Why the Pet Press Has Sold Out Dogs

With rare exception, and rarely sustained, the pet press has whistled past the canine graveyard for 100 years, as dogs have become progressively more inbred, as standards have been rewritten and distorted to salute deformity, and as once-proud working dogs have been reduced to practice dummies for frustrated hair dressers.

At the same time that true problems have been ignored, the pet press has been largely silent about veterinary bill padding and the nonsense self-certification systems trumpeted by correspondence school dog trainers.

Look through any dog publication and it becomes pretty clear that one reason for the roaring silence is that the target audience for most dog publications are dog show patrons selling dogs to new dog owners.

Criticize the values and knowledge of the folks who own and show pedigree dogs? Note that a stray picked up at the pound is more likely to be healthy than a pure breed?

That's calling for trouble from the advertisers.

It's more calling for more trouble to point out the most veterinary insurance is a rip-off or that no dog food has ever been shown to be better than another. After all, the insurance companies and dog food companies are big advertisers, aren't they?

And then, of course, there are the ads where kennels openly pimp for more rosettes.

Back in February, The New York Times wrote about this phenomenon in an article entitled Hype, Money and Cornstarch: What It Takes to Win at Westminster.  In it the author notes that:

Among breeders, owners and handlers, it’s understood: you can’t just turn up with the paradigm of the breed, if such an animal exists, and expect a best-in-show ribbon. To seriously vie for victory, a dog needs what is known as a campaign: an exhausting, time-consuming and very expensive gantlet of dog show wins, buttressed by ads in publications like Dog News and The Canine Chronicle.

Seriously, ads. Lots and lots of them. They usually hype recent victories at local shows, with the hope of influencing judges at future competitions. “A top 10 toy dog!” reads a recent full-pager for Bon Bon the Pomeranian, listing an assortment of triumphs under a picture of the animal panting atop some logs.

The cost of a campaign can add up fast. You need a professional handler and cash for plane tickets and road trips to roughly 150 dog shows a year. (Yes, about three shows a week.) And you need to spend as much as $100,000 annually on ads.

Altogether, a top-notch campaign can easily cost more than $300,000 a year, and because it takes time to build momentum and a reputation, a typical campaign lasts for two or three years. Kathy Kirk, who handled Rufus, a colored bull terrier who won best in show at Westminster in 2006, estimates that the dog’s three-year campaign cost about $700,000.

“Money is important in everything,” says Ms. Kirk. “The Olympics, auto racing, everything. The big bucks wins.”

Right. The big bucks win.

It's about money. You buy the best dog, pay for someone to board it, groom it, and walk it around the ring, and then you claim that YOU have a top dog!

So at magazines like Dog News, the ads keep pouring in. Often called the bible of the dog show world, Dog News is a weekly published by Harris Publications out of an office on Broadway in Manhattan. Other titles in Harris’s eclectic stable include Guns and Weapons, the hip-hop title XXL and the comic book Vampirella.

Most magazines are struggling with a downturn in ads. Not Dog News. It’s about 75 percent ads and runs as long as 600 pages in issues coinciding with big shows. Prices vary from $250 for a full-page black-and-white ad to $4,000 for the cover.

Yes, the cover is an ad.

“I don’t have a single staffer to solicit ads,” says Matthew Stander, publisher of Dog News. “They come to us unsolicited.”

Judges are the main target — they are sent the magazine gratis — and they star along with the dogs in most of the ads. There’s a tradition at shows of taking a photograph of winning dogs along with the judges who selected them, and most of the ads are little more than that photo and a cutesy tag line.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” reads a recent ad for Prissy the dachshund, “Love me because I’m a weinner!” The judge usually gets a shout-out, too. (“Thank you Judge Mrs. Bonnie Threlfall.”)

So there you go: 600-page-publications packed with ads and even the cover of the magazine is an ad!

And of course you have a shout-out to the judge, because if it's all about vanity, let's not stop with the dog owners!

We are told the cost to put a bull terrier into the top slot at Westminster is $700,000, and never mind if this breed is wrecked by genetic disease caused by inbreeding and has a tragically short life-span as a result.

Shhhh!   Mum's the word. We need the advertising!!

Professional handlers and owners say they wouldn’t write the checks if the ads didn’t get results. There are thousands of specials in any given year, and in a realm this competitive, the ads elevate you above the pack, they say. Just by buying them, you announce that you’re playing to win.

Right. Playing to win.

It's not about canine health or function, it's about rosettes.

It's not about the dog, it's about human ego.

And for the dog press, it's all about the ads.  The articles are just the filler in between.
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