Death by poisoning is never pretty.
Gasping for breath, exhaustion, convulsing, spewing vomit, pouring out saliva and excrement—these are the symptoms that precede the poisoning victim’s death, and such was the violent passing that had been suffered by the stiff on the slab in Lauw, Belgium, on March 6 of last year. A wonder to behold, with his entire life before him, he’d been crowned salutatorian of his class only hours before.
“He was my dream boy,” Aleksandra Lauwers, his constant companion, told me. “We just understood each other, always were together. Life without him isn’t the same anymore.”
He died like a dog, because he was a dog, but not just any dog. He was a champion show dog named Thendara Satisfaction, nicknamed Jagger, who had just triumphed as second in his breed (Irish setter) at Crufts, the 124-year-old dog show—the most important dog show in the world—in Birmingham, England.
“Only the best get to Crufts,” said Sandra Chorley-Newton, who has been showing Irish setters there for 45 years. And Jagger was one of the best, an immaculately bred combination of “a million things: movement, soundness, tight construction, elegance. The red coat is the crowning glory. It’s what’s underneath the coat that counts.”
It was after the show, back home in Belgium, that Jagger began having such difficulty breathing that his alarmed owners called a veterinarian. By the time he got there it was too late: Jagger had collapsed and died. An autopsy found shocking evidence in the dog’s gastrointestinal tract: pieces of beef neatly folded with poison inside.
On Facebook, Lauwers posted a photograph of her beloved setter performing “dog therapy for elderly people” at a retirement home. “To [the] person who has done it, [I] hope you can sleep well knowing you have killed our love, family member and best friend to our son,” she wrote.
The tragic news soon shook the show-dog world, first reaching Jagger’s co-owner and exhibitor, Dee Milligan-Bott. A veteran of 30 years of showing dogs, Milligan-Bott had stood triumphantly alongside Jagger in his prizewinning performance at Crufts only the day before. Now she heard inconceivable words from her partner in Belgium: Jagger dead! Jagger poisoned!
But how? Show dogs such as Jagger are watched more closely than visiting dignitaries. “We knew every movement [Jagger made],” from the dog’s home in Belgium to a hotel in Birmingham, then to the Crufts show ring, and back home again, Milligan-Bott told me in March. The entire time he had been led on a double leash alongside his half-brother, Thendara Pot Noodle, who had won Best of Breed in the Irish-setter category. “If he had eaten something, the other dog would have as well,” said Milligan-Bott.
At 29 minutes before midnight on Sunday, March 7, Milligan-Bott dashed off a desperate e-mail addressed to the press office of the Kennel Club, the venerable organization that runs Crufts. The club’s president is Prince Michael of Kent, and its patron is Queen Elizabeth II.
The media soon descended on Milligan-Bott’s home in Leicestershire, England. In an impassioned press conference, she and her husband, Jeremy Bott, also a show-dog exhibitor, urged fellow breeders and dog-lovers around the world to help them find justice: “We can’t and we won’t think that this was the act of another exhibitor,” Milligan-Bott said dramatically. “If we thought this, we couldn’t go on, and the last 30 years of breeding and showing beautiful dogs would have been a complete waste. So I ask you all to unite in finding the perpetrator who did this.”
In the days that followed, the media erupted with sensational reports and lurid headlines about the scandal: MURDER AT CRUFTS, blared The Sun. “A canine whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie,” reported the Associated Press. “A murder mystery more outlandish than any Hollywood script,” The Telegraph chimed in. British dog-lovers took to Facebook, their preferred means of communication, to express their outrage. Soon, there were reports of other dogs’ possibly having been poisoned at Crufts, including two Shetland sheepdogs, an Afghan hound, a Shih Tzu, and a West Highland white terrier. According to one owner, they had not been lethally dosed but were believed to have been “given something to mess up their chances in the ring!”
More than 160,000 exhibitors and spectators had passed through the show over its four-day run. Now, according to a story in Dogs Today, many members of the massive audience were “possible suspects.”
Sick as a Dog
The Kennel Club is headquartered in a five-story building in London. The club’s lobby is filled with dog bronzes and dog-themed oil portraits, not to mention actual dogs, and a bubbly receptionist, who exudes an almost canine friendliness and exuberance. “H.M.Q.!” she exclaimed when I noted that the coats of arms above her desk included Her Majesty the Queen’s. “She does come to our field trials.”
