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After the Pug Dog Club's Puppy Match wound down, Ray Kolesar
was the last to straggle into the Beards' motor home, not long
before midnight. He was holding a can of beer and bag of
potato chips. With him was the canine reproduction specialist,
whom he had dragged away from her steak and cosmopolitan at
the hotel restaurant to oversee tonight's insemination.
Making purebred pugs is arduous and important business. The
pug's problem is geometrical. A century of selection for the
standard's "square and cobby" body has exaggerated
those qualities, rendering many males incapable of positioning
themselves on a bitch, of procreating reliably without human
assistance. Nor can puppies muscle through the pug's narrowed
birth canal; like many breeds, virtually all pugs must be
delivered by C-section. "You'll never have feral
pugs," one woman told me earlier that night. She said it
fondly.
Woody, the Beards' stud, is older, and his frozen semen had
not survived FedExing. So weeks earlier, Patt Kolesar embedded
a hormonal implant in her bitch's vulva to bring her into heat
in time for tonight's scheduled "side by side."
Kolesar positioned her bitch, Birdie, on the floor. Woody
sniffed rambunctiously and mounted. As the dog began his
dedicated thrusting, the unlikelihood of him ever managing the
transaction on his own was plain. And so, as planned all
along, Jutta Beard crouched behind him and concluded things
with an expeditious right hand. In an instant, she was holding
up a plastic bag with a dime-size clump in its corner.
The reproductive specialist set about confirming the semen's
motility with a microscope and advised Kolesar to tuck the
pipette in her cleavage. It is a trick, she said, to keep it
warm while they transferred Birdie onto the table and Beard
microwaved some skim milk for "extender,"
compensating for Woody's paltry output. "It takes a
village," Kolesar said, exhaling deeply as she got up off
the floor.
Kolesar showed me a photograph of Woody's father, a famous
specimen named Captain Snappy. The squat, fawn-colored pug
with taut, thin legs stood on a pedestal. Gesturing rapidly,
Kolesar praised the gorgeous angle of the dog's back, the
proportions of its face. To describe the compactness of its
form, she invoked the Latin phrase "multum in parvo,"
or "much in little," the pug's unofficial motto.
Then she picked up an arresting syringelike instrument. It was
filled, via Woody, with some of Captain Snappy's superlative
genes.
Kolesar slid the tool into Birdie. After several minutes, she
removed it and seemed satisfied. Then she inserted her bare
finger into Birdie's vagina and began to wriggle it,
delicately and with great purposefulness. She was
"feathering" the dog, stimulating the vaginal walls
as a stud would, so that her muscle would contract and draw
the semen into her cervix. (The surest method of insemination,
Kolesar later explained, and one commonly done, is to
surgically expose the bitch's uterus, deposit the semen
directly and then sew it back up.) As Kolesar worked, Beard
positioned herself near the dog's head, and the Beards'
daughter was at center, stroking Birdie's back like a midwife.
This seemed to go on for a long time. Then it was done.
New York Times Magazine, February 4, 2007
I repeat, New York Times Magazine.
(Did you ever think you would read in the New York Times
about a woman in Wisconsin jerking off a male dog and
finger-fucking a female dog?)
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