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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. You know the saying dogs are man's best friend? One interesting thing about that sentence is that friendship is a two-way street. Both parties gain something. When it comes to dogs, we humans get laughs, companionship, cuddles, Instagram content, and sure, the dogs get food, shelter and housing, but isn't the value of friendship about more than just basic needs? Is it possible dogs get something even more from being our buddies? Because the saying is not dogs are a man's best servant.

What do dogs get out of being with us? These are just a few questions that author Tommy Tomlinson explored when writing the book Dogland. To explore these questions, he uses the one place that exemplifies dog obsession, the Westminster Dog Show. The dogs are beautifully groomed, the obstacle courses are intricate, the metals are shiny, but underneath this spectacle is a strong mutual bond between dogs and humans, and in the author's words, "The leash pulls on both ends." Here to talk about the world of dog shows and the inextricable connection between dogs and their owners is the author of Dogland, Tommy Tomlinson. Hi, Tommy. Welcome to All Of It.

Tommy Tomlinson: Hey, Kousha. Thank you so much for having me here.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely, and first off, happy Publication Day. I know it's a big day for you.

Tommy Tomlinson: Oh, man. The Publication Day. The best author phrase is New York Times bestselling author, but the second best one is Publication Day.

Kousha Navidar: Publication Day. It's pretty good even without the New York Times bit with it.

Tommy Tomlinson: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, have you and your dog competed in a dog show before? What was that experience like for you? Or maybe you have a story about your loving bond between you and your pup. How has life changed because of your canine companion? Tommy and I are here to hear your stories, I think especially if you have participated in dog shows. I know that. I am super interested in that, but we're here for all of it. We want to hear your stories. Give us a call, send us a text.

We're at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC or you can hit us up on Instagram or X. We're @allofitwnyc. Tommy, let's dive into the book. Years ago you're watching the Westminster Dog Show on TV, and a simple question pops into your head, and it basically led you on this journey, and on the very first page of your book's prologue, you pose this question. What exactly was that question and how did that question guide this book?

Tommy Tomlinson: The question was, are those dogs happy? Because, obviously, you know if you've seen a dog show, a show dog lives a much different life than your average pet or the mutt who lives down the street or whatever, they are groomed and prempt for hours and hours every day. They are trained for hours a day. They have special diets. They travel from town to town, like this big traveling caravan of dog shows and dog show people. They just live a very strange life compared to a regular dog.

As I started watching that show, I wondered if those dogs were happy, and then that led me to the question of, is a regular dog happy? Obviously, they seem happy. When you come home the dog runs up and wants to lick your face or whatever, they're showing signs of affection, but is it just a ploy for treats, or is it some real deep-seated love and affection for each other? Those are a couple of the questions that I tried to set out to answer through the prism of dog shows and through the longer look at the human-dog relationship.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, we're sure that there are many people here that can speak to that human dog relationship, especially if you have a dog, if you have ever thought about putting your dog into a dog show. We're talking to journalist, podcast host, author Tommy Tomlinson. His book is called Dogland. It's a book about people's love for dogs and the Westminster Dog Show, and it is out today.

If you have an experience living with a dog or experience with, maybe if we get lucky, somebody who has experience with a Westminster Dog Show, wouldn't that be something? Give us a call, send us a text. We're at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Tommy, you say you're not a dog expert. You haven't written about dogs before. I'm sure a lot of research and ethnographic work went into making this book. What did that look like?

Tommy Tomlinson: Well, I started off just by reading everything I could about, first of all, the dog show world, Westminster, and the larger dog show circuits, and then also a lot of books about dog behavior, what the general scientific understanding is now of how we think that dogs think and how we think that dogs feel, how they react to us and that relationship over the years. There's a lot of that work. There's a million scientific studies on that sort of thing. Many, many great books that have been written about it.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and then I also started going to dog shows to get some up close and personal viewpoints on that. I happened to go, my first show was Westminster in 2020, which happened just a couple of weeks before COVID hit. I got to go to one big show, and then they didn't have any shows for several months. That was actually a little bit of a blessing for me because it gave me a little more time to do some research and thinking.

Kousha Navidar: We've got Adrian in the East Village on the phone. Hey, Adrian, welcome to the show.

Adrian: Thank you. I just wanted to know they know that when humans and dogs look at each other they pass oxytocin, the hormone that a mother and baby pass to each other, and I think we underestimate the animal world. They have lots of feelings, and I think they're capable of love as well, and also, I just wanted to say that this Saturday, April 23rd, we're having the 33rd Annual Dachshund Spring Fiesta in Washington Square Park.

