Kicker: Unusual beauty contest

NICK EICHER, HOST: Here's an unusual beauty contest:

ANNOUNCER: … the World’s Ugliest Dog …

I give you the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds Ugliest Dog competition.

This year the honors go to an eight-year-old Pekingese. And if I could show you a picture, you'd immediately understand both why he won and why he was named as he is: Wild Thang.

I'm talking never-been-to-the-dog-groomer kind of wild. He's got this explosion of hair, never been cut. His tongue is always hanging out.

And you wonder why it took the little fella five years finally to break through. Wild Thang’s owner Ann Lewis is five-thousand-dollars richer and she got a guest hit on the Today Show.

LEWIS: We had so much fun and it’s for such a good cause: It's all about rescues …

And the lesson that even ugly dogs are lovable.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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