The more prestige a breed gets, the worse its future becomes.

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Frenchies have been marketed as the dog best suited to the lifestyles of the rich and quite possibly lazy. They don’t even need much exercise, for the simple reason that their numerous health problems can make too much exercise dangerous.

Rather than requiring human owners to change their lives to accommodate a new dog, the French bulldog is a breed that’s been broken to accommodate us. It’s not uncommon for Frenchies (like other small, trendy dog breeds) to be “housetrained” to exclusively go to the bathroom on pee pads, litter boxes, or turfgrass inside an apartment or on a balcony.

The Frenchie’s appeal isn’t just aesthetic but vaguely narcissistic. “We’ve bred them to look more like us,” says Alexandra Horowitz, a dog cognition expert and author of Our Dogs, Ourselves. They have a small nose that’s closer to their faces; their eyes are more wide-set; even their “smile” is vaguely human. When they vocalize or “talk,” it eerily mimics the tones of human speech. Frenchies make it easy for owners to project themselves onto their dogs without having to listen to what the dogs are actually saying.