It's free, open to all. It's just basically a fun day where dachshunds get together and play, and owners meet each other and exchange knowledge about the dog. It's a wonderful day. In fact, the Washington Square Park conservancy wrote to us and said, you bring great joy to the park.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wonderful, Adrian, thank you so much for making that plug and for talking about your experience. We've also got Nat in Staten Island. Hey, Nat, welcome to the show.

Nat: Hi. Hi, I'm just calling to say that what-- I'm sorry, I forgot your name. The author.

Kousha Navidar: Tommy.

Tommy Tomlinson: Tommy, yes.

Nat: Tommy. Tommy. Tommy I think what you've tapped into is I've had dogs all my life, and I've been around animals, and I think dogs are humans opportunity to connect with another life form. We found out now that humans connect with all sorts of things. Octopuses, fish, whatever, and I think that dogs specifically, of course, are very close to us evolutionarily, but none of us want to be alone, and dogs just want to be with us.

They don't care what they're doing. I've never been a dog show person personally, but they'll do whatever you want, just like we do for each other. If you smile at somebody, you'll climb a building for somebody. You'll give me a shirt, you'll jump into the river and swim across it just to be with another person, just to be with another living thing.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. That's such a beautiful sentiment, and thank you so much for sharing that, and your point about all different types of animals making connections with humans, I think is important. Tommy, I saw you nodding your head while Nat was speaking. What about that resonated for you?

Tommy Tomlinson: Well, dogs and humans are the longest-running, if you want to put it this way, human-animal relationship. As far as scientists know, dogs were the first animals that humans ever tamed, and not only that, humans basically created dogs. Every dog in existence today, every dog who's ever been, is descended from the gray wolf. The theory is that those wolves used to hang around back when humans were nomads, going from place to place, hunting, and at night they would cook by the fire and the wolves would get a little closer. At some point, some wolf got close enough that the humans reached out and touched it, basically.

From those wolves came the first dogs. Ever since then, as far back as 30,000 years ago, humans and dogs have had this relationship. I think we learned how to deal with other animals because we dealt with dogs first. They were our first close animal relationship. Everything since then has stemmed from those first dogs and how we did it. Adrian, the caller before was exactly right about how dogs and humans, when they look at each other, there's a chemical, an oxytocin in their brains, a pleasure chemical that goes back and forth. That doesn't happen with other animals.

Kousha Navidar: Well I want to get--

Tommy Tomlinson: We built-- Go ahead.

Kousha Navidar: Sorry. Well, I was going to say, I want to get into the point that you made about how long the history has been, and I want to bring it back to the Westminster Dog Show because this is what a big chunk of your book is about. I didn't know a lot about dog shows before reading your book, but there is a lot to learn and a lot of people might know about the Westminster Dog Show, but to your point, you write about the show at length and what I learned is that the second longest running annual event in sporting history is the Westminster Dog Show, at least for American history. It's only after the Kentucky Derby and both of those are with animals, which I found really interesting. Can you talk about that a little bit? What do you make of that?

Tommy Tomlinson: The dog show started generally in England in the mid-19th century. A group of Americans who used to hang out at the old Westminster Hotel in New York. They do like to brag about their hunting dogs, and they decided to start doing dog shows. It had already been one or two in the US at this point, but the Westminster guys decided they wanted to do it right. They built it. They put it together, showed off their hunting dogs, invited other people to show off their dogs, and this was immediately a huge hit. This was at a place called Gilmore's Gardens, which eventually morphed into Madison Square Gardens.

For almost its entire history, up until just the last few years, Westminster was held at Madison Square Garden every single year. It became a tradition January, February, that time of the year to have the dog show there. From the very beginning, it was a huge success. Thousands of dogs showed up. One of the very first ones, a guy from the American Kennel Club got up to speak and got drowned out by all the dogs barking. Since then, they've managed to frame the dogs a little better. Now every year, 2,000, 2,500 dogs gather in New York City. Now it's held at the US Tennis Center in Queens, Arthur Ashe Stadium, and it's the most prestigious dog show, certainly in the US and maybe in the world as well.

Kousha Navidar: What was it like for you when you entered a dog show for the first time? What did you notice? What did you see? What did you smell?

Tommy Tomlinson: Smell is part of it. Although, I'll tell you the funny thing is that what you don't hear and smell and see, it's very clean there and it's very quiet. These dogs are supremely well trained. Even though there might be 1,000 dogs in the same little space, they generally don't bark at each other and they don't sniff each other's butts. They don't do all the things that you think of normal dogs doing. They are incredibly well behaved. That's what I first noticed was that things that you didn't expect. As I got further into it I noticed the incredible level of grooming. They get bathes for hours a day. To make a show dog look show-dog-ready, takes an incredible amount of work.

Kousha Navidar: We're talking to journalist, podcast host and author Tommy Tomlinson. His book Dogland is about people's love for dogs and the Westminster Dog Show specifically, it's out today. We're talking about the relationship between dogs and humans. The question that Tommy poses right at the beginning of the book, does this relationship make dogs happy? What does that look like?

