There are no underdog stories at the Westminster Kennel Club show. That’s because everyone entered in the two-day canine competition is already a champion. The most important dog show in the country, the WKC has staged the contest since 1877 and the winner is considered “America’s Dog” for the next year.

“Westminster is so different from the other shows that it can be a bit of an equalizer,” Josh Dean wrote of the WKC in an excerpt from his new book, Show Dog. “It takes certain dogs way outside of their comfort zones. They spend their day cooped up in stuffed aisles, show in front of a crowd of thousands, and then exit the building into a loud and intimidating city with virtually no grass.” And winning isn’t even everything. “At Westminster, second (or third, or fourth) is not a disappointment; on the contrary, it is a career accomplishment for most dogs.”

Retiring from dog show competition can also provide a pretty sweet life for some top dogs. In 1995, Susan Orlean profiled “Biff” for The New Yorker on the eve of his final appearance at Westminster. And she was clearly smitten with this stud. “If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale,” Orlean wrote. “Biff is perfect. He's friendly good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools. He's not afraid of commitment. He wants children -- actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun.”

Of course, there is also a darker side to dog shows. In “Can the Bulldog Be Saved,” Benoit Denizet-Lewis wrote about the devastating effects that inbreeding has had on the species—all in the name of producing the traits that make the dog so adorable to owners. “A typical breed will have one or two common problem areas,” humane society spokesman Brian Adams told Denizet-Lewis. “The bulldog has so many. When I first started working at Angell, the joke was that these dogs are a $5,000 check just waiting to happen. But the joke gets old fast, because many of these dogs are suffering.”

Adding insult to all of those injuries is that fact that the bulldog doesn’t even do well in competition. “There is perhaps no dog that seems more out of place at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show than the bulldog,” Denizet-Lewis noted. “While other breeds practically prance across the show ring, heads held high in a seemingly conscious display of their rarefied status, the waddling bulldog serves as a kind of unintentional comic relief.

“The last time a bulldog won best in show at Westminster was 1955, and it has been nearly 30 years since a bulldog made it out of the group competition, which pits it against other nonsporting yet decidedly higher-brow breeds — including what may be the bulldog’s aesthetic opposite, the poodle.”