Free Paws before dying by Susan Conant Page A

their students make it into the ribbons and put titles on their dogs as the students are themselves. They want you to show, and even when you don’t do anything more than qualify, they congratulate you in front of everyone, and they keep goading you and everyone else to get out there.
    “Any brags tonight?” he asked when we’d lined up and sat our dogs. “No one? Come on!”
    “Guilford,” called out Heather. “High in trial. One ninety-seven plus.”
    “What’d they give you?”
    “Pewter tray.” She sounded disappointed.
    “Who was the judge?”
    “Martori,” she said.
    Samuel Martori, I would like to comment, once gave Vinnie, the best obedience dog I’ll ever own, a humiliating 187 for a spectacular performance in Open for which she deserved a minimum of 199 plus. I had not shown under the bastard since.
    Tamara and one of the Westies were next to us. “I will not show under him,” she said quietly. “I was so glad to see him Set that reprimand.”
    “So was I,” I agreed.
    In case you didn’t know, the Secretary’s Pages of Pure-Bred Dogs/The American Kennel Gazette make the most gossipy reading in dogdom, because that’s where the AKC publishes notices of suspensions, reprimands, registration cancellations, and fines. Some of the notices are about boring, trivial stuff like clubs that were late sending in reports, but others are about unspecified—but obviously underhanded—“conduct in connection with” shows and trials. Every once in a while, there’s a juicy line or two about what the culprit did. The notice about Martori stated that he’d accepted hospitality from an exhibitor before and after a trial he’d judged. What the Gazette didn’t say, but what I’d heard from about a dozen people, was that he’d given the exhibitor a score in the 190s even though the dog ticked the high jump and didn’t look as if it even had any idea how to sit straight. A history of ethical violations won’t necessarily stop people from showing under a judge, though. What stopped other people from showing under Martori was the same thing that stopped me: unfair scoring, and not unfairly high, either.
    Tamara leaned toward me and said, “You know, Rose was the one who turned him in.”
    “No!” I said.
    I almost missed Tony’s commands to sit and leave the dogs.
    In Open, the handlers have to go out of sight of the dogs for the sits and downs, and while we waited on the sidewalk just outside the park wall for Tony to call us back—-or for someone to come and tell us that our dogs were up—Tamara and some other people kept insisting that Rose had been the person principally responsible for the reprimand.
    “What did Rose do?” I asked.
    “Complained in writing,” Lisa said. “Her dog had a limp, so she wasn’t competing, but she was there, and she saw how the dog did. And then she heard what the score was, and she ran into him while he was leaving with these people, and she hit the roof and complained in writing.”
    “Everyone at Nonantum knew about it,” Tamara told me. “You just didn’t know because you weren’t training here.”
    “I knew about the reprimand,” I said. “I just didn’t know about Rose. If I had, I would’ve thanked her.” I was about to ask Heather why she showed under Martori, but someone appeared and told me that Rowdy was shifting around and said Tony wanted to know if I wanted to do anything about it. I did.
    To make sure that Rowdy didn’t pull the same trick or a worse one on the long down, I walked away with the other handlers, but instead of following them out of the park, I stepped behind a tree where I could keep an eye on him. He rested his head morosely on his paws and didn’t budge. He knew where I was.
    Heather’s daughter, Abbey, was sitting in a folding chair near the tree. She’d been observing the entire thing.
    “There’s a quick cure for that,” she said.
    I looked interested. Rowdy was restless because he was hot and wanted to go