Meet 2022’s World’s Ugliest Dog winner, an off-brand gremlin named Mr. Happy Face

Beauty, we all know, is in the eye of the beholder. While a puffball-covered affront to god can emerge as champion of the Westminster Dog Show, mutant canines whose appearances are no less horrifying than an overbred poodle are made to compete not for prestigious titles but for the infamy of being crowned World’s Ugliest Dog.

This is unfair, of course. All dogs, no matter what natural or arcane practices led to their birth, deserve our love. And yet, even with that said, we ask you to look upon Mr. Happy Face, winner of the 2022 World’s Ugliest Dog contest, and try to argue that he doesn’t deserve to win this year’s event.

Triumphing over far less unfortunate-looking contestants like the runners-up, a pair of animate brooms named Wild Thang and Monkey, Mr. Happy Face has become the champion of the first World’s Ugliest Dog event to be held since the pandemic began. One look at the creature, tongue-hanging out beneath two beady black eyes and a clump of patchy white hair, makes it clear how this canine gremlin earned the honor.

Thanks to a piece from Today, we learn how Mr. Happy Face came to be. His owner, Janeda Banelly, writes that she found the Chinese Crested-Chihuahua mix at a shelter in Arizona last August, where he’d arrived after living through years of abuse and neglect. Mr. Happy Face “suffered from tumors and multiple conditions and could have possibly been inbred.” At 17, he required medication and was only expected to live for “around a month.”

But Mr. Happy Face persevered under Banelly’s care. After he “hobbled up” to her at the shelter, Banelly says she “vowed that day [that] he would be so loved that he would never remember how awful his previous life had been.”

Despite existing in the world as a living testament to how the myth of the chupacabra came to be, Mr. Happy Face and Banelly do indeed seem to be full of joy. Banelly says that her dog’s big win is “an honor” and believes he’ll “help humans realize that even old dogs need love and a family, too.”

[via Boing Boing]

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