KNOX — Beaglemania is here, but fad isn’t for everyone

Jack Knox was once a newspaper editor in Kamloops, where he probably had a puppy who peed in the newsroom. He now writes for the Victoria Times Colonist.

COLUMN — News item: Miss P, a beagle from Enderby, B.C., has won New York’s prestigious Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

Thought one: Miss P might be Best in Show, but B.C. Transit still won’t let her ride the bus uncaged in Victoria. Blatant dogism.

Thought two: Beaglemania is upon us, which isn’t altogether a good thing.

Everyone was tickled pink when Miss P won (though we half-expected Kanye to come out of the crowd to complain that Beyoncé’s dog was better).

The beagle became an instant celebrity: four morning appearances on live TV, including the Today Show and The View, followed by lunch at Sardi’s, then a walk-on cameo in Broadway’s Kinky Boots. She sniffed her way around the top of the Empire State Building, met Donald Trump and was later YouTubed urinating on a fire hydrant in Times Square (wait, no, that last one was Bieber).

We Canadians were particularly excited about Miss P, just as we are any time one of us does something noteworthy in the U.S. For a people who devote so much energy to smugly declaring our superiority to ’Merica, we get awfully giddy when we win its approval. Maybe they’ll invite us to the prom some year.

Anyhoo, Victoria’s Trisha Sheehan expects the phone to start ringing. She’s a registered beagle breeder, one of two on Vancouver Island and only a handful in western Canada. With Miss P being from B.C., Trisha and husband Flynn anticipate demand for puppies should be even greater than it was in 2008 when a beagle named Uno won the Westminster show.

You would think that boost would make Sheehan happy, but that’s not necessarily the case. Even at $1,200 to $1,400 a pop (or pup) she expects the demand for beagles to outstrip the supply. Western Canada’s legitimate breeders can produce 60, 70 puppies a year, tops. The gap could lead to the emergence of dodgy dog-dealers sending not-necessarily healthy beagle puppies to the wrong homes, as happened after Uno’s victory.

“We did see a huge increase in the number of puppy mill puppies, puppies in pet stores, puppies from backyard breeders,” Sheehan says.

It was like that for a couple of years. Then the same beagles began flooding into the dog-rescue programs.

The pattern repeats whenever kids start clamouring for a pop-culture pup. In the 1950s, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie created a demand for German shepherds and collies. Later, 101 Dalmatians spawned 102 puppy mills. In the 1990s, every child wanted a Jack Russell terrier like TV’s Wishbone. (BTW, Jody Paterson used to own one named Jack, which caused no end of who’s-on-first confusion when we shared an office. I would hear her on the phone saying “I caught Jack drinking out of the toilet today,” leaving me to spend the rest of the day wondering why she was in the men’s room. But I digress.)

“Beagles aren’t the perfect dog for everyone,” Sheehan says. They’re incredibly busy as puppies, aren’t great for a family that includes infants. The ideal owners are retirees with experience of dogs and who can spend time with a social breed that doesn’t like to be left alone. “You can’t expect to go off to work for eight hours, come back and find your house still standing.”

People don’t always stop to think what kind of dog matches their life (though we could have a whole other conversation about the self-fulfilling prophesies created when the thugs who want a vicious dog choose a breed with a nasty reputation). Too many of us get caught up in fad and fashion, as though a dog were an accessory to be discarded when harvest gold appliances/golden retrievers go out of style.

Just because a breed is Best in Show doesn’t mean it’s Best for You. My own beloved Spot would never have won a trophy, not unless they awarded points for attempting sexual relations with visiting clergy, coming in for a crotch check when Grandpa wasn’t looking or punctuating a dinner party with a wet, noisy, aggressive investigation of his own private parts. But then, you don’t always need the Westminster Kennel Club to tell you that you have the right dog.

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