Animals: Finest Dogs

With quieter eloquence but no less feeling than Senator George Graham Vest displayed in his famed "Tribute to a Dog," Mrs. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, rich and gracious wife of Remington Arms Co.'s board chairman, declared last week on receiving the Chappel Foundation Plaque for signal devotion to dogdom:

"In the last decade there has been a distinct advance in the position of the dog. His steady rise in public esteem and the increased acknowledgment of his definite part in complex human relations is encouraging. The dog does not contend, he merely adds his measure to qualities of which this world has never had enough. Loyalty is a favorite word in our vocabularies. It is a luminous word, direct and simple. May we pledge it anew to the cause of those quiet friends who have helped us to interpret and define its meaning."

On both sides of the Atlantic last week there was ample testimony to Mrs. Dodge's thesis as thousands of dog lovers swarmed to London and Manhattan for the No. i British and U. S. dog shows. At the Royal Agricultural Hall, called the Coronation Show in honor of George VI, was the biggest dog show Britain had ever held except for last year's Golden Jubilee exhibition honoring George V. Manhattan's Westminster was the biggest in its 61 years. Cruft's* surpassed the Westminster not only in number of entries (4.352 to 3,144) but also in having on display ten Basenjis—little red dogs from the Belgian Congo which wash their faces with their paws, arch their backs when angry, chase lions and emit no sound but "groo," having lost their bark in centuries of silent jungle tracking. The two shows were alike, however, in having on their entry lists more cocker spaniels than any other breed.

From the wheezing pugs and spotted Dalmatians of the 1880s through the French poodles of the Century's turn and the post-War German shepherds, fashions in dogs have fluctuated almost as frequently and inexplicably as fashions in dress. Katharine Cornell's co-starring Flush in The Barretts of Wimpole Street may have had something to do with the cocker spaniel's recent spectacular rise in the U. S. A more likely explanation, considering its simultaneous rise in Britain, is growing appreciation of the flop-eared little dog's all-around qualities as a pet as well as a gun dog. Playful, gentle and notable even among dogs for his panting, big-eyed devotion, the cocker likes apartment corners and city streets almost as well as small-town lawns and country fields.

Mrs. Norman Thomas, wife of the Socialist, and Mrs. Francis Patrick Gar- van, wife of the Chemical Foundation's philanthropic lawyer-president, both breed fine cockers on Long Island, both had entries in last week's Westminster. But the best of the show's 205 cockers, jet-black Champion Torohill Smoky, belonged to Mrs. Garvan's 15-year-old son Peter, a Millbrook School fourth-former who has devoted his vacations for three years to feeding, grooming and exercising his dog.

Young Peter Garvan's heart thumped as he watched Smoky go on from winning best of breed to be chosen best of all sporting dogs, thereby becoming eligible to compete for best-in-show or U. S. Dog of the Year.