Why Are We So Obsessed With Ugly Dogs?

Play, a four-year-old French bulldog, waddled down the street in Noho. Squinting in the morning sun, she had bat ears, a downturned mouth and the mien of a pissed-off mother-in-law.

“People tell me she’s ugly all the time,” said her owner Nakisha Lewis, 41, a stylist and impact strategist. “I think the little round face is absolutely adorable…but every parent thinks their baby is adorable.”

You can’t go around calling human babies ugly, but thankfully the rules are more lax with dogs.

I’ve been patrolling downtown Manhattan to find singularly unattractive breeds—then asking their owners why they chose them. (I haven’t asked if any believe the urban legend that dogs resemble their masters.)

As a superficial snob who grew up with golden retrievers that deserved Pantene commercials, I had to know: Why are we so into ugly dogs now?

In recent years, man’s best friend has plummeted from a 10 to a 2. Sure, you see lots of gorgeous doodles, but at the end of every second leash lurks a rat with an overbite or a popeyed goblin with ears so monstrous they make King Charles III’s seem not that big.

French bulldogs lead the charge for character-actor canines.

Celebs cradle the Yodalike pups, and millennials love them even more than a tasteful beige wall.

For 31 years Labradors topped the American Kennel Club’s purebred rankings, which are based on more than one million annual registrations.

But since 2022 Frenchies have been top dog, with Labs and golden retrievers settling for silver and bronze. It’s like the quarterback and homecoming queen losing a popularity contest to a wheezing weirdo.

Dr. Carly Fox, a senior veterinarian at New York’s Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, said that flat-faced dogs—they’re “brachycephalic” for people in the know—have been ascendant in the past decade.

Other popular members of this snub-nosed club include English bulldogs, Boston terriers, pugs and Brussels griffons.

A rival gang—more niche but no prettier—is the rat pack.

Think chihuahuas, hairless xoloitzcuintles and Chinese cresteds, a mostly hairless breed with wispy tufts on its head that the American Kennel Club called a “mover and shaker” and I call “a dog that got left in the microwave.”

This summer, a Chinese crested in a pink gown shivered through a starring role in Lena Dunham’s Netflix show “Too Much.”

The Victorians sparked the modern obsession with engineering “lots of different looking dogs to fit different human wants,” said Dr. Rowena Packer, senior lecturer at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College.

The malleability of the dog genome allows for enormous physical variety, she explained, meaning that breeders can push features to extremes—squashing snouts, piling on wrinkles.

To evaluate a dog’s alterations, said Packer, consider how much it deviates from the original archetype: the wolf. I’d wager a wolf would sooner recognize a sheep as one of its own than a grinning pug.

Hal Herzog, a professor emeritus of psychology at Western Carolina University who studies human-animal relationships, said dog breeds become popular in the same way fashion trends do.

We look to movies and celebrities and, above all, copy each other. Chance plays a huge role in a breed going viral, he said, but it helps to have some inherent appeal.

The allure of wackadoo breeds? For starters, most skew small. That suits postpandemic demand for apartment dogs that can also travel, said Paula Fasseas, founder of PAWS Chicago, a no-kill animal welfare organisation.

But the big draw of brachycephalic (brachy) dogs is their cheek-squeezing cuteness.

When owners gushed that their Frenchies and pugs resembled human babies, I took offense on behalf of all parents.

Yet studies show that flat-faced dogs possess “kindchenschema” or “baby schema,” a term coined by ethologist Konrad Lorenz to describe infantile features that elicit caregiving reactions.

With wide eyes, small noses and bigger, rounder heads, a brachy dog’s face “is far more human than, say, a Labrador’s,” said Packer.

Those looks come at a high cost. Packer said that Frenchies, pugs and English bulldogs are more prone to chronic eye disease, skin-fold infections and spinal problems, as well as breathing issues caused by truncated airways—and exacerbated by faces that are often flatter than in the past.

Fox, the vet, owns a Frenchie but called extreme brachy breeds “nightmares” from a medical perspective. (Love the look? Packer recommends a healthier mix like a jack russell-pug, the superbly named “jug.”)

Some experts argue that brachy dogs’ health problems can make them more desirable to owners.

Authorities such as James Serpell have suggested that these dogs’ neediness brings out our maternal instincts, Herzog noted.

Forget about throwing a stick; as one young woman told me while her wet-nosed darling relieved himself in the park, you must wipe a Frenchie’s butt . Packer called this phenomenon “the parentification of dogs.”

The oversharing park-goer compared her Frenchie to a Labubu.

A cynic might say that, like those hideous-slash-adorable dolls, brachy pups are a trendy accessory for young urbanites to parade about and post on Instagram. Less debatable: Like those grinning monsters, dogs with scrunched faces are hilarious.

“There’s a tragicomedy aspect” to Frenchies’ appearance, said the Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, who owns a rescue, Colette.

“They look like something out of a Cervantes novel…they have this lost soul thing.” They also remind him of the late comic actor Marty Feldman, whose googly eyes shot off in different directions.

“They’re not beautiful like a greyhound,” he added, “but, you know, we’re not dating dogs.”

A Frenchie owner expects to field compliments like, “Oh my god, that’s hysterical,” said Will Thrun, 27, who works in finance. At a Halloween dog parade in the East Village, Poppy, Thrun’s Frenchie, lay in the sun dressed as a taco while the ancestral gray wolves howled in their graves.

Elias Weiss Friedman, who shares his photos of New York dogs with the nearly 8 million followers on his Instagram account, the Dogist, said people increasingly want pooches that stand out.

A weirdo dog lets you “show your individuality,” said Terence Nelson, 38, an influencer marketing strategist in New York whose fuzzy Brussels griffon, Sue, is a dead ringer for an Ewok. (I kept my mouth shut when Frenchie owners praised their dogs’ “uniqueness” with literally dozens of other Frenchies snorting about nearby.)

Brian Lee, founder of Way of the Dog, a dog-behaviour program in Southern California, offers another explanation for the prevalence of odd-looking pups: the rise in rescue-dog adoptions. People may think “I want to help this innocent animal” rather than focus on looks, said Lee.

When people call Eve-Marie Kuijstermans’s dog ugly she considers it a compliment. Edgar Allan Pup (“Eddie”), her Chinese crested-chihuahua mix, is mostly hairless, with old-mannish tufts on his head.

“He could be 100 years old,” said Kuijstermans. (He’s five.) “Kids are very confused by him,” added the 41-year-old SVP for a communications firm.

Lately, Kuijstermans has spotted more Brussels griffons, Chinese cresteds and “interesting mixes”—a revenge-of-the-nerds backlash to the flocks of fluffy doodles.

“For me, Eddie’s cuteness lies in the fact that he’s kind of a weird little guy,” she said, as her pooch scrambled onto my knee to survey the dog park.

Suddenly, this golden-retriever lifer began to fall for a sweet little thing as cuddly as a broom.