UKIAH, CA., 8/18/26 — Jinny Lu, 6, of Ukiah, who as of Friday is the World’s Ugliest Dog, is tired of being lionized. Lions are cats, after all.
She spent Tuesday morning asleep on a couch at Ukiah’s the Pug Hotel, in her pearls, tongue hanging out the left side of her mouth, while 11 other pugs worked the room around her. Nobody could get her to lift her head.
“No more interviews, she says,” said Michelle Grady, who runs the sanctuary for pugs who need a hand..
Jinny Lu, a South Korean transplant who lives at the senior pug sanctuary in Ukiah, was named the World’s Ugliest Dog on Friday, Aug. 14, at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa. The prize was $5,000 from sponsor Mug Root Beer, a spot on a root beer can and a trip to New York, where she and Grady did two Today show segments and two NBC News Now appearances on Monday.
The contest is produced by the Sonoma-Marin Agricultural Association, which billed this year’s contest as the 50th. Sources differ on the count — the same event was called the 34th annual as recently as two years ago, and winners have been recorded since 1976 — but 50 is the number on offer, and 50 will do. In dog years that’s 350, which entitles it to some vagueness about its age.
Grady had a plan for roughly four minutes of national airtime.
“The first NBC Now, I managed to say Pug Hotel,” she said. “The second NBC Now, I managed to say Pug Rescue of Korea. So I felt like my job was done.”
Does she have a green card?
Jinny Lu came to California through Pug Rescue of Korea, a Long Beach nonprofit that rescues neglected pugs in South Korea and flies them to homes in the United States. Grady said she adopted her three years ago after seeing her on Instagram, in the months after her own Korean pug died suddenly in her lap.
“I was like, oh, that’s my partner,” Grady said. “She’s gonna look good in pearls.”
Two other pugs live at the sanctuary permanently. They’re not adoptable, and they’re not going anywhere.
“They came in so traumatized,” Grady said.
It was Jinny Lu’s fourth time in the contest, and she finished second last year. Grady entered the first time as a favor to a friend who was short on dogs.
“She called me up and said, hey, we need losers,” Grady said. “Can you bring a couple of pugs? Because we need losers in order to have winners.”
This year Jinny Lu took the Spirit Award first, and Grady assumed that was that.
“I was just up on the stage with a smaller trophy and totally content, and waiting to see who was going to win number one,” she said.
A sanctuary, not a rescue
Grady draws the distinction before anyone asks.
“Of course, we’re a sanctuary. We’re not rescuing,” she said. “We’re a sanctuary. That’s the difference between us. And we work with the local rescuers.”
The Pug Hotel is in its sixth year and moved to Ukiah from Rohnert Park earlier this year. It’s registered as a 501(c)(3), and its stated mission is to take senior and traumatized pugs — the dogs least likely to be adopted anywhere else. Miss Lucy, whose back legs don’t work, was surrendered directly to the sanctuary and has now rejected three sets of wheels.
“Sometimes people will, like, their parents died,” Grady said. “Or go into memory care. We have a lot of them. And they’ll bring us the pug.”
The intake comes in two predictable waves.
“We typically get them in at the beginning of the summer,” Grady said. “Go on vacation, and they don’t want to pay to have their pug taken care of, so they take them to the shelter.”
The second wave is Christmas Eve. One year the sanctuary took in three. Grady said the suspicion is that people are getting a new puppy and clearing out the old one. A 12-year-old black pug was surrendered on Aug. 17 and is expected at the sanctuary once his medical work is done.
3 dogs waiting
The pugs Grady can’t move are the healthy ones.
“We’re having a tough time getting these healthy boys adopted,” she said. “It kind of comes in waves.”
Three are available now. Bomber, 7, is a black male out of the Central Valley, neutered and microchipped, with a dental done and his nostrils widened and palate trimmed so he can breathe. He wants to be somebody’s constant companion, and the sanctuary says he does best as an only dog or with one that will ignore him.
Ace, 8 or 9, is sight-impaired and does fine with regular eye drops; he walks well on a leash, almost never barks and is good with small children. Sparky, 7 or 8, will hike as long as he has water. Grady has taken to calling him Aardvark, having concluded he was never going to answer to Sparky.
“I think one of our big messages we’d like to get out is that we have adoptable pugs,” Grady said. “We have some beautiful adoptable pugs.”
The attention hasn’t translated. Asked whether people had been calling since the win to say they wanted a pug, Grady said no.
“They want interviews,” she said.
She is trying to hand the scheduling to somebody else. Nikola Clay, a sanctuary volunteer, handled things at the Pug Hotel while Grady was in New York.
“I can’t keep up,” Grady said. “I need somebody to manage the calendar.”
Adoption applications are on the sanctuary’s website, thepughotel.org.
Pugween, and a backyard made of dirt
The sanctuary’s main fundraiser is Pugween, set for Saturday, Oct. 17, in Rohnert Park. Pugs run loose in costume in a blocked-off school gymnasium, with vendors, a raffle and a live auction. Grady said the artwork had just come in and the details weren’t posted online yet.
The prize money goes to the sanctuary, and it takes a couple of months to arrive.
“They wrote that as if I was going to be rich,” Grady said. “But honestly, Jinny always donates money to the Pug Hotel. So it would go to the Pug Hotel.”
The immediate need is the backyard. Grady expected weeds and was prepared to mow weeds. What she has is dirt. The sanctuary has been collecting quotes on pea gravel, artificial turf and grass.
A star is born
More appearances are coming, including interviews out of Australia, and Grady is trying to find the dog a break somewhere in the schedule.
Jinny Lu has been unbothered by all of it. At a Broadway show she worked her way down a row of laps, came back to Grady’s for the second act and fell asleep. Four police officers stopped her in Times Square to take turns getting their pictures taken with her. In an Anthropologie store, three separate groups recognized her, and then a woman came up on the second floor, said “that has to be Jinny Lu,” and told Grady she had written the New York Times article about her.
Grady put it in terms of the job description.
“In the history of pugs, their only job has been to be a companion to a person,” she said.
Ruff