All photographs courtesy of Hannah Berger.

The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia, lies on a few hundred acres of flat land abutted by farms and an amusement park called Kings Dominion. It’s the kind of place where animals and vegetables get sorted out. When I told a shearing friend I was heading there, he told me he’d just been there, too, for “sheep stuff.” The crest of an orange roller coaster peeked through the trees as I parked beside several RVs, all of them accompanied by some form of outdoor pen. Just inside the Farm Bureau Center, the doormats were already covered in fur.

I was attending a two-day conformation dog show, where more than four hundred purebred dogs were competing to determine which one adhered most closely to an ancestral ideal. Shows like this date back to 1859, when a gunsmith named W. R. Pape organized a competition judging fifty or sixty gun dogs—pointers and setters, bred to hunt—at the corn exchange in Newcastle upon Tyne. Winners got guns. Today, their descendants, plus nearly two hundred other breeds, bred solely for display, compete in fluorescent event spaces for big ribbons. 

Now under the jurisdiction of the American Kennel Club in the U.S., conformation shows measure the degree to which a dog “conforms” to its “breed standard,” a document that transmutes historical function into superficially measurable and marketable qualities: proportions, attitude, gaiting patterns. These documents vary widely in length and style. The greyhound’s standard, for example, is a spare two-hundred-word document that strays from sobriety just once in its description of the eyes: “dark, bright, intelligent, indicating spirit.” The standard of the Coton de Tulear, the bichon-like “national dog” of Madagascar, is nearly eight times as long, describing colors and shapes in percentages and angles. Its “joie de vivre” is mentioned twice. 

Show dogs are distilled or static versions of their predecessors. Their work is to signify historical roles, rather than to enact them, and breed standards outline the best approximation of the referent. Nearly everyone here—judges, breeders, hired handlers—has memorized at least one. Judges approach each purebred with this idealized version in mind. This construction—the ideal against its approximation—is where my fixation with dog shows begins, and is why I was, perhaps, the only nonparticipating spectator in the building, other than the vendors and an orange-vested Sisyphus with a push broom, in continuous pursuit of the hairless path. 

***

Inside the vast exhibition hall several hundred light panels were suspended from the ceiling, alongside a car-size American flag. Below, five fenced-in show rings extended across the polished concrete in a hopscotch configuration. The show’s official photographer ate a bowl of Cheerios and stared at her tableau: a hazy blue curtain and a platform surrounded by fake flowers, waiting for the winners of the day to come pose in it. Behind her the superintendent’s desk stood by a blow-up clown with a piece of paper taped to its belly, on which someone had written “Complaint Department Please be kind.” A man at the desk got on the microphone, and all of us turned to the flag to listen to a crackly recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” 

Beforehand, I thought the two days of this show would comprise a single competition, in which one dog might, thrillingly and with increasing suspense, defeat all others. But a serious show dog will travel between AKC-sanctioned events like this one year-round, with the aim of accumulating points towards a champion title: a prerequisite for bigger events like the Westminster Dog Show. The pressure to earn points as quickly as possible produces unusual scheduling quirks: each day at Meadow Event Park held completely separate competitions. Both events were organized by the same AKC affiliate, held in the same location, and involved many of the same judges and dogs. And yet both mornings began anew, with roughly four hundred competitors, and both afternoons promised a different Best in Show—and thus, two different opportunities to earn a champion title. Most of the dogs, handlers, and judges who participated on Saturday spent the night in their RVs and showed up again the next day. The aim, I’ve gathered, is not to entertain but to maximize point accumulation—and to save on travel.

Across the exhibition hall, all the humans were locked in place by the national anthem, though none of their dogs felt compelled to follow suit. Among those ambling around their motionless handlers were dogs with names like GCHS A & A’s Phantom In The Dressing Room (long-coated chihuahua), GCH Springhill A Reason To Smile DCAT FITS (smooth fox terrier), and GCHS Koping Versa Hold On For Dear Life BCAT (Weimaraner). Show dogs’ full names are strung together from a formula: a prefix to denote champion status, the name of the kennel of origin, a word or phrase determined by whimsy or litter theme, and a string of acronyms denoting all other titles, if any. For example: GCH denotes “grand champion,” whereas GCHS means “grand champion silver.” 

The dogs also have shorter call names, but their full identifiers resemble product codes. Like people in institutionalized settings, dogs in conformation shows pass from subject to object and back again. They are family and property at once. Companion and commodity. As I keep forgetting, a “breed” is less a taxonomic classification than an economic one, distinguishing marketable qualities rather than ranks in some Linnaean system. These competitions are essentially quality control measures for the purebred dog industry, meant to assess breeding stock. Competitors are also studs and breeding bitches whose biological material becomes more valuable by winning. This is why, in order to participate, dogs cannot be neutered or spayed. 

When the national anthem ended, some two hundred people turned away from the flag. Judges and stewards stepped into each ring and Best in Breed competitions began. I pulled my seat up to the accordion fence of ring four, where nineteen whippets competed for Best in Breed. In the adjacent ring two handlers wearing identical, powder blue tweed skirt suits guided their puppies through the four-to-six-month beginner competition. Variations on the tweed skirt suit were everywhere; some handlers kept their bait—beef jerky or a cheese stick—in their jackets’ tiny pockets (other trainers stored treats in their own mouths). Behind me, several golden retrievers waited in double-stacked cages while their Best in Breed winner got touched up with a blow dryer for the next round. Ahead, handlers gaited their whippets to the examination ramp, where the judge looked for the “deep briskets” and “well-sprung ribs” described in their breed standard. She peeked behind the lips for the “scissors bite,” ran her hand along the back line from the withers to the loin, and, on males, briefly felt the testicles. 

