End of the line for Gus, the world's ugliest dog

Gus, the spotted, gnarled, one-eyed, three-legged pooch who was in June crowned the world's ugliest dog, died yesterday in Florida. He was nine.

Hairless but for a sparse white plume atop his head, the pink-and-black mottled Chinese Crested pooch succumbed to the cancer that had taken a hind leg.



Though half blinded in a fight with the family cat, at the end he kept his remaining eye, brown and bulbous, lovingly on his guardian Jeanenne Teed, she told the St Petersburg Times, which first reported Gus's death yesterday. He had a long, skinny rat tail, and looked as if he had been in a fire. When Gus accompanied Teed's daughter Janey to school one day, frightened teachers corralled him into a bathroom with a broomstick.

Teed rescued Gus from a neglectful home when he was a puppy. He had been kept in crate in a garage. Rising from those humble origins, Gus entered the California contest this June, after being too ill with cancer to compete last year.