FARLAP / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


covering Crufts for the Birmingham Post, he decided to see if he could shoot an entire feature without including a picture of a real dog. “I photographed dog paintings, dog plates, dog


jumpers, dog statues, cuddly toy dogs etc. It turned out pretty successfully and the Post ran it as a whole broadsheet page photo essay,” he says. In 2025, he was commissioned by the Royal Academy of


Dance’s Dance Gazette magazine to do a feature showcasing the movement of dogs. Although Hadley had a photo pass, it did not include ringside access and he had to shoot from public areas – a heads-up for photographers attending this year. Press access has been a bone of contention over the years. Beverley Smith, editor of Dogs Today magazine, remembers a time when the press were “as welcome as fleas”. She recalled a producer of a children’s programme using the F-bomb once because they couldn’t get press passes. Smith recalls internationally acclaimed photographer Elliott


Erwitt struggling to get in after being flown over from New York. “I’ve been banned a few times,” she says. “There was a time


when the Kennel Club issued a memo to staff which said they weren’t allowed to read Dogs Today. I criticised lots of things and we were seen as a sort of ‘dangerous’ publication. They’ve reformed quite a bit since then.” Smith has covered the show for more than 35 years and has


campaigned on issues such as puppy farming and tail docking. She says she receives a ‘rush of whistleblowers’ every year in the run-up to Crufts and interest from overseas journalists is huge. A story with a major impact was the 2008 investigation by


journalist and award-winning director Jemima Harrison. Her BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed revealed the extent of health and welfare problems in pedigree dogs and harmful breeding practices – a subject she began looking into after her own dog, Freddie - a flatcoated retriever - died at the age of 15. “I discovered that many flatcoats are dead, typically, by the age of eight or nine due to a particularly aggressive cancer,” she says. “I started researching and opened up a can of worms


about the way pedigree dogs were bred. The more I dug, the worse it got. I couldn’t believe that no one had


looked at the issue for a prime-time documentary before. In fact, the film was initially commissioned for BBC4 but moved to BBC1 when it became obvious how strong it was.”


“Crufts is one huge example of the love humans have for our four-legged friends.” Bruce Adams, photographer, Daily Mail


“Tannoys, voices, barking and hubbub fill the air.” Anna Webb, BBC contributor and host of the A Dog’s Life podcast


“It was a genuine exposé of a great British institution.” Jemima Harrison, journalist and producer


“The press were as welcome as fleas.” Beverley Smith, editor, Dogs Today


The biggest problem was getting vets to speak out. “Senior vets were nervous about upsetting the Kennel Club


– which was a source of research funding for some of them,” she says. “The vets who did put their necks on the line to speak to us got a lot of grief from breeders afterwards - that actually continues to this day for some of them. “The media appetite for the story both in the UK and


internationally was pretty gobsmacking. It went on for months.” The Kennel Club hired law firm Schillings and complained to Ofcom about the programme but four of the five complaints were rejected. Harrison says that Ofcom did however find that we had not given the Kennel Club sufficient right of reply, which was a mistake on our part. Although Crufts divides opinion, many people have a soft spot for it, not least its eight million viewers. Freelance journalist Jane Common, who has been writing


about pets for more than 20 years, recalls taking her Battersea rescue dog, Attlee, to the show in 2015 for an article commissioned by The Guardian, ‘A scruff goes to Crufts’. Attlee was given the once over by an official judge in the show ring, arranged by the press office. “Attlee, knowing he was in elevated company, rebelled, acting the larrikin,” she recalls. “Barking, jumping up and down and spinning round chasing his stubby tail.” Attlee passed away last year, but the photo of him on the famous green carpet is one of her treasured possessions. Unfortunately, it was the same year as the ‘poisoning’, so her feature never saw the light of day. If there’s one tip that Smith has for journalists attending


this year, it is: don’t pat the dogs or try to speak to the owners as they are about to step in the ring. “The dogs won’t bite, but the people will.”


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