And then there are Queen Elizabeth II’s corgis.
Chunky little guys. Potato-shaped body and clownish faces. Short kings. Stocky, bossy dogs who think they’re fat—who apparently have no idea they’re a bloated, toast-colored cylinder of a dog, hanging inches off the ground—because they have a job (keeping livestock and/or young children by nipping at their heels). Whose most notable feature after their short, stocky legs is their thick, fuzzy buttocks.
“We talk a lot about their butts,” says Connie Cheng. “Crazy butts. Stir the butts.
Cheng, 33, is the owner of CorgiThings, a range of corgi-themed products, and the ‘we’ in that sentence are the corgi people, for whom the death of the British monarch is the end of an era all along. different fact: the fluffbutts of Buckingham Palace.
Corgis have long pondered the breed’s association with royalty.
“People were like, ‘What kind of dog is that?’ and we’d say, “A corgi, you know, like the queen has.” And that would be immediately bring that image to people’s minds because they would see it on TV with them,” says Carrie Chase, 63, a corgi breeder in Martinsburg, W.Va. and an American Kennel Club judge. “She was almost part of the family.”
Many champion corgis in the United States have a connection to the Queen’s dogs, even if it’s distant – Chase, for example, has a dog descended from one of the breeding corgis that bred with royalty. His dog’s mother is, alas, a commoner, but the dog is still a thoroughbred: Not a dorgi, the dachshund-corgi cross the queen is credited with accidentally creating.
“I don’t really approve of that,” says Chase, a corgi purist.
When Bobbe Lord, a longtime corgi breeder from New Jersey, was assigned to stand the Westminster Dog Show’s annual “Meet the Breeds” event years ago, a colleague mentioned she shared a certain resemblance to the sovereign. She decided to take advantage of it.
“So I made a dress,” Lord said, “and over the years I’ve had different wigs so, you know, as I got older I got a lighter wig.”
The corgi folks have set up a castle backdrop for Lord to pose for photos with his subjects, like a mall Santa for the stocky, oblong dog lovers. Posing with Rebecca, an award-winning corgi, she tried to stay in character – carrying a handbag, as the Queen usually did, so that commoners wouldn’t make the faux pas of trying to shake her hand. “I would do a little wave,” says Lord, who posed as the Queen for several years until the coronavirus shut down the “Meet the Breed” event.
If that sounds like a bit of a stretch, know that corgis are a special breed, Cheng says.
“I think we’re naturally a bit clumsy, but we’re also a bit bossy,” she says. Corgis “have a little attitude, but like, in a bubbly way. I think that’s how most Corgi owners are.
That might describe His Royal Highness, we guess. But chances are she doesn’t have the same vocabulary to describe the breed’s other charms.
“When they’re sitting down, their little thighs and little legs look like drumsticks. We call them ‘drums’,” Cheng said. “When they lie down, because their bodies are so thick, they literally look like loaves of bread you can slice,” so there are plenty of memes about Wonder Bread, a popular Halloween costume for corgis.
This brings us into the realm of commoners. Many members of a new generation of Corgi owners associate the breed with memes more than monarchs. Corgis had a moment in the mid-2010s as the “it” dog of the internet, between Shiba Inus and, briefly, huskies. In 2021, they were the 11th most popular breed in the United States, according to the American Kennel Club. Influencer database Influence.co lists more than 1,200 corgifluencers.
“I give BuzzFeed a lot of credit for that because I remember they were always posting corgi memes and corgi GIFs and all the listicles of silly corgi stuff,” says Connie Wu, 38, owner of Sneakers, an Internet site. famous corgi who has over 130,000 Instagram followers and charges $200 for a cameo. Wu didn’t learn about the queen’s corgis until later, and while she found it “lovely,” she wasn’t too impressed either. Let’s just say that Sneakers won’t do bereavement tribute posts.
“The British monarchy is something that… people have very mixed feelings about,” Wu says.
But corgis were one of the things that people found endearing. In a family for which lineage is paramount, dogs of course have a pedigree: Based on the queen’s original corgi — a birthday present from her parents, named Susan — came over 30 offspring, with names like Geordie and Jolly, Pickles and Tinker, “Windsor Loyal Subject”, Dipper and Disco and Dagger, and, oddly enough, a second Dipper. A 1986 UPI story about the family said BBC workers wryly called the Queen’s Christmas shows “Corgi and Bess”. They played a prominent role in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.
They may have been cute, but they weren’t always good. You know there are good stories when the Royal Corgis Wikipedia page has an entire section called “Victims”. One was the Queen herself, who suffered a bite on the hand that required three stitches when a scrum of eight corgi broke at Windsor Castle in 1991. Buckingham Palace did not name the culprit, but the Sydney Morning Herald implicated Spark, Myth, Fable, Diamond, Kelpie, Phoenix and Piper in the fight.
A royal commentator called these corgis ‘awful little hairbrushes, awful little brats’. Another – Bruce Fogle, author of ‘The Dog’s Mind’ – said such attacks had happened before.
“Indeed, this stuff can go on for years, especially with female dogs, because they rarely, if ever, forgive,” Fogle told the Herald. (“Bitches Rarely Forgive”, by the way, would make a great T-shirt, corgi or otherwise.)
The Queen stopped breeding her corgis in 2015, although she has received several dogs since then as gifts. When the remaining dogs die, there will be no more royal corgis.
“I didn’t accept,” Cheng said. “I don’t want the legacy to stop.”
When the Palace announced the Queen’s death last week, it sparked a flurry of questions among the community. Where were the corgis? What would become of them? Who would take care of them next? Corgi members drew a line in a 2015 Vanity Fair article about how the queen gave up breeding because she “didn’t want to leave any young dogs behind. She wanted to end it.
“Wild that the queen requested that her surviving corgis be mummified to serve her in the afterlife,” tweeted comedian Vinny Thomas.
Corgi lovers quickly got their answer: Earlier this week, the Palace announced that the remaining dogs would be cared for by Prince Andrew, the Queen’s most outrageous child, and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson . This was, for many corgis, a great disappointment.
“It’s definitely not our first choice,” Wu says, referring to Andrew.
Even without the queen, corgis will retain their regal aura – for a little while, at least.
“I think it will eventually fade like anything else,” Chase says. But “in the future, we will still use it. We’re still going to say, ‘As the queen did.’ “Uh, had.
Young royals have different tastes in dogs. Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales have a black cocker spaniel named Orla. Last month, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex adopted Mia, a beagle rescued from abusive conditions at a kennel in Virginia. Meghan previously adopted Guy, a fellow beagle, and described herself as “a proud rescue dog owner”.
As for the new king and queen consort: Charles and Camilla own two Jack Russell terriers, named Beth and Bluebell. Could this be the start of a new royal era for Jack Russells?
“I didn’t hear any fanfare,” says Catherine Brown, 77, president of the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America. Jack Russells are “the worker’s terrier”, she says, so they are a good fit for the king, who “has a very humble side to him”.
The breed will make an excellent royal dog, says Keleigh Lawson, 54, a Jack Russell fancier in Yorktown, Va. and former president of the Virginia Jack Russell Terrier Club. Dogs are known for their hunting instinct, focus, bravery and above all their energy.
“It’s exciting” to think of Jack Russells walking around Buckingham Palace, Lawson says. “But I can’t imagine my dogs in there. They would destroy the place.
