Hannah Berger at the Paris Review:
The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia, lies on a few hundred acres of flat land abutted by farms and an amusement park called Kings Dominion. It’s the kind of place where animals and vegetables get sorted out. When I told a shearing friend I was heading there, he told me he’d just been there, too, for “sheep stuff.” The crest of an orange roller coaster peeked through the trees as I parked beside several RVs, all of them accompanied by some form of outdoor pen. Just inside the Farm Bureau Center, the doormats were already covered in fur.
I was attending a two-day conformation dog show, where more than four hundred purebred dogs were competing to determine which one adhered most closely to an ancestral ideal. Shows like this date back to 1859, when a gunsmith named W. R. Pape organized a competition judging fifty or sixty gun dogs—pointers and setters, bred to hunt—at the corn exchange in Newcastle upon Tyne. Winners got guns. Today, their descendants, plus nearly two hundred other breeds, bred solely for display, compete in fluorescent event spaces for big ribbons.
more here.
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