Each February, the fur flies at the Westminster show. This homage to our ability to shape and reshape Rover is a veritable feast of money, sport, fun and politics. : Puttin’ On the Dog

The air is redolent with talcum powder, hair spray, musky fur, wet towels and. . . . Do they still call it doggy doo?

And the noise: the whoosh-blast of hair dryers, some larger than vacuum cleaners, the metallic clatter of scissors, clippers and nippers.

There are barks and BARKS! yips and snorts, and baleful caterwauls. And everywhere the chatter of people in a knowing patois: champion this, whelp that, sire here and litter there.

We are backstage at humankind’s original laboratory for genetic engineering.

Cage doors slam, heavy crates roll down the hallways on push carts. Quivering wet noses poke at passersby, and sometimes a sodden pink tongue emerges to slurp a nearby face.

Long before the biotech boom, petri dish or the electron microscope, 100 centuries before discovery of the gene and how to splice it, way back to the first faint pages of recorded history, men and women have indulged their wildest fancies to shape and reshape the dog.

And once a year, as they have for 118 years, the elite of American dogdom gather in New York City to celebrate their feats.

This is the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show 1994--money, fun, sport, glamour, competition, controversy and politics of the most fervent kind.

In other words, Americans earnest at play.

It did not just happen , you know, that there is a Chihuahua and a Saint Bernard, a golden retriever and a basset hound, a Chinese crested and a petit basset griffon vendeen--and more than 140 other breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club.

People composed them.

And what imagination. In all the world, in all history, no other animal has taken on such range of shapes, sizes, colors, personalities and function.

“Absolutely,” confirms George Padgett, professor at Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “There is no other species like it.”

And now, at Madison Square Garden, during two lengthy days each February, more than 2,000 dogs and 10,000 people, having invested millions of dollars in the quest, meet under the TV lights in seven show rings to answer the question that burns in their hearts, if not necessarily yours: Who has the best dog in America?

Only one other sporting event, the Kentucky Derby, has been around longer. And probably none has accumulated so much hidebound tradition. There are larger shows, but none so prestigious. It’s tuxedos and evening gowns, but watch where you step. Every dog here has already earned its title as a show dog champion in the AKC registry. This is the championship of canine champions, a combination Miss America Pageant, Olympics, Chicago livestock exposition and Palm Springs country club social.

Leave it to Roger Caras, author and voice-of-God ring announcer at Westminster, to describe these dog people: “At best, they are a strange lot.”

Attention dog experts: Yes, we know you are reading. Yes, we know of the many boiling arguments about purebred show dogs. And yes, we will get to them in a minute. First, let’s poke around the show floor a bit.

From 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. each day, Westminster competitors await their calls to the rings from “benching” areas beneath the grandstands. This is a crowded, jostling, aromatic bazaar where breeders and dogs--and their promises of puppies to come--display themselves to spectators, who have paid up to $57 for a ticket.

Over this din rises a thunderous, truly profound and satisfied snore. Cowboy, champion bulldog from Moline, Ill., has lapsed into repose at Row 4A.

“The snoring? Ha. I’m sharing a hotel room with a lady and her chow. She warned me about her snoring. Ha. Back home we sleep with 10 bulldogs. We take them with us in our motor home. Come here, Cowboy, give the lady a kiss,” says Judy Johannsen, Cowboy’s owner.

She is handing out business cards and espousing the merits of these onetime fighting dogs, with heads the size of soccer balls and rumps like beefsteak tomatoes; with their undershot jaws, smashed-in noses and comically bowed legs.

“I researched for the right breed. I wanted the least aggressive dog I could get. I supervise the animal shelter in Moline, and so I looked through 15 years of dog-bite records. Not one bite by a bulldog. After that, bulldogs chose me.”

That a dog bred as a ferocious fighter has been transformed into one of our most gentle pets underscores the wonders of selective breeding on parade at Madison Square Garden. Darwin recognized that creatures evolve by the selection of nature. Dogs demonstrate the nature of humans to meddle.

