Sixty-Six Dachshunds Raced Against Each Other At Germantown’s Running of the Weenies

A dachshund named Loie won the Running of the Weenies at the Germantown Festival outside Memphis on Sept. 12, first home in a race that drew 66 registered dogs.

Zula finished second for owners Baran and Helen Carter, with Poe third for Casen Knight and Amanda Miller. Loie belongs to Matt Wukasch. The costume contest, judged before the racing, drew 14 entries and went to Mandy Hurdle’s Clara, turned out as Dolly Parton. The City of Germantown put out the results on Sept. 16, four days after the fact.

The annual race is presented by the Germantown Animal Shelter and held at the Germantown Charity Horse Show Arena on the Saturday of the festival, costume judging at 11 a.m. and the dogs off half an hour later. This year’s festival was the 53rd, spread across Sept. 12 and 13, with nearly 400 craft vendors and free admission. The city’s announcement thanked everyone who came out to watch and called the race one of the festival’s “most entertaining traditions.”

Dachshund racing is a wider circuit than one festival sideshow suggests. The Wienerschnitzel Wiener Nationals, first run at Los Alamitos Race Course in California in 1996, held its 29th running in July, and the Event News Enterprise reported a record field of more than 120 dachshunds. Bonnie, an 18-month-old from Farmersville in Tulare County, took the championship in 6.5 seconds over roughly 50 yards, collecting $1,000, a golden jacket and a doghouse shaped like a Wienerschnitzel restaurant. The track says the event has raised about $315,000 across its life for the Seal Beach Animal Care Center, which takes in strays around Orange County.

Novelty racing has been having a good year more generally. A Vancouver runner covered 26.2 miles across five Costco warehouses in a hot dog costume, and a field capped at 100 will race a marathon inside an IKEA store in Croydon, London, on Dec. 13.

The breed’s own club has been against the whole idea for years, though not for the reason most people would guess. The Dachshund Club of America objects on breeding grounds, arguing that racing pushes people to breed dachshunds for speed rather than to the breed standard and opens the door to what it calls exploitation by owners who do not have the dogs’ interests at heart. It dislikes the association with greyhound tracks too. The American Kennel Club’s Dachshunds in the News column, which points readers to that policy, put it more mildly back in 2018, saying it “generally frowns on organized Dachshund racing.”

The spine is a separate argument, and the club’s material on it does not mention racing anywhere. Its booklet on intervertebral disk disease, written by a veterinary neurologist in 1993, says disk degeneration in the breed can begin as early as six months and that roughly one dachshund in four will have some degree of disk trouble in its lifetime, most often between the ages of three and seven. “If the nucleus pulposus has not herniated but significant weakening of the annulus fibrosus exists, one good jump off the couch is all it may take for the dog to become hopelessly paralyzed from irreversible spinal cord injury,” the booklet says.

Either way, the breed sits at the wrong end of most running advice. Marathon Handbook’s own guide to the best running dogs is blunt about it, noting that very short legs are exhausted “within a matter of blocks” and that running can worsen the structural problems long-bodied dogs already carry. Owners after a real training partner are usually pointed toward building the dog up gradually and waiting until it is 18 to 24 months old.

None of which makes one dash across a horse show arena the main hazard in a dachshund’s week. The club’s advice is duller than a race day: keep the dog lean, limit the jumping, and crate-train it so it can be confined quietly when it needs to be.