the breed to make it look more human, although essentially more like caricatures of humans, and specifically of children,” he told me. “We’ve bred Bulldogs for their flat face, big eyes, huge mouth in relation to head size, and huge smiling face.”

  Advertisers and animators have long recognized that giving an animal big eyes and a big head is a surefire way to endear it to humans. When Walt Disney created Bambi, the studio wanted the character to be an accurate depiction of a deer. But when the original Bambi sketches were deemed not cute enough, Disney shortened Bambi’s muzzle and made his head and eyes bigger.

  In an essay in the anthology Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, Serpell wrote that “if bulldogs were the product of genetic engineering by agripharmaceutical corporations, there would be protest demonstrations throughout the Western world, and rightly so. But because they have been generated by anthropomorphic selection, their handicaps are not only overlooked but even, in some quarters, applauded.”

  Neither Uga VII nor Uga VIII—nor the Bulldogs that Josh Dean and I watched wobble around the show ring at Westminster—looked anything like the Bulldog of the early 1800s, which were used for bull baiting, a brutal sport where a dog would attack the nose and head of a bull. Back then, Bulldogs were leaner and higher off the ground, and their muzzles longer. They also had smaller heads and fewer facial rolls.

  Because of their viciousness in the ring, Bulldogs of that period were sometimes dismissed in similar ways as modern Pit Bulls. In an 1845 book, The Dog, a veterinarian wrote that the Bulldog was “scarcely capable of any education” and “fitted for nothing but ferocity and combat.” But as nineteenth-century England went purebred dog crazy (“Nobody who is anybody can afford to be followed about by a mongrel dog,” one dog publication claimed at the time), the breed underwent a physical, temperamental, and public relations transformation. Famed British dog dealer Bill George, who had worked at a kennel that bred dogs for bull baiting, turned his attention to breeding and promoting the Bulldog as a pleasant household pet and stylish purebred companion.

  Just how breeders like George succeeded in changing the look and temperament of the Bulldog is a debated question. Many believe that the breed was crossed with the Pug, creating a friendlier and more compact dog with a brachycephalic skull. Breeders have accentuated the Bulldog’s smooshed face and compact body since then, creating a dog with a fundamentally flawed design. But breeders are either incapable of conceding those flaws—or are blind to them.

  “Bree
ding certainly has a place in the world of dogs,” Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States told me, “but this mania about achieving what’s considered a ‘perfect’ or desirable outward appearance, rather than focusing on the physical soundness of the animal, is one of the biggest dog welfare problems in this country.”

  I asked him if we should start calling irresponsible dog breeding a form of animal cruelty.

  “Yes,” he said. “That would be a good start.”

  3. In which Casey and I encounter cats, cows, PETA, and the “dog-poop lady”

  AFTER SEVERAL days in Manhattan, Casey had surely forgotten about the existence of the Chalet.

  He seemed understandably displeased, then, when we returned to the Liberty Harbor RV Park in Jersey City. As we approached the RV’s side entrance, Casey stopped in his tracks and looked up at me with sad, disbelieving eyes. To counter that, I started jumping up and down and pointing dramatically toward the RV, as if something life-changing awaited us inside. When Casey’s tail began to flutter, I leaped in one motion up and into the motorhome and called for my dog to join me. He bought it. I gave Casey a treat and apologized for my chicanery.

  The RV was the same as I’d left it, which is to say it was messy. I’d spent only a few days living in it, but there were already dirty dishes in the sink, wrinkled clothes on the bed, rogue papers on the desk. Even a miniature pet lifelike sculpture of Casey (with a natural fiber coat) prepared for me by dog-obsessed artist Lucy Maloney had fallen off the dashboard and was wedged under the driver’s seat. I’d harbored grand plans of a personality change during this road trip. What better time to morph into a neat freak than during a cross-country journey in an RV? And because a motorhome is both an apartment and a car, by keeping it presentable I figured I’d be killing two birds with one stone.

  But that delusion had shattered all over the inside of the Chalet. And the problem with a messy motorhome is more than just aesthetic. If things aren’t put away and tied down, they become dangerous projectiles as you drive. Pots slide off the gas range and crash to the floor, scaring the daylights out of Casey; laptops fly off the desk, landing on Casey’s head. Both had happened only minutes after departing from Provincetown the previous week. I’d been too embarrassed to tell anyone.