For instance, what does an aging British lord do when he no longer can keep up with his setters in the hedgerows? Voila! He creates a dottering, jowly, oversized spaniel with undersized legs and a drowsy disposition. Almost anyone can keep pace with the clumber spaniel.

“I wanted a laid-back dog. So take Jeremy here. When I want to go, he goes. And when I stop, he stops. I’ve got eight clumbers,” says Patrick Dionne, of Beacon Falls, Conn. Jeremy awakens, rises for a pat on the head, then collapses again.

By one count, there are about 55 million dogs in the United States. And Americans spend more than $11 billion per year to feed, groom, shelter, nurse and amuse them.

Only a fraction are purebreds registered with the AKC. Even fewer are entered at the AKC’s 7,000 or so shows each year. Those that make it to Westminster have won enough points at other shows to be classified champions that conform most closely to specified standards for each breed and that have been campaigned hardest on the show circuit.

Once here, they compete for three awards, but no prize money. For best of breed, there are 148 winners, which then compete within seven groups of similar breeds. And those seven winners are entered for judging as the best in show.

This event started with a brotherhood of wealthy New York bird hunters who used to sip sherry at the old Westminster Hotel. To make off-season sport of their hunting dogs, they devised a show patterned after those being held in England and an earlier U.S. competition in Philadelphia. Nothing--depressions, world wars, winter blizzards--has stopped it since.

And while the middle class may be emerging in this milieu, the gentry still firmly controls traditions. That means earning your place, slowly.

Thelma Boalbey, whose New York letterhead still carries the GRamercy telephone prefix, has been running show publicity for 44 years. New York Times dog correspondent Walter R. Fletcher covered his first Westminster as an assistant reporter in 1928.

“This may be my last,” he says as he is shuttled by wheelchair from the press room to the judging ring.

“Walter, you’ve been saying that every year for 10 years,” remarks a junior colleague, a cubbish 60 or so.

Competition at Westminster is an intriguing brew of three ingredients: dog, handler and politics.

The dog must not only be a specimen that meets the breed’s written standards, but also must have that elusive quality that dog fanciers call “showiness.”

Look! Look at that poodle! She’s asking you to give her the award. You may have a perfect dog, but she’s got to ask you to give her the award.

From her box seat in the second row, Barbara Weisberg of Apex, N.C., explains why the ink-black standard poodle champion, La Marka Nina Oscura from Burlington, Wis., is about to be judged best non-sporting dog--better than the black miniature poodle or the bichon frise, keeshond, bulldog, schipperke, Tibetan terrier, chow chow and a handful of others.

Don’t you see? She’s very showy, and that’s the name of this--it’s a dog show. Look at her move!

Could it also be that the judge, Jacklyn E. Hungerland of Carmel, has a soft spot for poodles? She is, after all, president of the Poodle Club of America.

Weisberg fixes us with a cold stare.

Only an outsider would be so coarse as to suggest that kind of clumsy politics. No, in dogdom, the sharp elbows and helping hands are exquisitely more subtle and may take a lifetime to fully appreciate.

Show judge Nigel Aubrey-Jones, of Franklin Center, Quebec, joins us ringside for a discussion of dog-show politics:

There’s very little, really.

But so many people say otherwise, we explain. Newcomers who try to handle their own dogs say they almost always lose to the better-known, better-connected professional handlers. And owners who advertise in dog magazines seem to do a little better than those who don’t. And so on and so on.

You cannot expect in any field for people with less experience to triumph.

But this is about dogs, not people, isn’t it?

The easiest way to camouflage one’s shortcomings is to cry politics. The percentage of ignorance is far greater than the percentage of true knowledge.

Well, the Labrador retriever is the AKC’s most popular breed, and the golden retriever is not far behind. How come these breeds never win best of show at Westminster?

There seems to be a belief--and it’s wrong, of course--that a dog can’t have a brain and be good looking, both. The thought is, if he’s got brains, he’s ugly. And the pampered show dog is beautiful but has got to be stupid.

But wait, isn’t the poodle one of the smartest dogs? . . . Oh, never mind.

There are more important criticisms of AKC shows, questions not so easily answered and that cloud the happy life of today’s dog fanciers: Troubles lurk in the much-manipulated canine gene pool.

