Evil Breeding

in B. Robert Motherway’s study. When Jocelyn had answered the door, the black shepherd, Wagner, had been nowhere in sight. Neither she nor I had mentioned my offer to help with the dog’s unfortunate habit of growling at her. The dog’s absence had made me hope that Jocelyn had taken some initiative in the matter. Maybe she’d persuaded her father-in-law to keep the dog away from her. I doubted it. She had a touchingly downtrodden air. When she was alone with her father-in-law, he probably growled at her, too.
    He didn’t growl at me. He didn’t exactly leap to obey my every command, either. I asked about Gustav Alisch and about a man named Sickinger who’d come from Germany to judge shepherds at Morris and Essex in 1935.
    “Sickinger,” Mr. Motherway repeated. “Rings a bell. I knew quite a few German breeders back then. I used to escort groups of students. In the summer, you know.” Indeed, I did. He was repeating himself. I didn’t say so. “Expose them to the Continent and so forth,” he went on. “Museums, cities, the language. I’d take advantage of the opportunity to meet the breeders I’d corresponded with, take in a show or two when I could fit it in.” And then, damn it, he was off on an almost interminable tangent about the past and present differences between the judging and breeding of shepherds in the United States and in Germany. I’ll spare you the details, which, in the case of the German system, are very complicated. Among other things, the German championship system requires working titles, endurance testing, and hip and elbow X rays to evaluate soundness. It also involves the assessment of what shepherd people call “progeny groups,” that is, offspring. In contrast, to register a litter of GSD puppies with the American Kennel Club, you need do nothing but breed two AKC-registered GSD parents. Period.
    “Incomparably superior,” pronounced Mr. Motherway, referring to the German system.
    I nodded. Who could disagree? When it came to breeding dogs, most European countries practiced what I now thought of as canine eugenics. With good results, too. I was in no position to object; I wholeheartedly believed in that kind of planned reproduction. For dogs. But for people? Voluntary planning? Yes. Involuntary? Certainly not! There was, however, a point on which I wanted to challenge Mr. Motherway, one I’d ordinarily have raised. For decades, the man had served as an American Kennel Club judge. In that role, hadn’t he felt like a hypocrite? I held myself back.
    “Americans,” Mr. Motherway continued, “are finally starting to add German dogs to their breeding programs. Long overdue. I’ve done it myself for years. Mrs. Dodge did, of course. From the beginning.”
    And during the Nazi era? I longed to ask. Just what did Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge do and not do? Who were her friends in Germany in those days? I do not raise sensitive topics with the recently bereaved. Mr. Motherway had been born in Germany to German parents. He’d had a sister who’d died in Germany, a sister he never spoke of. For all I knew, she’d perished in the Holocaust, a victim of Nazi eugenics. For all I knew, Geraldine R. Dodge had been oblivious to the rise of German fascism. Her tremendous wealth had bought a protected life. She had been deeply absorbed in her dogs, her horses, her art collection, her peaceful passions. I struggled to rationalize her membership in the American Eugenics Society, a group with strong ties to the German eugenics movement that culminated in the death camps. All her life, Mrs. Dodge had taken in stray animals. In 1938, she’d founded St. Hubert’s Giralda, which to this day carries on her mission of sheltering homeless dogs and cats. She’d taken animals from that shelter into Giralda itself. The Lady of Giralda had been kindness personified. It was simply impossible that she’d been anything remotely like a Nazi sympathizer. But from the edge of consciousness, something gnawed at me, some jarring bit of information. I felt plagued by the sense that Mr. Motherway could not only supply the information, but clarify and explain it.
    He let me down. I let myself down: I asked nothing. Our meeting ended.
    He rose. We shook hands. “It has been a pleasure,” he told me. He sounded sincere.
    “I’m especially grateful to you for seeing me at this difficult time,” I said.
    “Distraction is the best medicine,” he replied graciously. “Shall we get together again?