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Dark Whisperings Shake Dog Show Circuit
Wed February 4, 2004 10:25 AM ET
By Pete Harrison
LONDON (Reuters) - Something sinister is troubling Britain's usually genteel world of dog-showing, and at the center of it all lies one question: Who called Mrs Joyce Mann a "puppy farmer?"
Hate mail is circulating, threats have been made over the phone, Mann -- the country's top show judge -- has resigned and The Kennel Club says it has never seen anything like it.
"It is quite a nasty business," said a club spokeswoman. "Someone has set out to blacken Joyce's name at the pinnacle of her career."
And all this with the premier date on the dog show calendar fast approaching: Crufts, the world's largest dog show and the quintessence of British canine culture starts on March 4.
Joyce Mann, this year's Crufts Best of Show judge and wife of its chairman Peter, had been targeted by a fax campaign to highlight her mass breeding of Yorkshire Terriers in the 1960s -- puppy farming -- a practice common at the time, but now considered unethical.
"This has all the ingredients of a Miss Marple mystery," said Beverley Cuddy of "Dogs Today" magazine. "Dog showing is still very much a gentle middle-class pursuit, but it does have this other side.
"When people get obsessed, only winning counts, and the dog becomes irrelevant," she added.
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I always find it fascinating how humans who profess to love something - often become "obsessed" with some tangential aspect of the object of their affection and end up having the reason they entered into the relationship in the first place become "irrelevant."
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