“In this building alone, I can name you three millionaires who don’t breed dogs; they’ve never bred a litter in their life,” says Tracy Tuff, the handler from Canada. “They just like to throw money at people like us to show good dogs.”

The owners come from so many different backgrounds and professions that they are hard to categorize. Mr. Winston, Sloan’s co-owner, is in nuclear medicine, his wife, Ms. Rosio, said. This is their first campaign, and their reasons for competing are very personal.

“It’s like having a child in middle school and you realize that kid can play baseball,” says Ms. Rosio, “and for the next two or three years you do everything you can for the kid to play ball. It’s the same thing. We have four kids and they’re grown now. This is our new baby.”

The role of money doesn’t seem to bother anyone other than the owner-handlers, perhaps because campaigns have been extremely pricey since the ’70s.

David Frei, the public face of the Westminster Dog Show, sounds mostly unbothered by the sums. Well, he is disturbed by rare reports of people mortgaging their homes to show their dogs. And now that so many dogs have multiple owners, he is done trying to read all of their names during the telecast.

“People say to me, ‘Why didn’t you read off the names of all the owners?’ ” he says. “Well, if the dog has six different owners, that’s the only thing I’d get to say about the dog.”

With luck and a stellar performance, Sloan might be a name that Mr. Frei utters when it’s time to announce the winners. She trotted to a rather quick victory over Apollo in Portland, padding around the ring with a champion’s poise, a tiny snowbank on paws.

When the show begins in Madison Square Garden, she’ll have everything she needs to take home top honors: wealthy patrons, an esteemed handler and an expensively won reputation  to put it in dog-fancier terms  as a terrific little bitch.