The winners of the Best in Breed rounds would progress to one of seven Best in Group competitions, and later that afternoon, the winners from each group would compete for Best in Show. But between the barking, blow dryers, and HVAC system, I had little chance of hearing what the judges had to say. What I heard instead was gossip. A woman next to me told a couple about a breeder who was using a bitch with a midline defect, which had produced a litter with kinks in the tail. A scandal. During her story, a boy I took to be her son, about seven or eight, appeared from somewhere and stood in front of her crying. The woman quickly put one hand over his mouth. “Stop,” she said, invoking one of the most common dog-training commands. She sent the boy back outside.

***

There is a procedure called “bark softening,” in which a surgeon removes some amount of vocal cord from the larynx of a dog. On Sunday morning I stood transfixed by one small dog on the second level of a group of triple-stacked cages. The dog was barking at me through the bars but I heard almost nothing. Each yap sounded whispered, like a forced exhale. I first assumed she suffered from some nondisqualifying congenital defect; now I suspect she was barking through post-op cords. 

As of this April, the procedure is illegal in Virginia, despite the AKC’s advocacy efforts. The AKC’s Government Relations Department lobbies for the rights of dog owners who “wish to maintain their dog’s historic practical function” using common cosmetic procedures. A docked tail is a requirement stipulated in the standards of many hunting and guard dogs, including the boxer, Doberman pinscher, and cocker spaniel, whose tails are a liability in the field.

After all, the purebred dog is defined by its historical purpose, and the standards against which they are judged are meant to reflect this history. Whippets, originally bred to catch vermin, are now judged by qualities that imply an ability to “cover a maximum of distance with a minimum of lost motion” in pursuit of prey. In its lengthy standard, the “sympathetic awareness” and “unique vocalizations” of the Coton de Tulear link back to its Madagascan origins as a companion dog. The conformation show rewards dogs who carry their history the most authentically, welcoming their historically accurate progeny into the future. 

Of course, it’s only the appearance of authenticity that’s at stake here—for example, a static musculature that implies speed. Some breeds have mysteriously lost their historical referent: the standards for the bulldog and Staffordshire bull terrier make no reference to purpose, presumably because both were developed for blood sports: bullbaiting and dogfighting.

***

I spent much of Sunday hovering discretely around a turquoise tent in the corner. The vendor, Infinity Canine, kept a gold-and-white borzoi in heat and a table of semen-collection-and-analysis equipment under their tent. Earlier that morning, I’d glanced at their sign-up sheet, which had one entry: under a column labeled “Breed and Service Requested,” someone had written “G. Dane” and “Freeze.” Cryopreservation, the requested service, would enable this Great Dane to sire a litter at any point in the near or distant future, alive or dead. 

I watched the giant dog approach the tent entrance a few hours later, accompanied by a woman and her teenage daughter. A vet in scrubs put down her Starbucks pastry and zipped them into the tent, and, while I could only see a tail flicker intermittently through the high mesh window, I knew that the woman and her teenage daughter were crowded into the corner of the tent watching their pet get jerked off into a bag while another vet held the borzoi in front of his face. In scenarios like this, a bitch in heat is the “teaser,” used to the same end as porn in a (human) sperm bank. 

On a sandwich board outside the tent, Infinity Canine’s logo illustrated a sperm swimming through the two holes in the infinity symbol. It seemed like a tidy illustration of a theory I’d been harboring about these shows—that, despite their careful recordkeeping, the judges, breeders, and handlers of conformation are engaged in a distinctly ahistorical project: a preservation lying somewhere between reenactment and taxidermy. One of the many criticisms leveled against conformation shows is that, by focusing on form, they’ve ruined working breeds, such that dogs historically bred to herd and hunt are no longer capable of doing either. Breeders work tirelessly against the mechanisms of evolution, wrangling genetic material to come as close as possible to an ideal that is constantly renegotiated, moving further from its origin with every Best in Show. 

This glitchy approach to history yields a bewildering kind of eternal recurrence—a concept most bluntly represented by an odd flourish in the Westminster “win shot.” In this year’s photo, a Doberman named GCHP CH Connquest Best Of Both Worlds poses on a large purple circle surrounded by her prizes: a big ribbon, a pewter trophy, a silver cup, and, propped up in front of her, a pewter frame—inside of which sits a picture of the picture currently being taken. 

It’s an uncanny bit of Photoshop. But it wasn’t a fluke; some Westminster press person has been doctoring the “win shots” in this way since at least 2023. Perhaps because an empty frame looks sort of desolate on camera, and one can reasonably guess which photo the prizewinner might choose to display in it. Perhaps they were compelled to excise all signifiers of uncertainty from the photo, proposing a temporal pattern of winning—which, for a show dog, is akin to being—that would overwrite the idea of before and after with one resounding always.

By late afternoon Sunday, one German shepherd, one golden retriever, one Bernese mountain dog, one Boston terrier, one Norwich terrier, one long-haired dachshund, and one long-coated chihuahua persisted, and were gaited around ring one, in that order, by size and speed. The golden retriever’s handler let her dog take little nibbles of the bait during his examination before putting it back into her mouth for safekeeping; the following two did the same. 

I’d read on the ranking boards that this judge preferred “small and pretty” dogs in the ring, and indeed, his attention was set a little farther down the line. GCHB Dikerdachs Horatio, the long-haired dachshund, strong of bone and hard of muscle, Roman in the muzzle, nostrils well open, hair from the tail (“not carried too gaily”) forming a veritable flag, won Best in Show. Somehow, at the time, I’d had no memory of the previous day’s Best in Show results, when Horatio had, I was surprised to learn, won again. Or already, I should say.