Nostalgia can be a perilous sentiment. But on the morning after the noisy, glitzy, staged-for-television, night before, it was hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy with the retro tendency at Britain’s Kennel Club.
Where had this new breed of Crufts sprung from? This Crufts of more than 12,000 assorted dogs, corgis with tails, American schnauzers, Russian scotties, dazzling lights, and a prolonged fanfare to usher in the time-honoured formalities for Best in Show? Small wonder, perhaps, that there were those this time last week who had shaken their heads and clucked in disapproval at the boastful monster this “biggest dog show in the world” has become. Only capital crime, it might seem, was lacking.
Until, that is, Jagger, a rather splendid Irish setter who was second in his group, collapsed and died within hours of returning home. His Belgian vet had reportedly cut open his stomach and found meat neatly cubed around granules of poison. A second report of a dog falling violently ill after the competition forced the Kennel Club to issue a statement saying there had been “no official complaints from any owners”. Whatever the toxicology findings eventually say, it will be hard for “natural causes” to supplant the notion of dastardly crime in the minds of those who believe that Crufts has – well, gone to the dogs.
For the nostalgists, Jagger’s sad end seems to sum up a lot of what they feel has gone wrong. This animal had joint owners, one in this country, and the other in Belgium, where he lived. Since when were dogs worth so much that they had dual nationality and you effectively took out shares in them (like racehorses)? The crime, assuming there was one, may have been committed – as its joint owner generously suggested – by some misguided animal-rights campaigner or someone who had taken against dogs in their generality, or Irish setters as a breed. But more malign motives cannot yet be excluded. For this mega-Crufts is the sort of show where you can imagine jealous rivals settling scores with ancient means.
In the late 1990s, stationed in the United States, I pursued my interest in the dog world (chow chows being my particular weakness, if you want to know) by going to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York.
The atmosphere was quite different from the Crufts of yore (the Crufts of the proud owners posing with their pedigree pets on the curvaceous steps at Earl’s Court). Owners and breeders were not sitting around comparing notes and swapping grooming brushes, or chatting quietly over their Thermos flasks. If it was not quite-dog-eat dog out there, the bitchy rivalry between their owners was palpable. The film Best in Show came out a couple of years later, in 2000. To my mind, this friendly satire let New York’s Westminster off lightly.
The new Crufts is not there yet, thank goodness. But it has been evolving, like the animals themselves, growing bigger or smaller, putting on a bit of weight, making the ears pointier, fluffing up the coat with doggy hair spray, and generally adapting to the hyper-competitive global world. It began with the move to Birmingham (bigger premises, easier access); it continued with the introduction of “pet passports”, replacing quarantine, and it has now attained international levels of professionalisation.
There are comparisons to be made with the Premier League – the pluses being that English football attracts the best in the world and earns enormous amounts of money, as do the individual players; the minuses being that we start to neglect homegrown talent, team spirit may decline, and there are some nasty “foreign” habits, such as diving, spitting and biting. That’s the footballers, by the way; the overseas dogs (like their native counterparts) get confined to their kennels if they show signs of losing their cool.
But there is no need to join the canine Ukippers quite yet. For all the fuss, you would have thought that more than half this year’s Crufts entries were “foreign”. It was actually only a little more than 10%, and there were only 300 more “foreign dogs” than last year. All right, so Knopa, the Russian scottie, won Best in Show – Crimea and political sanctions notwithstanding – but the reserve was a flat-coated retriever from Macclesfield called Dublin.
Yes I wince, with the nostalgists, to see Crufts advertise “cutest” in show, hold a contest for Scruffts, and rate “hero dogs” for acclaim by public vote. But this may be what it takes to keep the show commercially on the road, and for the UK – in this small world, at least – to remain top dog.
