This year’s World’s Ugliest Dog competition has found a winner, with a scruffy little pooch named Scamp the Tramp taking home the 2019 honours at the annual contest, held at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California.
As The Guardian reports, Scamp’s owner, Yvonne Morones, won an appearance with her pet on the “Today” show, along with $1,500 in cash, an additional $1,500 to donate to an animal shelter and “a trophy the size of a rottweiler.”
“He’s Scamp the Champ, no longer Scamp the Tramp,” Morones told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. “I think the audience saw his beautiful spirit and everything he’s given back to the community.”
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Morones rescued Scamp from a shelter in 2014 after seeing him on Pet Finder. “It was on the way home that I knew I made the right choice,” she explained. “There we were, two strangers in a car on the way home to a new start. Bob Marley was playing One Love and I looked over and little Scamp was bobbing his head. It was like he knew he had found his forever home.”
When not winning ugly-dog competitions, Scamp volunteers as a “reading dog” at a local elementary school, where children practice reading aloud to him, and also serves as a companion dog at a senior centre.
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This year’s competition did offer a sad note due to the absence of last year’s winner, a 9-year-old English bulldog named Zsa Zsa, who passed away just a few weeks after her 2018 win.