We're taking your calls. You can reach us listeners at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433 WNYC. When we come back from a quick break, we're going to talk more about the Westminster Dog Show. We're going to go more into some of the characters that Tommy writes about and hopefully we'll take some more of your calls. Stick around, we'll be right back.

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Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Kousha Navidar, and we're talking about dogs this segment. Dogs and people together. Were with journalist, podcast host and author Tommy Tomlinson. His book, which today is the publishing day for it, is called Dogland. It's a book about people's love for dogs and specifically the Westminster Dog Show. We're also taking your calls if you have experience with dogs changing your life, especially if you have experience with the Westminster Dog Show, we'd love to hear from you.

Give us a call. We're at 212-433-9692. Tommy, a couple texts that I want to read that I think were interesting that came in during the break. The first says, "So many stories. Worked for a breeder. He gave me a dog, but I had to let him show the dog. Brussels Griffon rough coat. He was at Westminster twice. I still have his leash, his champion ribbon and bowl." There's another text from Alison in Greenwich that said, "I want to push back a little bit saying that they get groomed for hours and hours a day, but a lot of them, like labs are much easier to care for."

While I was reading these texts, I was thinking about one of the characters in your book, Tommy. You focus on one particular show dog and their handler. The dog's name is Striker and the handler is Laura. They're competing for the best in show category, which you called, I think before the break, the world heavyweight championship of dog shows. I understand that Striker is just a nickname like Striker, the name itself, his real name is much longer. Do you remember, can you tell us a little bit about what Striker's full name is?

Tommy Tomlinson: If I'm remembering this right, it's Vanderbilt 'N Printemp's Lucky Strike, and that's actually a fairly short official name for a show dog. People go crazy with these names. Usually, the first name of the dog is the place where it was bred. Then after that, people come up with all these crazy she sells seashells by the seashore sort of things. If you look through a catalog at a dog show, you'll just see all these wild names that got to be so crazy that the AKC had cracked down on the number of letters that you could use for a dog name, but that's their registered name.

Dogs that also have a call name, which is just what you call them and this particular dog's name is Striker. He's a Samoyed which some people in the dog fancy called Samoyed which is more of a proper name. He's a huge white Siberian-husky dog, looks kind of like a snowman, just pure white with fur that blurs to silver at the edge. He's just an absolutely gorgeous dog and zen-like in his stillness. I thought watching him and then watching other dogs that were more hyper and bounced around a little bit, he just felt always calm and centered all the time. I think that calmness with the chaos of the dog show all around him, probably one of the things that made him a champion show dog.

Kousha Navidar: I understand that show dogs basically have one goal and it's not about how pretty they look or even how well they jump. Can you tell us the sole purpose of a dog show? What are judges actually looking for?

Tommy Tomlinson: These dog shows are called confirmation shows. The reason they're called that is that the ideal thing they're looking for, dogs technically are not competing against each other. They're competing against the breed standard of what the perfect dog of that breed is supposed to be. These are written standards done by the clubs for each breed. Sometimes they run to thousands and thousands of words, get into minute detail about dogs eye color and how high they should be, the proportion of the shoulders to the back end. All these very, very precise measurements and thoughts about how a dog should look and behave.

What a judge is supposed to be looking for is how closely the dog in front of them conforms to the standard for that breed. They're not really looking at a bloodhound versus a poodle. They're looking at is that bloodhound, how close is that to the perfect bloodhound? The one that's the most perfect in that sense is supposed to be the winner.

Kousha Navidar: What did you make of that when you heard that that was the objective? It seems to go against the idea that maybe not the premise of your book, but the question that you posted at the beginning about this mutually beneficial relationship.

Tommy Tomlinson: Well, I think it comes from how these things have evolved. These breed standards in many cases used to have really practical applications because they wanted dogs that were able to do certain things. A dog that was bred a certain way to be a champion hunting dog or a sled dog or something like that, that people discovered over time that the best dogs might have a certain eye color.

The eye color wasn't important, but it was a marker for the best of that breed. Now, it's much more about how the dogs look because we really don't use dogs, by and large, as power tools anymore. They're more like our companions, our roommates, as I put in the book, they're all therapy dogs now. That breed standard in many ways is a throwback to something that made a lot more sense in the older days and now is more cosmetic in nature.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Tommy Tomlinson about dogs and the Westminster Dog Show and the relationship between dogs and humans. His book Dogland, which is about all of that is out today. I want to talk about the book again in terms of formatting. This is something I thought was really interesting about the book. You have these fun breakaway sections scattered throughout Dogland, and you call them Pee Breaks, and they're fun factoids about dogs.

