The Rose City Classic dog show brings out the best in poochies—and their owners. by Corbin Smith A place: The Portland Exposition Center in Vanport, on Saturday, January 18. There are dogs everywhere, every kind you can possibly imagine: Bernese Mountain Dog. Shiba Inu. Whippets. Honest to god, straight from the catalog Dalmatians. A small baby beagle, ambling around the show floor. Chao Chaos. Poodles, poodles, poodles, everywhere. Big dogs. Fluffy dogs. Small dogs. Sleek dogs. Dogs that run, dogs that sit and hang out. Dogs sitting in their cars, just chilling. Dogs barking, getting in a word with the other dogs. Dogs ambling outside and taking a fat, hot piss on the concrete seating area outside the convention hall, sending every other dog who is there a message: I am here, and I join in our mass claim of this wedge of concrete. Some dogs are subject to grooming by a human being. Some are chilling in a crate. Some dogs are running through a series of intricate obstacle courses, led on by people jogging alongside in athleisure wear, while others are trotting in a series of fenced-off areas, led on a leash by a person wearing something more formal.  They are here for the 2025 edition of Pacific Northwest’s biggest annual dog show, The Rose City Classic, a four day bone-nanza of trotting, grooming, agility competitions, and people saying “Oh wow, what a beautiful dog” to each other. Well, not really. That’s why the people who brought them are there. The dogs are there because they are compelled to be there, but they seem to be having a pretty good time.  Corbin smith You’re familiar with the particulars of showing dogs, probably: trotting on a little leash, a judge looking at a dog’s teeth, the way that when the results are announced it seems kind of arbitrary as to why they’re saying one Corgi is better than another. These procedures are very old, particular, and exist in service to the evaluation of breeding stock, a practice with deep roots in animal horticulture, a tradition that goes back to the beginnings of human civilization. In dog breeding, the goal is to establish and maintain breed standards, a standard list of expectations that every dog breed is subject to: size of teeth, shape of the eye, length of the ear, markings on the coat, size and length and weights, are all standardized in the American Kennel Club’s published standards. Winning show dogs aren’t necessarily the best, the most loving or loyal: they’re the dog that most conforms to breed standards, whose testicles or ovaries are best equipped to keep the breed moving forward in a way that conforms to the history and quality of the breed. The goal in breeding communities is not to create the dog Kwisatz Haderach—it’s to keep the breed going without disease or inbreeding-induced collapse. The result of this ethic on the floor can be pretty funny: a person with an untrained eye seeing five Bernese Mountain Dogs who all look and move exactly the same, trotting in a circle in front of a judge, is bound to wonder, “Aren’t these guys all the same?”  Corbin Smith Nowadays the evaluation of stock is pretty sophisticated, laden with DNA testing to weed out diseases and prevent inbreeding. “All of the ethical breeders I know do healthy tests on their dogs and females,” says Dr. Sonya Wilkins, a veterinarian from Montesano, WA who was working at the show all weekend. “Say it’s a breed that has eye problems, they’re gonna have the eyes checked, they’re gonna have the heart checked, they’re gonna have the hips checked. They’re gonna do DNA tests so that their dogs don’t carry genetic markers for diseases that we’d be concerned about. Most of the people I know who show and breed dogs are very ethical, and you’re not going to get surprised by a disease you weren’t aware of. They’re also doing a lot of background work on the family tree, to make sure that they’re not doing too much inbreeding or line breeding.” “I’m a general practice veterinarian, so I see backyard breeders and I see ethical breeders. Backyard breeders, a lot of times they have a dog that’s purebred, and they will find any other dog that’s purebred and throw them together—without any care whatsoever if that dog is going to compliment the dog they have. They’re not doing testing, they’re not making sure the puppies have a home before it’s bred. Ethical breeders aren’t breeding their dog until they have homes for the litter, and if anything ever happens to their puppies in the future, even six, seven years in the future, they’ll take that puppy back because they are very committed to keeping their dogs out of animal shelters. You’re not going to see a well bred dog in an animal shelter: those dogs are backyard bred dogs, puppy mill dogs, they’re not from ethical breeders.”  