The World’s Ugliest Dog is picked

It was hard to deny the fact that Gus -- a one-eyed, three-legged hairless Chinese crested with skin cancer -- wasn’t exactly a looker. It didn’t help that he spent most of the three-hour event sleeping in a baby blanket in owner Jeanenne Teed’s arms with his tongue hanging out. Or that he sometimes bites when folks get too close.

But that turned out to be a winning combination for the crowd favorite and ultimate winner of this anti-beauty pageant for pups held each year in Petaluma at the Sonoma-Marin Fair. Consider it a nod to the underest of underdogs. ‘Big buckets of drool get extra points,’ said emcee Brent Farris of radio station KZST, during Friday’s event. ‘So do missing limbs.’ Not that Gus didn’t have some serious competition for the pug-ugliest pooch on the planet. This year’s contest included 15 pups at various levels on the ‘yikes’ scale, from Princess Chelsea, a blind Chinese crested (a popular ugly dog breed), whose hairless condition only accentuated the strawberry-sized growth on her leg, to Buster, the bug-eyed Chihuahua mutt.