141st Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

It’s once again time for that annual celebration of inbreeding and genetic disease that is the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Dogs have many admirable qualities including undeserved, unconditional love and should you have one in your temporary care I urge you to cherish it as I have mine (many over a century and a quarter, none currently). The cruelest thing I ever saw was a (temporary) neighbor’s dog on a 3 foot chain, fly covered and festering in feces on a bare patch of ground the other side of and impeccably painted picket fence. I was very young, the dog understandably hostile, and I didn’t yet know that there were adults I could talk to who might have been able to take the action I could not.

I think about it a lot to this very day and not in a way that reflects well on my character.

The systemic cruelty of breeding is under appreciated. For every Show Dog are hundreds condemned to blindness, deafness, kidney disease, diabetes, cancer, congestive heart failure, dysplasia, and other illnesses. In the best case they are only around for 15 or 20 years, unlike Parrots who last and last until you are either a dead one yourself or thoroughly sick of them and their sass.

NBC has been outbid by Faux for the rights to broadcast the show and they in turn have relegated it to Faux Sports One so you may not be able to watch as you have in years past.