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It’s Westminster Week at Madison Square Garden, the time when Jeremy Lin cedes the floor to Pekingese, Syke Terriers, and Flat-Coated Retrievers, all battling for Best in Show. The Westminster Kennel Club dog show is America’s chance to celebrate the purebred dog, to talk knowingly about pedigrees and conformation. This year, there’s a little extra buzz, with Martha Stewart’s Chow Chow winning Best of Breed, and Josh Dean’s newly released bookShow Dogs: The Charmed Life and Trying Times of a Near-Perfect Purebred, which chronicled a year in the life of an Australian Shepherd.
Tessie, my golden retriever
But the rest of the year, the breeding establishment is under fire from those who cite the genetic problems with pure-bred dogs and further argue that it’s irresponsible to continue to breed dogs when so many rescue dogs need homes.
“In New York, the trendiest dog to own is a rescue,” says Dean. “It’s part of an urban, educated, progressive mindset and it’s getting more and more fervent every year.”
Animal advocates don’t mince words on the subject. “Westminster and the dogbreeding industry it props up are directly responsible for the fate of many of the dogs who end up in shelters and euthanized for lack of a home,” writesPETA Foundation staff writer Lindsay Pollard-Post
Putting aside puppy mills—horrible places where pure-bred dogs are bred in massive numbers and under inhumane conditions for sale in pet stores–there are sound counter arguments for getting a pedigreed dog through a responsible breeder of the kind that show at Westminster and smaller shows throughout the country.
“They know the breed so well that they know what the puppies are going to turn out to be: Size, temperament, lifespan, how much they’re going to shed,” explains Dean. “They don’t sugar coat it at all. They’re very honest, because their worst fear is having an owner who’s unhappy. If you go to a pound, you have no idea what you’re going to end up with.”
I’m in unique position to shed some light on this controversy, having lived with wonderful animals at both ends of the spectrum. Here’s a tale of my two dogs: Alison, the brown rescue dog, and Tessie, the pedigreed golden retriever.
Alison: My wife and I had been married a couple of years and we were thinking about taking those scary steps into true adulthood: buying a house and having kids. We were smart, responsible people, but also prone to worry: How can we raise a child if we can’t keep the houseplants alive?
So as a transitional step, we decided to get a dog.
We went to a few adoption events, and decided against a very personable, very large Rottweiler. We finally got serious and headed to a large animal shelter inNewark.
It was exactly the kind of institutional, no-nonsense place you see in the movies, with rows of cages and dogs barking as we walked past.
We first gravitated toward this pretty, fluffy brown dog. When they took us all to another room, and it became clear that he liked the other dogs in his cage far more than he liked us. We felt bad putting him back, but he didn’t mind at all.
In a nearby pen, this sweet medium-haired golden brown dog with floppy ears and a half-curly tail, jumped up and showed us her pink belly, and tried to lick our faces through the bars.
It was love at first sight.
She adopted us as surely as we adopted her.
This 50-pound dog was an extreme random bred, the very epitome of the kind of medium-size dog you get when you let dogs reproduce unsupervised. I looked at her paperwork. She had a name already—Alison—and a little note said “Do Not PTS.” I was about to ask what that meant, then I figured it out. There was no doubt about what we were rescuing Alison from.
Alison gave us some clues about her previous life. Two or three years old, she was already housebroken, leash trained, and knew how to sit. We would soon find out that she liked to roll in cat poop, but that’s another story.
Alison loved us. Other people? Not so much. When my sister went to pet her, she backed up in a panic and peed on the floor. She looked at pretty much everyone with a slightly wary glance. A couple of my friends got too friendly and she gave them a little warning nip.
We did the best we could to socialize Alison. She made friends with my sister, but she remained wary of strangers. We didn’t have that many people over, so we opted for a practical, safety-first solution: when we had company we’d put Alison in the spare bedroom with a bone.
We loved Alison and she lived a long and happy life in our home. She reached an accommodation with our then-very young children, but she died of age-related natural causes before we could see how she would react to a couple of toddlers. We also know that not
every owner would have been as patient with her issues as we were.
Tessie: Peter King who writes forSports Illustrated, used to live across the street from us. He had a dog named Woody, a big old golden retriever, Totally self-possesed, Woody was a truly exceptional dog—he did the things that most dogs do, like fetch and stay.
He would also dump on command. Really. I watched Peter say “Woody, dump” and, well, he did. Amazing.
So when it came time to bring another dog into our household with active, older kids, our thoughts naturally gravitated to Woody. Alison was a great dog for a different stage in our lives. But with an noisy house full of kids and friends and toys and video games, we needed a different, more sociable dog that wouldn’t be fazed by our domestic hustle and bustle.
Our first instinct was to call a local golden retriever rescue. They rejected our application out of hand when they read that my daughter had mild asthma, although no dog allergies. At some level, we felt bad about not going the rescue route, but our first concern was finding a dog that would integrate easily and fully into our family.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/allenstjohn/2012/02/14/westminster-show-dog-and-the-battle-over-purebred-puppies/
I still teach it so my dogs will have a chance to eliminate before going in the ring. Come to think of it, it's also a useful command on rainy nights when I throw the dogs outside and they try to get back inside.
It's justs extra bad today 
