I don’t know, that cat looks rather dignified, to me. With his fur the way it is, it looks almost like a lion’s mane.
I heard a story once of a family whose dog had a litter of puppies on them, and they were trying to get rid of them. They ran an ad in the paper for two weeks “Eight beautiful puppies, free to a good home”, but had no takers. Then they changed the ad to “Seven beautiful and one very ugly puppy, free to a good home”. Within two days, they had adopted out the ugly one eight times.
“A widespread investigation of funeral homes, morgues, and hospitals has concluded that the unburied dead have been returning to life and seeking human victims. It’s hard for us here to be reporting this to you, but it does seem to be a fact.”
With animals, it’s so hard to classify one as truly ugly. Even that cat is ‘so ugly it’s cute’.
The only thing I’ve ever found that’ll make me think an animal is ugly is its personality - it could be the most gorgeous looking critter in the world, but if it’s vicious I’ll remain firmly convinced that it’s dreadful. Case in point, my grandmother’s cat - glorious long, smoke-coloured fur, but the temperament of a demon. Every time I looked at it, I saw an ugly cat - but on a purely superficial level, she was quite lovely.
So it’s not just me, eh? This is going to sound dumb, but I’d convinced myself that what I grew up knowing as “Persians” were just long haired cats, and that I’d been wrong about what a Persian looked like, since Persians have pug faces! But no, they WERE Persians, but “Persian” has changed. Huh. Interestink…