Best in show. Is there a more divisive concept in civil society? Our forebears may well have held “Best Decorated Cave” events, human competitiveness being a usefully adaptive trait.
But the value of modern shows can be hard to spot, as with the recent Chelsea Flower Show and America’s Westminster Dog Show. Both are hugely enjoyable spectacles but have taken paths so far from their original purpose – to celebrate the love of growing things and the evolution of the wolf into a variety of treasured human utility and companion animals – as to repudiate the ethos of both.
Since 1913, experts have assembled Chelsea’s annual show gardens using plants at the height of perfection to inspire home gardeners. But increasingly, they also whack up costly structures and hard landscaping – excavating hillocks, rockeries, ponds and faux streams – only to bring in the dozers and jackhammers and dig it all up afterwards.
Notwithstanding recycling and replanting, it’s incredibly wasteful – and contradictory, given leading horticulturists’ lecturing about sustainability to amateur gardeners.
The Royal Horticultural Society has, for sound reasons, urged gardeners to let weeds flourish, leave slugs and other insects unmolested and eschew hard landscaping, decrying manicured perfection as unsustainable. But when it comes to show time, it’s do as we say, not as we do.
There was considerable relief when, despite haughty pronouncements that this year was “all about foliage and texture”, plenty of actual flowers were “curated” in the flower show. These were not just gardens, mind, but “statements”, “journeys” and symbolisers of loftier ideals. One lovely woodland-themed winner was about “forest bathing”. Another, entitled “Imagine the World to be Different”, featured towering brick walls and a fountain, raising the question: different from what?
As for Westminster, you could scarcely tell the sprightly miniature poodle supreme winner was a dog. Sage, from Texas, looked like a collection of improbably large, black, teased spheres in which someone with a peculiar sense of humour had imprisoned a very skinny, shaved creature – which, nevertheless, maintained impeccable poise.
That Sage evolved as a sporting dog, bred to fetch shot birds from water, seemed a monstrous leg-pull. The show’s cocker spaniels, also ostensibly sporting dogs, appeared to be wearing enormous shaggy Ugg boots that would have put them at grave risk in a river.
Though the puffy white bichon frises were conventionally cute, it’s hard to argue that with their tiny, undershot chins, further dwarfed by outsized blocky hairdos, they also looked a bit gormless. Only a show breeder could find the perma-clamminess of some breeds’ compulsory beards and moustaches adorable – never mind the poor pooches’ comfort.
Huge gratitude is due to dog breeders, who – evil puppy mills aside – seldom break even on the perishingly expensive and demanding business of perpetuating the 300-plus types of dogs. We can mock their outlandish hairdressing, which is at the least a discomfort for the animals from damp rashes and constant faffing, and at worst chemically hazardous.
But photo archives remind us how shows’ exacting standards have led an evolution to less functionality and even enforced life-endangering wretchedness, chiefly in pugs, bulldogs and the like, which even 50 years ago had breathable snouts and longer legs. And though working and sporting breeds generally retain sound physiology, it was mysteriously decided that the magnificent german shepherd needed correction by sloping its spine so the poor creature appeared permanently halfway to a “sit”. For a subjective idea of aesthetics, the objective ingredient of suffering has been not just tolerated but mandated.
Some dogs seem to enjoy being showed. Just a guess, but they’d probably enjoy muddy walks more. As Sage’s owner said, once her career was over, she could finally scratch, get wet and “be a normal dog”.
