When some Gilded Age gentleman hunters organized a New York event to compare their dogs, could they have imagined that people would someday call it the World Series of dogdom or the Super Bowl of dog shows?
Of course they couldn’t. The World Series and the Super Bowl didn’t exist. Nor, for that matter, did the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty.
But the Westminster Kennel Club’s dog show did, and still does. With the 150th annual show set to start Saturday live on FOX, FS1, FS2 and FOX One, here’s a then-and-now look at the United States’ most famous canine competition.
“The trappings, the window dressing, you know, changes over time. But what’s at the core, what’s the heart of it, which is the love of dogs … that has been the same,” says club President Donald Sturz.
The name
It comes from the Westminster Hotel, where the show’s founders liked to belly up to the bar and brag about their dogs. The hotel is long gone. The moniker stuck.
The dogs
The club’s “First Annual New York Bench Show of Dogs,” in 1877, was no small thing. It featured about 1,200 dogs of a few dozen breeds, ranging from pugs to mastiffs. They included an English setter valued at $5,000, at a time when an average laborer in New York made about $1.30 a day. The Associated Press reported that “the bulldogs are represented by a number of noticeable delegates,” and a family of “Japanese spaniels” was “highly amusing.”
It wasn’t the first U.S. dog show, but it wowed and endured. Among U.S. sporting events, only the Kentucky Derby has a longer history of being held every year.
This year’s Westminster show boasts 2,500 dogs, representing as many as 212 breeds and 10 “varieties” (subsets of breeds, such as smooth vs. wirehaired dachshunds). Some likely hadn’t made it to the U.S. in 1877. Others didn’t exist yet anywhere.
But many are much the same as they were in Westminster’s early days, Sturz says. Some details — the length of muzzles, the thickness of coats — have shifted in this breed or that, and better canine nutrition may have led to “a little bit more size, or a little more bone” in some, he said.
Today, all the canines have champion rankings in a formalized sport with a complicated point system and official “standards” for judging each breed. They compete for best in show, a trophy that Westminster added in 1907. Earlier shows had no overall prize.
Hundreds of other dogs now vie for separate titles in agility and other sports, which kick off this year’s show on Saturday.
The vibe
When Westminster started, the dogs weren’t the only ones with a pedigreed air.
“Everybody was fashionably dressed and wore an air of good breeding,” The New York Times said of the 1877 show — and the paper was talking about the spectators, not the animals. Not to be outdone, some canines also were gussied up in lace collars and ribbons.
Over the years, the event drew entries from foreign royals, American tycoons and modern-day celebrities including Martha Stewart and Tim McGraw. A decades-long list of pro athletes have cheered on their animals, from baseball’s Lou Gehrig and Barry Bonds to the NFL’s Morgan Fox.
Westminster has carried a whiff of bygone, clubby gentility into the 21st century — handlers wear suits and dresses, upper-round judges black tie — and the competition is hardly casual. Many top contenders come in with hired professional handlers and a show record built on near-constant travel, with buzz built through dog-magazine ad campaigns.
Still, many people handle their own dogs and work or are retired from policing, medicine, the military, corporate jobs or other fields. Some of the animals also have jobs, including bomb-sniffing and search-and-rescue.
“It’s an elite event, but it’s one that we want everyone to feel that they can access and be a part of,” says Sturz, a clinical psychologist and retired school district superintendent.
The venue
Westminster debuted at Gilmore’s Garden, a precursor to today’s Madison Square Garden. Nearly every subsequent show has been in some iteration of the building, even after part of it collapsed and killed four people, including a Westminster official, shortly before the 1880 show. Next week’s semifinals and best-in-show finals, set for late Tuesday, will be held in the present-day Garden.
From the start, the show has drawn thousands of spectators in person — and many more on TV since the late 1940s, with still more via streaming.
Of course, that’s not the only way Westminster has been portrayed on-screen.
The movie
Yes, we’re talking about “Best in Show,” director-writer-actor Christopher Guest’s cult-classic 2000 mockumentary about obsessives and oddballs competing at the fictional “Mayflower” dog show in Philadelphia. Guest attended Westminster during his extensive research for the film.
Is it really like that? As with any satire: sort of. Circulate at Westminster, and you’ll certainly see some wound-up people primping and presenting animals, but you’ll also see some competitors cheering for each other, sharing expertise and playing with cherished pets.
Show folk had mixed feelings about the movie. But it helped expand Westminster’s audience, says David Frei, who hosted the show broadcast from 1990 to 2016.
“They didn’t make fun of the dogs,” Frei said. “They just made fun of the people.”
The protests
As Westminster’s prominence grew, it became a magnet for complaints that dog breeding puts looks ahead of health. As far back as 1937, some show-goers questioned whether collies’ narrow heads and long noses were healthy, according to an AP story at the time.
In recent years, animal welfare activists have sometimes infiltrated the ring or demonstrated on the sidelines. This year, PETA has put up billboards near the venues about the breathing problems of flat-faced dogs, and oxygen-tank-carrying supporters plan to demonstrate outside.
“Westminster has had countless opportunities to evolve, yet it clings to an outdated obsession with aesthetics,” a PETA staff writer said in a recent op-ed distributed by the Tribune Content Agency.
Sturz said the club “has a longstanding history of showing its commitment to dog welfare.”
He notes that the organization has donated to veterinary scholarships, pet-friendly domestic violence shelters, rescue groups and other canine causes. Those ties go all the way back to 1877, when some proceeds from the first Westminster show helped the nation’s oldest humane society, the ASPCA, build its first shelter.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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