The High Cost of Poodle Poofing

An article at Slate makes clear that to win at Westminster or most shows, it's not enough to have a good dog; you also have to have the right breed and a massive amount of cash or a lot of "sugar daddies" to foot the $100,000 or more annual bill to campaign a top dog.

If you spend a few weekends attending dog shows, you’ll pick up some surprising kibbles of knowledge along the way. You’ll learn, for instance, that any white dog is likely to be covered in powdered chalk. Or that certain breeds — bulldogs, for one — are incapable of reproducing without human intervention. You’ll also discover that the exorbitant expenses required to put a successful show dog on the road aren’t paid by the dogs’ owners. Yes, all the top dogs have backers, sometimes several of them...

Scott’s background was in Yorkshire Terriers, a breed he fell into through his ex-wife. One dog turned into a breeding and showing hobby that very quickly consumed both of them. Scott came to love the competition, and especially winning, but soon winning breed ribbons wasn’t enough. He wanted Groups, and then Bests in Show. And he found that it was very difficult to win Best in Show with Yorkshire Terriers.

If Scott wanted to compete for titles, the choice seemed rather obvious. “Poodles do very well,” he explained. “There are probably more Bests in Show in one weekend by poodles than all the Flat-Coated Retrievers would have in an entire year. And you could say that about a lot of breeds. It’s just the way it is.”

... All told, Scott says the range of campaigning a dog over a year varies: “You’re dealing with $100,000 to half a million.” Some people, of course, campaign multiple dogs.

And even then, you don’t know.

“People have spent millions and millions to win the Garden and have never won. Lots of people,” Scott said. “The stars have to align. The year we had Vikki we won 69 Bests in Show but the judge we had was going to put the beagle up, and he did.”

... Once you have a conversation with Ron Scott, you start to wonder if a regular person, with a great dog, could ever have a chance at competing for show wins. Hastings, the handler and trainer who knows as much about dog shows as any human, could recall just a few recent dogs that did well despite lacking a wealthy backer. She remembered a Yorkie, owned by a family that wasn’t rich, and shown by their daughter, that won Westminster.

I looked it up. That was in 1978, when Higgins became the first and still only Yorkie to win at Madison Square Garden. Handled by Marlene Lutovsky, Higgins’s care was indeed a family affair. Marlene’s mother Barbara reported that she was the one who got up every morning at 5 a.m. “to clean his teeth, brush and oil his coat, change the wrappers and give him clean booties.”

If you have someone like Ron Scott behind you, it means that you don’t have to rise before dawn, let alone brush your dog’s teeth. But more important than that, having a backer allows potential champions to be trained by the best professional handlers and to be advertised in all the major show dog magazines—week in and week out, for however long it takes.

I asked Scott if he thought it was possible to win without having someone like him pay the bills. He thought about it for a second. His reply: “It would be very difficult.”

If all of this sounds like the dog is just an after-thought to winning at any cost, then you have the right idea. Even winning is not really about dogs; it's about money and handlers and relationships and advertising. The dog is just a means to the end, and whatever that end is, it has very little to do with dogs and a great deal to do with the need to compete and fill some cavernous hole in the soul that is not being filled by family, God, craft, service, or nature.
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