On a high floor in her dog-themed office, I met Caroline Kisko, 59, the Kennel Club’s elegant and erudite secretary and director of communications, who had been put in the unpleasant position of explaining her esteemed institution’s security arrangements and its handling of the Jagger poisoning. “*The Sun’*s title ‘Murder at Crufts’ sounds great, if that’s what you’re into, but the reality is very far from that,” she said. “Dog people love dogs. Therefore the idea that they would go out to ‘nobble’ [canine-speak for sabotaging a rival dog] another competitor is just madness.” Kisko calls the various controversies at this year’s Crufts “the hooh-hah.” Still, she couldn’t dismiss or deny the troubling events that had turned the 2015 Super Bowl of dog shows into a cavalcade of calamities—“Crufts’ year from hell,” as some were calling it.
It had begun, as most mysteries do, with dramatic foreshadowing, “the stuff that tabloid dreams are made of,” wrote longtime Crufts judge Frank Kane in a March 18 column in Dog World, the bible of the international show-dog set. “The onslaught started long before the show opened its doors.” First, there was a backlash among British exhibitors, who protested the growing number of foreign dogs competing at Crufts (nearly 3,000 this year; in 2009, it was 1,100), prompting The Independent to lament that Crufts had lost its “British bulldog spirit.” “It’s daft!” Kisko says in reaction to this complaint. “Balderdash!… Just such rubbish!”
A month before Crufts, members of the Staffordshire Bull Terrier Club argued so heatedly over parliamentary procedures at their annual meeting that the police were investigating an assault allegation. VICIOUS, SNARLING … NO, NOT THE DOGS, THE BREEDERS!, read the Mail on Sunday headline about the incident.
Then there were “the A.R.,” as some dog people derisively call them, the animal-rights activists, who include the members of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (R.S.P.C.A.) and, most vocally, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). In 2009, PETA’s vice president of international operations, Poorva Joshipura, had unleashed an anti-Crufts manifesto in The Guardian. “If you respect, care about or love dogs … do not attend Crufts,” she wrote in an opinion piece that blasted the show as a “hideous event” due to inbreeding, which, Joshipura claimed, leaves approximately one in four purebred dogs with serious congenital defects. (In 2009 the Kennel Club began adopting new standards to avoid the genetic problems of purebreds.)
It was a declaration of war. The most direct and dramatic way to convey its message, PETA decided, was through “disruption,” causing disturbances inside actual events. To accomplish this, PETA U.K. used its campaign coordinator, 27-year-old animal-rights activist Kirsty Henderson, who told me she was “responsible for protests, disruption, demonstrations, and other campaign actions.” No one associated with PETA would ever even consider poisoning a dog, Henderson insisted. But she readily admitted they had been out to poison the world’s biggest dog show. “Breeding is discriminatory, senseless,” she said. “Our job will never be over until Crufts is no longer happening and until breeders are no longer creating animals for profit.”
Months before Crufts, Henderson and her team began plotting their 2015 disruption, which they hoped would be big and bold enough to galvanize the international media and shift attention from the show ring to the animal-rights arena.
“We just hoped we could pull it off,” she said.
Dog-Eat-Dog
How had all this happened to the regal dog show created in 1891 by Charles Cruft? The sales manager of a dog-biscuit company, he was determined to involve the best endorsers of his product: royalty, which controlled dogdom then and whose breed preferences were copied by the upper classes. Cruft embossed his prizewinners’ medallions with the profile of Queen Victoria’s beloved collie, Darnley II, and often he crowned dogs owned by royalty as his show’s champions. Kings, queens, czars, maharajas, and sheikhs of many nations soon showed their dogs at Crufts and sent representatives with “open chequebooks and instructions to buy as many of the prize winners as possible,” according to Brian Hoey’s book Pets by Royal Appointment.
With its royal pedigree, Crufts grew both in size and prestige. Luxurious train carriages, designed by Cruft, elegantly transported superstar dogs from all across England to compete. By 1936, Crufts was the biggest dog show in the world. By 1948, the show had been sold to the Kennel Club, the governing body that sets the standards for breeds in Great Britain, and the show began to change from a royal event to a public enterprise.
Now held at the massive Birmingham National Exhibition Centre, it spreads over four days, 25 acres, five halls, a pavilion filled with trade stands, and a 7,000-seat Best in Show arena. Last year’s show attracted nearly 21,500 dogs and 160,000 spectators. A longtime regular ticks off some of the competitions at the show: Agility. (“Where the dogs jump over obstacles.”) Fly Ball. (“Where the dogs have to run the length of the hall and a tennis ball releases. It’s like a relay race. The dogs just go nuts, and the public loves it.”) Heelwork to Music. (“Which you and I could call probably Dancing Dogs. The handler and their dog perform a routine to music. It usually involves the owner dressing in appropriate costume.”) “And in every hall there are hundreds of trade stands with vendors selling every possible thing connected to the dogs,” says the breeder. “The idea is to make it a complete experience for the visitors.”