“Too many of today’s purebred dogs are genetic time bombs,” says Larry Shook, author of the book “Puppy Report” and of a forthcoming series in Dog World magazine, “Dogdom’s Moral Showdown.”

The problem is this: Purebred show dogs are bred almost solely to conform to appearance standards. Their working characteristics are of no consequence, their temperament only a matter of casual consideration, their genetic health and soundness in increasing doubt.

German shepherds are prone to hip problems, collies to eye disease, Dobermans to bleeding disorders, bulldogs to a variety of ailments. The list is unpleasantly long.

These show dogs are the prototypes of the breeds that come and go in the public fancy. And when a specific type catches on, the demand for puppies is met by breeders good and bad. The only real incentive to produce sound animals is pride, and that has not proven satisfactory to a growing number of critics. There is even significant worry within the AKC.

Even ring announcer Caras opened Westminster this year with a warning to those shopping for a pet. Good puppies, he said, “do not come from puppy mills and pet shops.”

Critics such as Shook go further, saying that even buying the offspring of champions is “canine roulette.”

“And statistically, you have a good chance of losing. You lose with staggering vet bills. You lose with the tragic early loss of a pet you have grown to love. You lose when your puppy grows up aggressive.”

If dog buyers did their homework, he adds, the problem would go away overnight. “Or,” he says, “if the AKC would require that dogs can’t be champions unless they are certified free of genetic disease, or can’t even be registered without such screening.”

Other countries have instituted stronger health safeguards, and pressure is mounting here for greater screening. The AKC is also besieged by public objections to ear cropping and tail docking. And a host of other complaints make dog shows no different than many other American endeavors of the ‘90s--a rat’s nest of controversy.

Still, it remains nothing short of a marvel what people have produced from the elastic genes of the wild wolf during the last 10,000--or maybe more--years.

There are dogs at Westminster that weigh barely more than a pound (Chihuahua) and some nearly 200 pounds (mastiff). Some tell you where they are from (Irish setter, Tibetan terrier), and some don’t (the Labrador retriever is from Newfoundland). Some can hold three tennis balls in their mouths (golden retriever). Some are all-American dogs (Chesapeake Bay retriever, Boston terrier), and some are exotic foreigners (shiba inu from Japan, Ibizan hound from Egypt).

There are dogs with dreadlocks. And dogs with hair, dogs with fur, and dogs with neither. Such as the lap dog known as the Chinese crested, which can be entirely naked except for oddly tufted feet, head and tail.

Say, does that dog need suntan lotion?

“Well as a matter of fact he does get a tan,” explains Victor Helu, from Bethpage, N.Y., who handles the Chinese crested called Cheesecake. “Look here at this picture--that’s him in the spring. You see he’s very light. Now here is a picture of him in September. You see how dark he’s gotten?”

Naturally, there also are dogs who suffer discriminatory stereotypes.

Isn’t it true that the Afghan is the dumb blond of dogdom?

This must be a sensitive question, because Afghan owner David would rather not give us his last name. But, he answers:

“Well, five times out of 10 it will sit if you tell it to.”

So, who won Westminster?

If you missed the finals on cable television, the seven dogs brought into the ring were a fawn-colored boxer (working group), a German shepherd that was the nation’s winningest show dog in 1993 (herding), the black standard poodle (non-sporting), a black and tan Norwich terrier (terrier), a Pekingese (toy), a parti-colored cocker spaniel (sporting) and a Norwegian elkhound (hound).

After 40 minutes, judge Walter F. Goodman of Miami, wearing a tuxedo jacket embroidered with dogs, lined the seven champions abreast and faced them like a general beholding troops. This is the Year of the Dog by the Chinese calendar, and the winner would be the American dog of the year.

Goodman’s hand rose and snapped to a point . . . the 4-year-old Norwich terrier, Chudley Willum the Conqueror, owned by Ruth Cooper of Glenview, Ill., and Patricia Lussier of Lake Placid, N.Y.

They received the coveted silver bowl trophy of Westminster.

And Willum?

The following day, he was sighted nibbling chicken off a fork at Sardi’s.