Free Evil Breeding by Susan Conant

these shows, Kimi would finish her championship, but she was no big threat. Rowdy, however, was serious competition. What’s more, genetic good fortune combined with robust health, excellent veterinary care, an ideal diet, and careful grooming had given him an outstanding stand-off coat. Was a jealous competitor attributing Rowdy’s wins to Soloxine? If so, I couldn’t imagine who.
    A second, remote possibility concerned an agreement I’d made to let Rowdy’s breeder use him at stud. Although the data aren’t absolutely clear, hypothyroidism seems to be especially common in Northern-breed dogs. To complicate matters, there’s disagreement about what should be considered normal thyroid levels in malamutes and their Arctic kin. One point of almost universal agreement, however, is that no ethical person knowingly uses a hypothyroid dog in breeding. Some people do it, of course. Rowdy’s breeder was not among those people. Neither was I! Rowdy and his proposed mate had both been screened. But had the condition ever occurred in Rowdy’s lines? Yes. Now and then, it cropped upin every malamute line I’d ever heard of, just as it did in other breeds and in random-bred dogs. Even so, maybe someone without the guts to ask direct questions was suggesting that Rowdy should not be bred.
    Once again, I upended the envelope and shook it. Nothing fell out. I tore it fully open. It was completely empty. Nothing linked that leaflet to the death of Christina Motherway.

Chapter Seven
    I HAD SEEN DOZENS of photos of Geraldine R. Dodge. Three were my favorites. The first showed her with Rin Tin Tin. She and the famous dog faced each other. Their eyes met. Both wore relaxed smiles. He was sitting up, fore-paws in the air. She was kneeling. Her right hand was raised. Her index finger was pointing. At first glance, the gesture suggested that Mrs. Dodge had just told the shepherd to sit up and was now signaling him to keep on performing the trick. If you followed the direction of her finger, however, it became apparent that my soul mate, my kindred spirit, America’s First Lady of Dogs, was pointing Upward with a capital
U.
What’s more, close, emphatic study revealed that Mrs. Dodge was not kneeling in the ordinary, secular sense. Rather, with religious fervor akin to my own, she was genuflecting before God and Rin Tin Tin.
    The second of my favorites must have been taken when Mrs. Dodge was very old. She sat outdoors. Tall trees and low shrubs rose in the background. To the right of her chair stood two of her beloved shepherds. Two more sat on her left, and, beyond them, another rested on the lawn. What drew me into the picture wasn’t just the obvious health and happiness of the beautiful and well-loved dogs. All five dogs were smiling, I admit. So was Mrs. Dodge. But what reached out and seized me were those six startlingly identical pairs of eyes.Mrs. Dodge had seen the world through the eyes of her joyful dogs. They, in turn, gazed with delight at the perfect world she had created for them. When Mrs. Dodge was in her early eighties, her court-appointed guardians applied for legal permission to reduce the amount of money allotted to feed her dogs. Why the guardians? She had been declared mentally incompetent. Her husband had died the previous December. Although she paid $90,000 a year in taxes on her Fifth Avenue mansion, the house was never used and had been boarded up. In terms of dog ownership, she had hit what must have been the low point of her adult life: She shared the five hundred acres of Giralda with a mere forty-nine dogs. Her guardians applied to have the dogs’ annual food allotment drastically reduced from $50,000 to $14,000. On June 24, 1964, in Newark, New Jersey, Superior Court, Judge Ward J. Herbert ruled against the guardians. Mrs. Dodge’s dogs, he decreed, were entitled “to live in the style to which she had allowed them to grow accustomed.” That’s what the
New York Times
said. Gee, no wonder her