Uncategorized | February 15, 2006

This just in.

Rufus—formally “Rocky Top’s Sundance Kid”—took Best in Show last night at the 130th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. The photograph printed today in newspapers worldwide shows a joyous Rufus nuzzling Kathryn Kirk, his ecstatic trainer. Rufus is the first colored bull terrier ever to take the top dog show’s top honor. You could say that Rufus was an underdog.

But all is not as it seems.

Although judging is supposed to be based on such criteria as “general appearance,” “temperament,” “coat,” and “ear shape,” rumors are surfacing that the judges were swayed by factors not officially sanctioned by the Kennel Club. For instance, Rufus’s official papers state that his puppyhood was spent “on the rough streets of Camden, New Jersey.” The “Smoking Gun” website reports, however, that Rufus was actually raised in the posh suburb of Saddle River. And those three months “locked in a crate in the cold, damp garage” as the terrier describes in his 2005 memoir A Million Little Kibbles were, it appears, actually only ninety minutes locked in the house one May evening while his owners went to The Park Steakhouse for dinner, returning later with a delicious doggy bag. “Such discrepancies,” explains an anonymous talk-show host, “raise serious questions as to what is truth, what is fact, and what is just a bunch of barking noises.”

Reporters are investigating some of Rufus’s claims made in his post-show interview, such as that he is a “self-trained” dog, having hooked up with Kirk only days before the Kennel Club Dog Show.