You have a section called Dog Haters Ranked where you rank the worst fictional dog haters in media, and you ranked Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians on number one, which was no surprise to me. Very good choice. What was fun for you about writing these sections?

Tommy Tomlinson: The reason I started to do it is as I started to do the research that we talked about earlier and looked at all the dogs that we talk about and think about in our culture is just an overwhelming number. There are so many great dog stories out there. As I started trying to figure out like how in the world am I going to fit all this great stuff into my book? One thing I thought about was let me just make some lists where I can just tell brief stories or brief mentions of some of the dogs that are either important or interesting in our culture.

I got this idea to do these little pee breaks between chapters where I talk about, as you say, dog haters or dogs in art or traveling dogs and all that sort of thing. That was a way to wedge in all these great things I've learned about dogs along the way.

Kousha Navidar: We just got a text from somebody that has a question for you. It reads, "What are Tommy's thoughts on some of the recent international breed bands for either behavior or unsafe breeding and how can we encourage and enforce safe breeding practices?"

Tommy Tomlinson: There's a lot of that going on, especially overseas. In some countries now, they have banned the breeding of dogs like French Bulldogs and others described as flat-faced dogs like Pugs and things like that. Those dogs are very popular. French Bulldogs for the last couple of years have been the top breed in America, but they also, because of the way they're designed, the way the humans designed them, they have really terrible respiratory problems, and they don't live as long as a normal dog should. Because of that, other countries have put either bans or restrictions on how they're bred, how they're raised, that sort of thing.

I think that is something that the US is going to have to at least look at in the future. Although, I'm sure there'll be very strong resistance from dog breeders and dog lovers because these dogs are really popular. We've bred them in a way to look more like us. They have the flat faces and they're more human in nature. Everybody talks about how all pugs look like Winston Churchill in a way. Because of that, we've caused some long-term damage to those dogs' bloodlines. I hope that's something we take a look at in the future.

Kousha Navidar: It makes me think of one of the more peculiar things that you write about in the dog show world, which is a breeding group called the Sperm Girls. Can you tell us more about what they are?

Tommy Tomlinson: Yes. Their company is called Infinity Canine. They're outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, and they go to dog shows across the country and collect semen from the dogs that are owned by people who want to preserve that semen for potential breeding down the road. This stuff is frozen, a dog can theoretically father other dogs many years after it's dead because of this practice. It's very popular and they have people lined up at their tents every time they go to one of these shows to do this work that they do. Is done manually. There's no machine to do it.

As one of the women told me as I was interviewing her, she said, "If you had told me that this is how I'd end up making a living, I would've slapped you." [chuckles] This breeding for the future is something that happens all the time. Many people, including Barbra Streisand for example, have actually cloned their former dogs and they have cloned versions of their old dogs that are alive and well now.

Kousha Navidar: I'm hearing all of this and it sounds so cultural to me, and we have this text that just came in talking about international standards. You touched on this in the book, but I'm fascinated about applying the ideas of the book globally because you take us to shows across the US and the United Kingdom, but if you go to other parts of the world, dogs are not treated in the same way as maybe folks in the West do. Did you look into how dogs are perceived and treated in other cultures, and how did that impact your thesis?

Tommy Tomlinson: I did. I don't dwell on it in the book that much, but certainly, in other cultures, dogs are mainly street dogs. There's a couple of really interesting studies and some interesting thinking about to get back to that question of how dogs find happiness. Street dogs have more dangers in their day-to-day life, certainly. They probably don't live as long as the average pampered indoor dog, but they have agency in their lives that a house dog doesn't. They can go wherever they want. They can mate however they want. They can eat whatever they want.

If you thought about it in the human terms and you got to pick one of those lives or the other, you might pick the street dog's life. There is some things that we should think about. We have domesticated dogs and domestication we think of as a pretty good thing because we generally treat our dogs pretty well here, but they don't have the same choices that a stray dog or a street dog in another country might have. That's something we're thinking about.

Kousha Navidar: The annual Westminster Kennel Dog Show is taking place right here in New York in a few weeks. You mentioned that it's in Queens on May 11th through the 14th. Are you going?

Tommy Tomlinson: I'm not going this year. I've been to several. I have book events and that sort of thing. I'll be on my book tour then, but I'll definitely be watching.

Kousha Navidar: Wonderful.

Tommy Tomlinson: Now, it's a little better for me because I know some of the people there and I have a little bit better sense of what's going on, so I hope I'll be able to watch with a little better eye.

Kousha Navidar: Wonderful. Thank you so much for writing this book. We've been talking to journalist, podcast host and author Tommy Tomlinson. The book is Dogland. It's a book about people's love for dogs and the Westminster Dog Show, and it is out today. Tommy, thank you so much for joining us.

Tommy Tomlinson: Oh, man, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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