Tearing through the obstacle course. corbin smith Not every dog is here to show. Some are here to haul ass. In the back room of the convention hall, two big sets of risers and two obstacle courses welcome the many agility competitors at the Rose City Classic. And, reader, there is no greater joy in this life than watching agility dogs do their thing. It should constantly be on television, and the best runners should be hauling in millions of dollars to spend on bones and stuffed animals to shred.  Brenda Beldink, from Camas, WA, and her dog Zany—a three year old American Eskimo—were running the course right before I spoke to them. Brenda was visibly out of breath from guiding Zany through the course, which is a precise and intensive activity even for the humans who are coaching the dogs. “He did great,” Beldink said of Zany’s performance. “The mats are brand new, but they smell like other dogs, so after the weave poles, he did sniff (stopped running to smell the ground). I got him to run with me, so I’m not sure if we qualified or not, but he ran great. He doesn’t seem to mind the crowd. Even when he went in the tunnel before he was supposed to, and the crowd roared, he was like, ‘Awesome.’” Brenda Beldink's dog, Zany. Corbin Smith “I have another one who’s nine at home, named Riot, and they’re like little athletes,” Beldink continued. “We have a treadmill at home. He goes swimming once a week, hikes two or three times a week, and walks every day. We have practice two or three times a week, and I drive an hour-and-a-half one way to class. I train in Hopewell, near McMinnville. I really like my trainer.” Brenda’s dogs also do other events, including barn hunt, rally, and scent work. “I've been doing it for a really long time, since 1995. I played soccer and softball for many, many years and I just like competition. When we got our first dog, I had no clue about dog sports. I did some breed showing, got some titles, but then I was done. I would rather concentrate on the fun of running and training.”  Does the dog like competing? “He loves it. He runs fast, likes to make me happy. But this breed wouldn’t do it if he didn’t like it. Some breeds love to run and love to work no matter what. It has to be the right temperature, the right venue. Normally we compete in barns and horse arenas, on dirt—so this trial is really cool. This matting cost a hundred grand. Our club purchased it for this venue primarily. We had a person pass away who left the club a million dollars… she had Malamutes and she wanted to leave it to a club she really loved.”  Corbin smith Brian Martin, sporting a pinstripe suit and an immaculate waxed mustache, was in the building to judge hound breeds. “I went to my first dog show in 1962,” he tells me, “I was eight years old. My wife and I were professional handlers. I lived in Chicago at the time, and we’d carry 20 to 30 dogs, per day, per show. The most shows I did in one year was, I think, 170. You’d get two days at home and you’d be on the road again. It was a death march. However the dog I was showing ended up being the number two ranked dog in the entire country, defeating 66,000 dogs that year. It was a Basset Hound, and a Basset has never won that much.” “To become a judge, you need breed experience, exhibiting experience. And then you go through a series of tests. A judge studies the standard (a written description of the ideal specimen of that breed), takes tests on the standard, and when they judge, they take their interpretation of that standard and compare it to each individual entry in the class and sort out which one is going to be closest to the standard in their opinion. So in four days you get four opinions, and it might be four different dogs who win, or the same dog might win every day.”  I asked Martin what makes a good judge. Experience, of course, but he also alludes to something ineffable. “Being a dog person, how do you describe a dog person? They’re a dog lover, they have a good hand with the dog, they can sense a dog’s feelings. I used to say that, as a good handler, when you knew your dog farted, you knew what mood he was in. Having an innate sense. Everybody’s good at something. I think I’m good at being a dog person.”  Corbin Smith “My favorite dog I showed was a dog named Bumper Cars. He was the number two ranked Basset Hound of all time, won 42 best in shows, a hundred and fifty hound group firsts. The number one Basset Hound of all time, Gatsby—which I also showed, won 52 best in shows—was my big winner… but Bumper Cars, I just loved him. A few years ago, someone brought in one of his sons and showed him to me, and I looked in his face and it was as if the dog was talking to me, and he said ‘Where have you been?’ He was a 24-year-old frozen semen baby of Bumper Cars, and he just oozed "daddy." Looked like daddy in the face, looked like daddy in the body. He was a beautiful dog.” Was it hard to be objective? “At that point, yeah, because you just get sucked right in. All the memories, and all those travels, and all those shows you went to, and all those great wins… and you start thinking, you too, maybe. But I can’t guide him, someone else was showing him. But as a judge, that was a thrill.”  corbin smith