At Crufts

Every March​ , over the course of four days, thousands and thousands of dogs go to a conference centre outside Birmingham. They arrive in waves, the dogs, according to the order in which they will be assessed. Breeds being shown at Crufts are divided into seven categories: hound, gundog, pastoral, terrier, toy, utility and working. The schedule changes every year, but this time the terriers and hounds were up first, in their crates and on their leashes, with their hairspray and special dog toothpaste (poultry flavour, liver flavour, coconut and mint). Among them were 138 Afghan hounds, 91 salukis (the ones that look like teenage girls) and 111 Bedlington terriers (the ones that look like the ghosts of lambs).

The toy and utility breeds were up next. Toys are the frilly, flickery ones, the kind you have under your arm if you are a snooty woman in a children’s book. Your Malteses, your Chihuahuas. The utility breeds have no adjectives in common. During the judging, a commentator described the group as ‘hugely varied … we’ve got some very large breeds, some breeds which were bred for running and some which were bred to be eaten, unfortunately.’ There were 174 bulldogs this year and 146 shih tzus (underbite, topknot and ‘distinctly arrogant carriage’, per the Kennel Club’s guidelines). There were 260 Dalmatians.

I arrived early on day three, just before the gundog judging began. Driving into the National Exhibition Centre, we passed a camper van parked on a verge, not far from a sign that read ‘Veterinary advice on CANINE CASTRATION has changed!’, with a picture of a dachshund looking scared and embarrassed. The van’s door opened, and what must have been a dozen Irish setters came rippling out of it onto the grass, barking at the sun as they stood bright red and shining on the green. They were blazing, heraldic, something you would be lucky to see at the end of a vision quest.

My taxi driver was in too much of a hurry to slow down for me to take a picture, and I panicked about having no hard evidence of the exhilarating scene I had witnessed. I did not yet know that by the end of the day, ten or even thirty Irish setters standing around in the sun would be as nothing to me, that soon I would scarcely pause to make a note as I got into a hotel lift and observed that it was full of Samoyeds, radiantly white dog-shaped clouds travelling up to the fourth floor in silence, black noses twitching in the dead air.

If you watch Crufts on TV, as 8.5 million people do every year, you will see some pretty unusual things. Turn on Channel 4 during the International Freestyle, and you will find a Slovakian woman and a Border collie doing a frantic synchronised dance routine to a raunchy cover of ‘Hit the Road Jack’, the collie hopping on its hind legs for ten seconds and at certain points giving the strong impression that it understands the concept of dumping a useless man. Here, in an arena where the Sugababes recently performed, is a crowd bursting into applause as a spaniel steadfastly ignores a rabbit decoy streaking across the astroturf. Here are the genial announcers saying ‘bitch’ over and over: obedience bitch, limit bitch, postgraduate bitch, this magnificent young bitch from Venice, this famous bitch from America.

As a televised spectacle, though, Crufts is essentially comprehensible, organised around familiar rules. The presenters are the same ones who do the Olympics. The agility competitions work along similar lines to showjumping: animals are eliminated if they knock something over or take too long going round the course. As for the judging, we all know what a competition is, even if we don’t understand the criteria for winning. It might not be obvious why the papillon was chosen over the Pekingese, but we believe that the judge must have had his complex and internally consistent reasons. Overall, you come away with the sense that the event takes place in the world that most of us inhabit.

It’s not like that. For four days, the NEC is another planet, a thriving one, with its own rules, its own language, its own celebrities and its own newspaper, called Our Dogs. It doesn’t have its own currency, but it might as well do, considering its alien system of financial rewards. The owner of a Best of Breed winner, for instance, who in the process of qualifying for Crufts will have spent up to £10,000 on competition fees, grooming, training, travel, accommodation and clothes, gets a cheque for £20. The owner of the Best in Show winner, who may have spent far more, gets £200 and a replica trophy.

Crufts has its own shops, which include My Life as a Dog, Dog Only Nose, The Little Dog Laughed. It has products and services that you won’t find anywhere else: post-castration or post-death semen harvesting; special hair-resistant jackets, with mandarin collars offering a protective barrier against the swirling drifts of dog hair that every professional groomer has to combat; left-handed dog scissors; ‘grooming nooses’. It has its own maxims, the most frequently repeated of which is that it doesn’t matter what happens in the judging ring, you always take the best dog/bitch home with you. It has its own approved gait: that slow, bounding action handlers must perform as they lead their charges across the show ring, an uncanny, half-weightless movement, as though the person were running with weights across the bottom of a swimming pool. It has its own myths, such as the one about the Swedish breeder whose luggage was full of mineral water he had brought from home and which he used to wash his Lhasa apsos, unprepared as he was to accept the inferior results he got from the stuff that came out of the taps at the Hilton. A great innovator, one Hungarian handler called him. A pioneer.

