Tomi takes bow at Westminster
NEW YORK — When Julia Haight leads her prize entry into the Westminster Kennel Club dog show ring today, she'll see a Shiba Inu who's athletic, alert and pert.
Oh, and this: Tomi helped save her life.
Haight can't be certain what would've happened that day last October. How could she? Five people were in the house on Long Island, sound asleep when the fire started.
What she knows for sure is that Tomi smelled the smoke enveloping her second-floor bedroom. He jumped hard onto the bed, pounced on Haight from head to toe and then kept slamming his 25-pound body into her face.
“He's normally catlike, very graceful. But he was violently shaking. It wasn't like him at all,” Haight said.
Awakened by this real-life alarm, everyone escaped. The home, not so lucky.
“It could've been so, so different,” she said.
More than 2,700 dogs will be coming to America's most prestigious pooch event, and all of them are special.
Charlie the Skye terrier was second to retired Miss P the beagle for best in show last year. Rumor the German shepherd is now ranked as the nation's No. 1 show dog.
There's a Berger Picard who detects when the owner's son has low blood-sugar levels. There's a pharaoh hound who needed medical and emotional aid after neglect.
“These are real dogs and real people,” longtime Westminster television host David Frei said. “They're not dogs that just sit around all day on doggie cushions eating doggie bonbons.”
Judging at the 140th annual show started this morning in the exhibition space on two piers that jut into the Hudson River. Shortly before 11 p.m. Tuesday on the green carpet at Madison Square Garden, Richard Meen of Canada will choose America's top dog.
