I followed them. The Westminster staging area resembles a heavenly pet store, where every animal is getting groomed constantly and there’s a four-to-one ratio of employee to dog. It’s organized into aisles, which are signposted as if the pets were types of groceries: Labradors, Tibetan mastiffs, and boxers in one row, Samoyeds and Alaskan huskies across from them. Some dogs nap in their crates, which range from ordinary wire or plastic to the sort of heavy-duty metal that you’d expect to see protecting a bank vault in a heist movie. Other dogs stand atop elevated tables, peacefully submitting their ears for a brushing. Waves of polite barking rippled through the room.
A three-year-old Glen of Imaal terrier named Emmett sat on his hindquarters and waggled his paws in the air for a treat. According to folklore, dogs of this breed once worked as rotisserie attendants, walking on medieval treadmills that rotated the spits holding meat over a fire. Kate Flack, Emmett’s owner, told me that the Glen of Imaal breed almost went extinct. “And then Irish nationalists resurrected them in the early twentieth century. They were fierce guardians of the Glen’s antique features.” She gestured toward Emmett, who resembled a cheerful Ewok, and patted him on his enormous fluffy head.
A crowd gathered around Finley, a golden retriever, the Taylor Swift of breeds. It was his first time at Westminster, but he had been competing since he was seven months old. “He’s a big, gregarious knucklehead,” his owner, Brad Minges, who had come from Raleigh and spoke with a drawl, told me. “It’s his birthday tomorrow. After Westminster, he’ll probably do Palm Beach, then Maryland. Then he’ll retire.” Behind him, a maintenance man wearing a fluorescent vest carted away an enormous trash can full of dog paraphernalia, stirring up flurries of fur in the air.
I walked back through the maze and got in line for the elevator: there were more competitions next door, at Pier 94. The big doors opened. “Get the dogs on,” a security guard said, urgently, as if we were evacuating the Titanic. “Get the dogs on, get the dogs on.” An exhausted pointer, wearing a protective cape, like a marathon runner, boarded the elevator and sat placidly, facing the wall.
Pier 94 was covered by an exotic purple carpet. To the right of the entrance was a warren of dog merchandise: socks and coasters for every breed; dog cosmetics; grooming tools that looked like high-end vibrators; “couture leashes”; jewelry for dogs; jewelry for humans, featuring dogs; pop-up studios advertising canine oil portraits. A group of people had gathered, paparazzi-style, around another golden retriever, named Bailey, who posed modestly for their iPhones, occasionally breaking into a smile.
Bailey was five, and he lived in Florida. “When he was eight weeks old, he jumped onto a boogie board in the pool, and I just knew that he was a star,” his owner, Grace Glavin, said. She showed me a photo of a minuscule puppy balancing serenely on a boogie board. Then she showed me the boogie board. Bailey posed with it. I left with a flyer about Bailey that resembled a spa advertisement for a Valentine’s Day package. “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body,” it read.
I kept walking and met May, a three-year-old boxer—the “clown of the dog world,” her owner, Kim Dye, told me. “She won Select Bitch today, so she did good,” Dye said. I met Zeus, a dark silver Cane Corso, or Italian mastiff, who weighed a hundred and forty pounds. His handler, Lenard Clayton, wore a red rose in his lapel, a plaid pocket square, Argyle socks, and a sequinned bow tie. “He’ll pin you to the ground,” Clayton told me.
Applause rang out; a breed competition had just concluded. A woman in a pink suit ran to greet her husband with brimming, joyful eyes. Her name was Anita Gage, and her Irish setter, Ready—official name: More Than Ready—had just won an Award of Merit. She and her husband, Tom, had travelled for fifteen hours to get to New York from California. Tom, an English professor, told me later, “The beauty of the Irish setter has caught the eye of painters for centuries.” Somehow, we got on the subject of Turkish politics, and for the rest of the dog show, as handlers napped in camping chairs and the animals lined up, Noah’s Ark style, to exit through the loading dock, the two of us talked about Fethullah Gülen.
That night, at Madison Square Garden, the best dogs in the Sporting, Working, and Terrier groups were selected. The arena was full of people who cheered for their favorite breed as if they were cheering for a family member at high-school graduation. When the Clumber spaniel, a dog that looks like it has received a head transplant, appeared on camera, it was so shockingly cute that the crowd started to scream.
At eleven-thirty p.m., the top dogs from each of the seven breed groups assembled atop the bright-green turf. Judge Thomas H. Bradley III, tall, balding, and dignified in a bow tie, walked back and forth in front of them. He gave a speech about what it meant to him to award Westminster’s highest honor, praising the thousands of owners and handlers and assistants who had come to New York and seeming genuinely moved. The crowd was tense. He pointed dramatically to Rumor, a German shepherd, a five-year-old female named after the Adele song “Rumor Has It,” whose handler had nearly retired her from competition after she lost Best in Show in 2016. She’d made her comeback. The other dogs cleared off the carpet, and the mass of spectators walked sleepily onto the escalators. From floor to floor, everybody was saying, “They’re all such good dogs.”
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