Amid the selling, the educational exhibits, and the sideshows are the main events: the show rings, where pedigreed dogs compete for titles and prizes. While prizes at Crufts are meager (even for the Best in Show winner)—around $150, a ceremonial sack of dog food, a bottle of champagne, and a trophy—a victory turns a dog into a valuable commodity. Jagger was reported to be worth $75,000 because of his potential to earn stud fees. And owners and handlers have been known to ride a Crufts victory to a lucrative dog-grooming business. Such rewards can encourage trophy lust.
‘Oh crikey Moses!” retired dog-show judge Annette Penny said of her many years in the field as we had a glass of wine on her patio in rural France. “It’s very, very bitchy!” she said of the competition, and then proceeded to enumerate some of the nasty tactics supposedly used by jealous competitors, such as tainting dog food with laxatives, snipping out patches of fur, scratching the pads of a dog’s paws “so it won’t be able to walk properly,” and feeding a dog a chocolate bar and relishing the judge’s grimace. “Chocolate leaves such a nasty film around the mouth,” she said.
“Nobbling” is said by some to be common in the fiercely competitive run-up to Crufts, a series of qualifying dog shows, in which the competition and, supposedly, the intrigue is intense. Reports of show dogs poisoned and tranquilized are legend in British show-dog history, and rumors regularly circulate about dogs who have undergone prohibited plastic surgery. The Kennel Club’s Caroline Kisko insists such tactics exist only in the minds of overheated owners. “All of the suggested poisonings that we started to hear about, going back over the years, we collected all of them, and there wasn’t a shred of truth to any of them,” she said.
But others insist that dirty tricks are real, especially when the dogs are out of their owners’ sight. “I’ve been going to Crufts for the last 30 years,” veteran dog writer Colonel David Hancock said. “It is fairly common for a long-haired dog to have its coat cut disadvantageously by a competitor. And it is not unknown for a dog to be given a sleeping pill before its competition by a competitor on his bench. Sleeping pills that certainly don’t affect the dog noticeably but make them underperform.”
Putting On the Dog
The Best in Show event is the culmination of Crufts, observed by thousands in the Best in Show arena, with an estimated 1.8 million viewers watching on British television. With pomp and circumstance the judge carefully examines the seven finalists, one from each breeding group, out of a field of thousands. Finally, the judge points to the winner. When he did last year, British dog-show veterans collectively gasped. The winner was a black Scottish terrier named McVan’s To Russia with Love, known as Knopa, and the handler was Rebecca Cross. Not only were Cross and her dog both foreigners—the handler from America, the dog from Russia—they were also both decided underdogs, no pun intended. “Whoever wins something, somebody has to find fault,” Cross lamented to me. “It’s never a good, clean win. It always seems like there has to be a conspiracy to it.”
As Cross and her dog triumphantly headed toward the winner’s table, two interlopers waited in front-row seats in the arena: PETA’s Kirsty Henderson and Luke Steele, a 25-year-old law student and animal-rights activist from Leeds. “We felt we definitely needed to get on the floor this year,” said Henderson. “Because that’s where the cameras are.”
Henderson had a sign that read MUTTS AGAINST CRUFTS hidden under her jumper. When Knopa was announced as the winner, Steele grabbed the sign and bolted out onto the massive arena’s main floor. He held the sign high over his head. For an instant there was pandemonium. Then five security guards rushed out and grabbed him, ripping the sign from his fingers and carrying him off the floor and out of the arena. But there was one more bit of trouble to come, this one occurring at the show’s most sacred moment: when Rebecca Cross hoisted her victorious Best in Show Scottish terrier atop the winner’s table.
“Please don’t pick up your dog the way you did in group!” Cross remembers being advised by Crufts officials, meaning, she explained to me, don’t pick up the dog by the throat and tail, because some animal-rights groups would perceive this as a cruel way to handle a dog. In fact, lifting Scottish terriers by the throat and tail is the way Rebecca Cross says she and others who breed them do it. The breed is known for its stubby and extremely tough tail, which has long been used to yank the dogs out of rabbit holes. Nevertheless, Cross promised that she would lift her dog by its chest and belly. But, in that ecstatic moment of triumph, she forgot about her promise and picked up her dog the usual way. “I could hear the stewards near me inhaling, as if to say, ‘Oh no! She did it!’ ” she recalls. Immediately, animal-rights activists and other protesters lambasted Cross in an uproar on Facebook and beyond, for “picking up the dog like a teapot.”
