Inside the Secret World of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
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They booed the poodle. This was at Westminster 2020, in Madison Square Garden, just a few weeks before COVID emptied sporting arenas around the country. It was my first Westminster. And from inside the Garden, I noticed something I hadn’t known from watching the show on TV: the crowd gets pretty beered up.
The final seven dogs that year included a clear crowd favorite: a golden retriever named Daniel. Golden retrievers have been one of the most popular dogs in America for decades. They originated in Scotland, and you should know for entertainment purposes that the generally recognized founder of the breed was a man named Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, who was referred to as Lord Tweedmouth.
If a crowd can collectively swoon, the Garden crowd swooned over Daniel. He looked like a living honeycomb. His Brad Pitt hair swayed as he loped around the ring like there was nowhere else he would rather be. The crowd cheered every time he moved.
The anti-Daniel was a black standard poodle bitch named Siba. She had one of those preposterous poodle haircuts. Poodles, of course, are not born with preposterous haircuts. Those haircuts once had a practical purpose. In Germany, where poodles were created, the dogs were bred by hunters to fetch ducks. They were designed to have thick curls to insulate them from cold water. But they wound up with such dense fur that it was hard for them to swim. So their owners shaved the poodles except for the spots that most needed to stay warm—chest, head, feet. As they came out of the fields and into homes, that fur proved perfect for sculpting. Groomers kept shaving parts of the poodle but went wild with what was left. The poor poodle ended up as a hybrid from hell: duck-hunter chic.
It turns out that duck-hunter chic is the kind of thing that gets a dog laughed at on the street but beloved in the dog-show ring.
Dog shows require poodles’ coats to be trimmed into one of two variations: the English Saddle or the Continental Clip. (There’s a simpler cut for puppies.) In both major cuts, groomers shave the face, feet, most of the tail, and most of each leg. The English Saddle leaves a swath of fur around the rear and an extra puff around the hind legs. Siba sported a modified Continental, with a ball of fur in front of the tail. From the rib cage back, she was mostly naked. But the really striking part was her front end. The top of her head was shaped into a massive pompon, and a waterfall of black fur sprouted downward from the vicinity of each ear.
This did not impress the Bud Light drinkers at the Garden. She got mild applause, if any.
Toward the end, the judge, Robert Slay, had the dogs take one more lap around the ring. The fans started chanting for Daniel.
Here is where I remind you that the dogs were not, technically, competing against each other. Officially, Slay was measuring them against their own breed’s standard. But at dog shows, I’ve come to think, they are unofficially measured against something else: what people inside the dog-show world consider to be a great dog, as opposed to what regular human beings consider to be a great dog. The insider term for the dog-show world is “the fancy.” As in, Are you part of the fancy?
Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show
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Daniel was a thousand lovable dog-things. But he was not fancy.
The poodle won.
And the fans booed. Not all of them, but enough to notice.
Backstage, afterward, every dog person I talked to said Siba was the right choice.
Standard poodles have won Best in Show at Westminster five times. A golden has never won.
As Siba and her handler posed for pictures, workers were already sweeping up the debris and collecting the stray cups left under the seats. It felt like a pub closing up for the night. Which made sense, given how Westminster began.
From DOGLAND: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show by Tommy Tomlinson. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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