Why Are We So Obsessed With Ugly Dogs?
The era of the gorgeous golden retriever is over. Today’s most coveted pooches have frightful faces bred to tug at our hearts.
5 min
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.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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