It has its own fashion mandates and aspirational labels. For a female handler at the top of her game, there can only be a glittery skirt suit from St John, a brand long associated with financially secure American grandmothers, which now does a roaring second-hand trade on Facebook through groups called ‘St John Dog Show Outfits’ and ‘St John for Dog Shows Under $400’. It has its own methods for assimilating strangers. No one asks an unfamiliar person what they do or where they come from; the relevant question is ‘What’s your breed?’

Above all, it is a planet full of dogs: many more of them than anyone would imagine could fit into a conference centre complex next to Birmingham Airport. They were everywhere. I saw them in the hotels and in the restaurants, in the lobbies and in the corridors, leaning their massive heads against the Perspex siding of the on-site pharmacy while their owners darted in for emergency toothbrushes.

I heard them howling their brains out under the stands in the BP arena during the West Midlands Police Dog Display, a twenty-minute demonstration of riled-up German shepherds launching themselves at the padded limbs of volunteers dressed as burglars. The howling was audible even over Green Day’s ‘Good Riddance (Hope You Had the Time of Your Life)’, which was playing during the Saturday morning show as a policewoman announced the retirement of two police dogs, PD Chase and PD Viper, and encouraged the audience to put their hands together as the two animals streaked across the arena for ‘one final bite’, PD Viper leaping at the volunteer with such shocking violence that the man sitting behind me shrieked: ‘Jesus wept.’

I saw a sea of St Bernards waiting at a zebra crossing, and eight identical Pomeranians skipping around a bar stool on their stiff orange legs. I saw a trio of harlequin Great Danes walk through a hotel’s revolving doors and make their way to the reception desk. Each afternoon, when the judging for the day had concluded, I stood outside the main eventing hall and watched as hundreds of dogs and their owners trotted past me on their way to the parking lots, one uniform group followed by another, like the animals leaving the ark.

Twenty-four thousand dogs were judged at Crufts this year. Every minor puppy, every veteran bitch, every champion dog was assessed according to the guidelines laid out in the Kennel Club’s Illustrated Breed Standards, now in its fourth edition, running to almost five hundred pages and containing minutely detailed photographs of the 224 distinct breeds of dog recognised by the organisation (which was founded in 1873).

In The Invention of the Modern Dog (2018), the historians Michael Worboys, Julia-Marie Strange and Neil Pemberton examine the Victorian origins of these standards, tracing the change from categorising dogs according to their function (sheep-herding, ratting, coursing, fighting, retrieving, sitting on laps) to categorising them according to their appearance: ‘What had previously been called varieties and types of dog were remodelled physically and culturally into breeds,’ defined by ideal physical traits. They argue that the popularity of Victorian dog shows, and the ensuing demand for universally agreed-on judging criteria, were the principal cause of this shift. Competitions drove both standardisation and differentiation. The rigid taxonomies of pedigree breeds, in other words, came about in part because people wanted a disinterested external authority to provide an explanation as to why their particular borzoi was overlooked in favour of another.

Today, Illustrated Breed Standards is a riveting document, a tonally unstable mix of prescriptive and descriptive, tangible and intangible, objective and wildly, outrageously subjective. Within a paragraph, or even a sentence, the guide will veer from the apparently scientific to the whimsically anthropomorphic, as in the description of the West Highland white terrier: ‘Small, active, game, hardy, possessed of no small amount of self-esteem with a varminty appearance’. It makes constant reference to a dog’s imagined historical form, and to the importance of its being ‘fit for function’, even or especially if the demand for that function was obliterated by the industrial revolution, as in the description of the temperament of the English toy terrier: ‘alert … remembering that historically he could acquit himself satisfactorily in the rat pit’.

Page after page, the book offers evidence of attempts to impose unyielding order and logic, alongside admissions that order and logic do not really obtain in this arena. A bichon frisé should have round eyes, a bull terrier should have an egg-shaped skull, but what is a judge to do when confronted with the mandate that ‘the Afghan hound looks at and through one,’ other than follow her heart? How do you decide which deerhound possesses the most ‘quiet dignity’? Who is to say which of seven Pomeranians is the most vivacious?