The controversy that followed, known as “Tailgate,” was complete with a petition railing against Rebecca Cross for cruelty to the terrier. The petition attracted more than 110,000 signatures, demanding that the club strip her of her Best in Show title. (The Kennel Club wrote Cross a formal letter, asking for an explanation. Cross apologized, and no action was taken.)
Crufts 2015 was mercifully over.
And yet two more unfortunate episodes remained. Two weeks afterward, in Bierbeek, Belgium, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Ka Makana, nicknamed “Mak,” who had just been crowned as the best male ridgeback at Crufts, was being walked in a recreational woods when a shot rang out, grazing the dog’s lip. The ridgeback ran. More bullets followed, striking him in the neck, “shattering his vertebrae,” the dog’s owner, Dorothy McGoldrick, told me. Her championship dog, Belgium’s Top Rhodesian Ridgeback in 2013 and 2014, with a stud fee of $2,000, was dead.
“Do you have any enemies in the dog world?” the police asked McGoldrick at the scene. “Of course. Everybody has enemies in the dog world, especially if you are successful. People are jealous,” she replied. Representatives of the Kennel Club called. “They asked, ‘Did I think the dog’s shooting had any connection with the show?’ ” She wouldn’t, couldn’t, allow herself to think that. She preferred to believe the shooter was “just a stupid hunter who doesn’t like dogs.”
A month later, puppy-nappers stole six German shepherds from their home, in Essex. “Twisted dog thieves who stole a litter of defenceless puppies destined for Crufts have demanded owners hand over £4,000 or the animals will be ‘tormented,’ ” claimed the Daily Express. (The dogs were never found.)
Barking up the Wrong Tree?
Meanwhile, Jagger’s tissue specimens had been moved from his veterinarian’s office to Ghent University, where toxicology tests were completed. On March 16, the Kennel Club released a four-page report on the poisoning. It concluded, “Jagger the Irish Setter tragically died after ingesting fast acting poison banned in Europe some 28 hours after attending Crufts. Timelines indicate that poison was almost certainly eaten in Belgium.”
In fact, the report stated that the poisons, carbofuran and aldicarb, designed to kill pests, take effect within hours and could only have been consumed shortly before the dog’s death, on Friday, March 6, when he was already home in Belgium. “We must conclude that it is inconceivable that he could have been poisoned at Crufts on Thursday 5th March [when the dog departed the dog show], some 28 to 36 hours earlier.”
As for the six other dogs reportedly poisoned at the show: “When you punctured the rumor, you couldn’t find these dogs,” said Beverley Cuddy, publisher and editor of Dogs Today.
The world’s biggest and greatest dog show was safe for dogs again. Or was it? Even after the official report on Jagger’s death was released, the controversy lingered. The Kennel Club remains adamant that logistics prove Jagger ate the poisons, perhaps off the ground, back home in Belgium and not at Crufts—“or even while he was in the U.K.,” insisted Caroline Kisko.
Dee Milligan-Bott was equally resolute. She and the Lauwerses prepared “a chronological timetable of Jagger’s exact movements, something we have absolutely no doubts about, from leaving Home in Belgium on Wednesday to his return, on Friday, 6th March,” she wrote on the Lauwerses’ Facebook page. The timetable showed that the dog was never off a leash or out of its owners’ watch except for a short time at Crufts.
On March 17, the day after the Kennel Club released its report, Milligan-Bott and Aleksandra Lauwers posted a joint statement on Facebook. “We accept that we will never know the true facts of why, where and when Jagger ingested poison which resulted in his death,” it began.
“What affected us nearly as much as losing our dog is how the Kennel Club has gone to great lengths to wash their hands of it,” Milligan-Bott said when I spoke to her in March. “But we are 100 percent sure he was maliciously poisoned.”
Why had Milligan-Bott persisted in the notion that Jagger was deliberately poisoned at Crufts when toxicological evidence seemed to prove otherwise? I asked Kisko.
“Because dog people are like that,” she said. “I think it was very hard for them to step back from it, because unfortunately—and I don’t think it was in any way intentional—they had stirred a hornet’s nest in terms of media interest.”
Either way, it’s a cold case now. As for the police, after preliminary inquiries, officials in both Belgium and Britain declined to investigate.
