Who Is the Cutest Dog in the World?

Fair warning: you are asking a Boo fan site, so you can guess our answer. But the question has a real history, an actual crowned champion, and a genuinely interesting answer about what happened to the title. Here it is.

The dog who held the title

“World’s Cutest Dog” is not an official award. No kennel club bestows it. It became a real title the way most internet things become real: everyone just agreed.

The dog everyone agreed on was Boo, a teacup Pomeranian from San Francisco with a teddy bear haircut. When his Facebook page exploded in 2010, the world’s media needed a shorthand for who this dog was, and “World’s Cutest Dog” stuck. It appeared in headlines, on his four books, on his official Gund plush line. For nearly a decade, if you typed this page’s question into a search engine, the internet’s answer was one word long: Boo.

He held the title until his death in January 2019, and here is the thing: nobody has really taken it since. Plenty of adorable dogs have millions of followers, but no single dog has ever again been THE cutest dog in the world, the one your grandmother and your group chat both knew about. Boo’s full story, and what happened to him, is here.

What made Boo the cutest?

Science actually has a partial answer. Humans are wired to respond to “baby schema”: round faces, big eyes, small noses, soft contours. Puppies have it; Boo, thanks to a short haircut that rounded his face into a teddy bear shape, kept it his whole life. He looked permanently like a stuffed animal that had learned to walk, and 16 million Facebook fans responded exactly the way biology predicted.

The haircut, by the way, was an accident of necessity, and it became so famous that groomers still take requests for “the Boo” by name. That story is on our page about the Boo cut.

Today’s contenders

If the title were contested today, the shortlist would look something like this:

• Jiffpom: the strongest claim. Also a Pomeranian, also teddy-bear trimmed, with Guinness records and one of the largest pet followings on earth. The natural heir.
• Doug the Pug: Nashville’s celebrity Pug, with books, merch, and famous friends.
• Whichever puppy your feed showed you this morning: and honestly, that is the real answer now. The age of one universally crowned dog ended when the internet fractured into algorithmic feeds. Boo may have been the last dog everyone agreed on.

The rest of the era’s greats, and what became of them, live on our famous internet dogs page.

Looking for a cutest-dog-breeds list?

If you came here shopping for a breed rather than a history lesson, the look most people mean by “cutest” is the teddy bear look, and we keep an honest guide to every breed that delivers it, including what the grooming actually involves.

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