For Bill Lambert, the Kennel Club’s spokesman, the guide’s hermeneutic flexibility is its great virtue. ‘If it wasn’t open to interpretation,’ he said, his demeanour that of a Sunday school teacher, ‘then the same dog would always win. But because two judges can interpret the standard in a slightly different way, everybody has a chance.’ We were in Lambert’s temporary office, centrally positioned in the maze of the NEC. It was the morning of the final day; in the halls outside, the judging for the working and pastoral groups was underway. ‘They’re all pretty close to the breed standard, but there will be a dog that just has that bit of personality, that you’re drawn to as a judge. You see it and you can’t take your eyes off it.’

Take the Jack Russell who had won the terrier judging on day one. ‘You could see its personality was just oozing out of it.’ Best in Show was coming up that evening and I asked Lambert for his predictions. He shook his head, but then conceded that the cocker spaniel was terrific. Also the Tibetan mastiff, a perfect example of the breed. The miniature schnauzer? Ideal. ‘And that whippet …’ We were standing by his door, and he closed his eyes for a second, rocking backwards and forwards as he drew a dog in the air with both hands.

I had seen the whippet the day before, tiny Miuccia from Venice. She was waiting beside her handler in a line for coffee, an elegant outline of a hound who trembled only slightly as two wolfhounds padded past, cargo ships looming over a paper sailboat. The handler, a well-dressed young man called Giovanni Lioguri, told me he had been breeding whippets for eight years. ‘It’s my breed,’ he said. ‘I love how they are. They can be super quiet, super sweet when we’re at home, and then they get completely crazy in the fields.’ He didn’t mention the physical features highlighted in the guide: the perfect scissor bite, the rose-shaped ears, the ‘smooth daisy-cutting action’.

Neither did the woman who had been showing Samoyeds since 1978, who first got one because she had heard they were good with children, or the man whose schnauzer won the utility group, and who had to wrestle with himself in order to keep from breaking down as he accepted the award. ‘She was born in my home,’ he said, voice quivering. ‘She is my pet. I love her more than anything.’ I spoke to a woman from the Netherlands, Katrinka, efficiently working on the coat of a Hungarian puli (the ones that look like bewitched mops), whose cheeks became flushed and whose eyes reddened as she expanded on her feelings about the breed. ‘They love you, they are sitting with you, when you go out to the toilet, they are together with you. They are sleeping on the bed.’ Her smile was radiant as she showed me how to maintain the animal’s floor-scraping dreadlocks, coarse to the touch.

I spoke to a lot of people at Crufts, about their breeds and their competition history and their gripes about the parking situation. Looking back at the transcripts of the interviews, I was surprised at my consistent failure to ask the question I really wanted an answer to: why do you do this? Why wake up at two in the morning to drive from Bath with your sheepdog, whose great-uncle won best of breed in the early 2000s? The question evaporated from my mind as soon as each person started talking, their enthusiasm apparently an answer in itself.

Why do they do it? No one is throwing their time and energy and money into qualifying for Crufts in the hope of winning £200. Many are there because all their friends are too. There are parties every night – the Afghan hound community, in particular, is known for its gregariousness. It’s a social life. Some very successful breeders make money from sales and stud fees, and there is also the matter of prestige. I was in the press centre when the owner of a champion papillon walked in, and the flutter was exactly the same as when I was in a restaurant and Emily Blunt came and sat at the bar. But as I listened to the way people spoke about their dogs, watching them cry uncontrollably when the awards were handed over, it was hard not to conclude that many were there because they needed an official outlet for their feelings about their animals, external validation in the form of a rosette, or a trophy replica, or a Bitch Challenge Certificate.

It was Miuccia who took Best in Show in the end. The audience’s disappointment was audible, though everyone was a good sport about it: people had wanted the Jack Russell, also a bitch from Italy, but more of a crowd-pleaser. It was a strangely anticlimactic moment. Seven exceptionally well-behaved dogs sitting quietly on the astroturf, all totally different from one another in appearance, one singled out over the others for what you would have to describe as profoundly mysterious reasons. The judge liked her attitude, maybe. Or perhaps there was just something about the way she looked at her.