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The Dog Show is Serious Business
Cassandra Hartman, proprietress of a dog training school in Caledonia, stepped into the middle of the red-carpeted centre ring at the fourth annual Purina National Dog Show wearing a sheer red dress, with Debbie Reynolds, her golden retriever, at her side. Then, “Le Jazz Hot,” from Victor/Victoria, started playing.
Cassandra and Debbie Reynolds launched into a dance routine in time to the music. Halfway through the song, four other dogs and their handlers (all female, fortyish) took over and did a synchronized version of the same. After a few more numbers with different dog/handler pairs, Cassandra returned for an encore, with another one of her golden retrievers, this one named Bob Fosse. (Being owned by Cassandra is apparently as surefire a ticket into show business as being born a Baldwin.)
Every routine ended with treats for the dogs, and so they executed their choreography with tails wagging, jaws hanging open and dripping with saliva. Pavlov rang a bell; he probably wasn’t much of a dancer.
Cassandra Hartman (proprietress of Cassandra’s Canines, a dog training school in Caledonia, Ont.), with Bob Fosse.
In the world of dog shows, dog dancing is known as “freestyle.” The announcer during the event explained it as combining “moves and skills from many different dog sports.” At the fourth annual Purina National Dog Show, freestyle wasn’t part of the official competition; it was being staged purely for entertainment during the intermission between the morning and afternoon rounds of judging―intense bouts of scrutiny that were going to decide which dogs, of the roughly 1,100 entrants, would ultimately earn, for their owners, portions of the show’s allotment of prize money. At forty thousand dollars, Purina National’s purse is the largest currently offered by any Canadian dog show.
Because of the relatively large amount of money at stake (the Best in Show winner took six thousand dollars), the Purina National, a co-production of Purina and the Canadian Kennel Club, bills itself as the “Canada’s most prestigious dog show.” It took place this year from Friday, March 12 to Sunday, March 14, at building five of Mississauga’s International Centre, which is essentially a collection of giant, aircraft hangar–sized buildings with concrete floors. The Purina National occupied about half of one.
The judging areas, a series of seven rectangular, red-carpeted “rings,” occupied most of the centre of the hangar. Some rings were being used for what are known as “confirmation trials,” which are preliminary rounds in the main competition, that culminate in Best of Breed and then Best of Show. Other rings were devoted to “obedience” and “rally obedience” competitions, in which dogs are judged for their ability to obey commands and perform slight physical challenges, such as jumps and serpentine walking. Around the perimeter of the rings were booths belonging to merchants and breeder’s associations. The Purina National was also kind of a trade show.
Karin Bull, a Pickering woman who sells natural pet care supplies by mail-order from her website, Bio Paw, was manning a booth full of her products. She was a short, polite lady, with curly brown hair and glasses―basically the last person on earth you’d expect to possess a glass jar full of dried, severed bull penises.
“It’s good for them,” she said, meaning not bulls, but dogs. Rawhide, she explained, is dangerous, because it can lodge in canine digestive tracts and cause blockage. Dehydrated meats, like chicken breast, tripe, and, apparently, “beef pizzles” (as they are known), make better chew toys, because they’re fully digestible and nutritious.
Elsewhere in the hangar was an area with tables, where owners were grooming their dogs. Maria Mastorianni, from Kettleby, was there. She showed off her Black Russian Terrier, a shaggy dog about the size of a riding mower, whose fur she was combing fondly. What makes a champion dog? “It first of all comes from good food,” she said.
Richard Paquette, head organizer of this year’s Purina National and a director at the Canadian Kennel Club, was an genial man, who, with his close-cropped goatee and his crisp beige blazer, was as immaculately groomed as any purebred. He got his start as a dog show competitor, he said, when a total stranger noticed him walking his pet Samoyed at a mall. The stranger was so taken with the quality of Paquette’s dog that he offered to pay for Paquette to take the dog to a show. Paquette’s dog (“my family pet!”) took Best of Breed.
After that, Paquette embarked on a career as a breeder, and, eventually, became a professional handler, and then a dog show judge. (Professional dog show handlers earn up to one hundred dollars per dog, per day, and often handle several dogs at once, so it can be lucrative.) Paquette’s main breed, now, is Shih Tzu. “Canada has the best Shih Tzus in the world,” he said.
But seriously, we asked him, would you consider this a sport?
“Oh yeah,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “The sport of dogs.”
Photos by Nancy Paiva/Torontoist.