I would understand if Daisy Crockett, who shares a household with our neighbors up the block, also is acting a little vain.
You see, Buddy and Daisy both are beagles. And for the first time in 100 years, a fellow member of their breed — a classy 3-year-old named Uno — was judged best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club competition in New York.
Buddy didn’t watch the broadcast. I told him about it afterward.
In the dog show world, Westminster is the big leagues, or maybe the Olympics. The competition this year attracted more than 2,600 entries.
Represented in the ring are the best examples of the wildly varying (sometimes outrageous) sizes and shapes that centuries of ungoverned canine lechery and subsequent human meddling have managed to produce.
There are fragile beasts as small, nearly, as cave rats. And great shambling individuals almost large enough to saddle and ride.
There are ones with squashed-in faces and bug eyes, and others whose features are concealed entirely behind a mask of hanging hair.
There are dogs you could hide in your coat pocket, and ones bred to be harnessed for pulling wagons or sleds.
Among them all — including such giants Great Danes, bullmastiffs and St. Bernards — the beagle, Uno, standing 15 inches at the shoulder, turned out to be the elephant in the room.
The NBA’s New York Knicks, with their dismal record at midweek of only 15 wins against 36 losses, may be having trouble holding the interest of their fans. But on each of the Westminster show’s two days, when Uno entered the ring the near-capacity Madison Square Garden crowd erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.
And the object of all that admiration responded as any self-respecting beagle would, by baying, bounding and beating the air with a happy tail.
Uno didn’t come in a favorite. The smart money was on poodles, standard or miniature. Coifed, poofed and trimmed to shape, like doggy topiary art, they remind me of nothing quite as much as those grotesque 6- and 7-year old beauty pageant contestants.
Call it prejudice, if you like, but I prefer a dog’s dog — not animate cotton candy. The elderly gentleman who judged the final round looked not at all like a hound man, but evidently he agreed. And in the Westminster show, beagles were long overdue.
Daisy I know only from a distance, having seen her being walked on a leash down the far side of the street. To my eye, she has an abundance of style and spirit.
What our Buddy has, on the other hand, is a dear nature, a good heart, the softest brown eyes imaginable, and an appetite. He’s middle-aged, gray-muzzled, shaped somewhat like a sausage and a little overweight.
He has one other important virtue though: a beagle’s mouth. I mean, a MOUTH!
No squirrel will be allowed to feast unmolested at the bird feeder. And no friend or stranger, no door-to-door salesman, no cruising evangelical or prospecting thief will ever approach our house unannounced.
Madison Square Garden isn’t in Buddy’s past or in his future. But as with all the other furred friends whose lives are joined to ours, like Uno he is best in show.
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