16 Ugliest Dogs The World Has Ever Seen

The kind of faces even mothers would struggle to love.

Ben Margot/AP
It's a strange fact of being a parent: you never know how ugly your child is, even if you have the kind of friends who take great pleasure in informing you at every turn. That's because objectivity is impossible when love is involved, and the same tends to be the case with pets: cat owners swear that their feline is different, that it isn't the high-maintenance terrorist that all cats secretly are, even as it claws holes in their furniture smugly. Dogs are less inherently evil, but their owners still seem impervious to any criticism: they'll swear blind that their bull mastic wasn't that sort of dog as it drags another postman into the kitchen screaming, and there's never any way that it was their beloved pooch that escaped and left several dirty bombs around the neighbourhood. Thank heavens then for those self-aware dog lovers who actually recognise that theirs might not be the most perfect creatures in the world. Some - like the entrants into the annual World's Ugliest Dog Contest held in California - have probably gone too far though, celebrating their gollum like lovelies in the most perverse "beauty" contest ever conceived. In honour of those little loveable monsters, what follows is a compendium of the most famous and infamous of the Ugliest Dogs in the world. The long and short of it seems to be that you shouldn't buy a Chinese Crested if you're looking for something that isn't going to give the neighbourhood children nightmares for the rest of their life.

16. Elwood

Ben Margot/AP

Meet Elwood: the Chinese Crested and Chihuahua mix dog who won the title of 2007 World's Ugliest Dog at the annual contest in Petaluma, California. Sadly, the punk-looking beast died unexpectedly on Thanksgiving morning in 2013.

 
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