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Who would not want to award a blue ribbon to Boujee the golden retriever, with her boundless enthusiasm and ineffable talent for maintaining her dignity while clamoring for attention? One swoosh of her magnificent tail and it’s easy to see why this blond bombshell is the top-ranked golden competing at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, with judging to begin on Monday.
Although Boujee spent 2024 making friends and winning shows, she has little (or no, if history is any guide) chance of beating the other 2,500 entrants vying for Westminster’s coveted best in show award. In the 117 years that the award has been given, golden retrievers have won exactly zero times. (Wire fox terriers, for some reason, have won more often than anyone else — 15 times.)
This might seem unfair, given that goldens are, along with Labrador retrievers and French bulldogs, consistently the most popular dogs in the United States. (Neither of those breeds has ever won Westminster, either.) Even with the mysterious calculus of shows — dogs are judged not by how fabulous they are, but by how closely they adhere to the supposed Platonic ideal of their breed — it would seem to follow that sometime in the last century, there has existed a golden retriever whose golden retriever-ness exceeded, say, the Peke-iness of a Pekingese.
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Apparently not. (Pekingese, who to the untrained eye look less like dogs than majestic ambulatory hairpieces, have won six times.) The logic of these things is mysterious, even to dog experts.
“I did not answer your question, because I’m not sure I or any one else can,” said Barbara Pepper, chairwoman of the judges’ education committee at the Golden Retriever Club of America. “It’s one of those questions that can’t be answered.”
