Has the World Reached “Peak Bulldog”?

The world may have reached “Peak Bulldog” except for the US, where cruelty, stupidity and pedophilia has its own political party. 

“In the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and countries throughout continental Europe — including the French bulldog's namesake, France — the tide has turned, in some locations, dramatically. Pet owners increasingly are shunning flat-faced (technically known as brachycephalic) breeds like French bulldogs, English bulldogs and pugs amid mounting evidence that they have, on average, shorter lives than other dogs and cost their owners more in veterinary bills.

“One big country, though, is conspicuously bucking the trend.

“In the United States, the French bulldog was the most popular purebred dog in 2025, its fourth straight year at the top since it dethroned the Labrador retriever in 2022, according to the American Kennel Club.”

See >> VIN >> “Flat-faced-dog ownership slides globally; US an exception”.

A reader on Facebook cheered the news (as do I, with the obvious caveat), noting that “Education is a WONDERFUL thing.”

Yes, it is.  So too is water, the giver of all life.  But neither can penetrate a stone.

I responded:

I used to think people simply needed opportunity to get educated.

This was back when you had to drive or bicycle to the library or book store and spend life and cash to pry out a fact or two, and a week or a month of work to answer three questions.  

I dreamed of the day all human knowledge would be in our pockets for free. 

 

And then the iPhone and Google showed up, Youtube, Google Scholar, the Way Back Machine, etc.

And then I realized the error of my thinking.  

So many people are both lazy *and* incurious.

More recently, I discovered there’s a word for the Other Big Thing, which is the incurable condition of willful ignorance.   

 

The word is *amathia*, and it describes a stubborn refusal to learn or consider evidence, “often seen in capable people who choose delusion over truth”.

Yep.  That’s a Big Thing in the world of dogs. 

 

Still, lazy and incurious covers most of it. Amathia takes a wee bit of work, while most people are simply too lazy and incurious even for old-fashioned denial and delusion.