Stud Rites

center.
    ”With Freida right there!” Betty exclaimed. ”Never! That is exactly what Sherri Ann has in mind, setting me up to create bad feeling with Freida. Nothing would please Sherri Ann more than to listen to me rub it in Freida’s nose that Rescue got the lamp that Sherri Ann promised her. I will not give Sherri Ann the satisfaction!”
    According to rumor, what was called the ”bad blood” between Sherri Ann Printz and Freida Reilly had originated a year or two earlier in what would’ve struck anyone outside the world of dog breeding as a nothing incident. Freida had wanted to breed one of her bitches to Sherri Ann’s Bear, Ch. Pawprintz Honor Guard. When Sherri Ann said no, Freida took the refusal as a gross insult to her canine lines and to her own reputation as a responsible, ethical breeder. Suppose that you’re traditional Chinese parents, okay? And an arranged marriage is proposed between your wonderful daughter and the splendid son of another estimable family. And his parents quash the deal. The implication? You’re not good enough. Neither is your kid. This was like that. Only far worse.
    Betty eyed the lamp, which was still with the antique wolf prints and the other valuable donations. Lowering her voice to a level audible to a mere twenty or thirty people, she confided, ”Tacky thing! Lowers the whole tone of the booth!” Although I’d never heard Betty express any admiration for Bear, it occurred to me that she, too, might have wanted to use him at stud and, like Freida, been flatly turned down.
    The overhead lights blinked and dimmed. The announcer’s amplified voice boomed: ”Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Showcase of Rescue Dogs.” To take advantage of the power of first impressions, we’d given the number-one spot to what’s called a ”quality dog,” an obvious blue blood. The ”ahs” and ”oohs” rose above the announcer’s voice. Second was a sweet little female who’d been rescued from the puppy mill; third, a red-and-white male who’d been found with a metal training collar deeply embedded in the festering flesh of his neck. Our fourth, Helen, and the boy who handled her drew cheers.
    When Duke Sylvia led in the fifth dog, I thought for a second that sly old Duke had decided all on his own to boost the image of rescue dogs by slipping in a substitute for the one he’d agreed to handle for a timid adopter. The dog, Cubby, was one I’d placed with a woman named Jeanine, who was too shy to handle him herself. Three months before Jeanine had adopted
    Cubby, a man had broken into her apartment. She’d tried and failed to fight off the attack. Although the rapist was caught, Jeanine had remained terrified of aggression. She’d asked me for a big, gentle dog. Cubby was immense, a rangy, gangly creature with long, thin legs, a gigantic barrel chest, light eyes, propeller ears, and so many other faults that he might as well have had puppy mill via pet shop tattooed across his forehead. But he was as gentle as he was homely. He didn’t look gentle, though, and he was really, really big. I’d omitted Jeanine’s story from my script, of course. I’d also had to leave out the other interesting feature of Cubby’s history. Turned in by a man who’d bought him at a pet shop, Cubby had come with AKC papers. I’d run his pedigree—in other words, traced his family tree. As Cubby’s appearance suggested, most of his ancestors had been owned and bred by operators of wholesale commercial kennels in Missouri and Arkansas, in other words, by the people we aren’t supposed to call puppy millers in case they take offense and sue us. Four generations back, though, I’d found a dog with the kennel name Pawprintz, a male bred by Sherri Ann Printz and, according to the Alaskan malamute stud book register, owned by a G. H. Thacker. G. H. Thacker was, I’d figured out while running other pet-shop pedigrees, a USDA-licensed puppy farmer in Missouri, a woman named Gladys H. Thacker.
    In writing Cubby’s part of the script, I’d had to omit Cubby’s true role in Jeanine’s life, and I certainly wouldn’t have humiliated Sherri Ann Printz by informing the assembled membership of our national breed club that a Pawprintz dog had somehow ended up in a puppy mill. Sherri Ann would have been totally disgraced. Suppose you’re a pooh-bah in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and there you are at the national D.A.R. convention when over the loudspeaker booms the