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12/05/2018 08:45 AMA little luck and a lot of charisma has made a top dog of Branford's own Ozzie, a rare, two-year-old purebred Tibetan Mastiff.
After three weeks of online voting, Ozzie recently cinched the win for the first annual cover contest of Connecticut Dog magazine. Last week, magazine publisher Melissa Roberts traveled from Glastonbury to Branford to meet up with Ozzie and his owners, Branford residents Pam Knapp and Bob Schwall. On the steps of Town Hall, Roberts presented them with a poster-sized version of the November/December 2018 issue featuring Ozzie on the front cover. Ozzie posed for the cover shot with professional photographer Kaitlyn Rosae of Mansfield.
Ozzie's odyssey to big win started back in August, when he and many other pups came out to enjoy Dan Cosgrove Animal Shelter's annual fundraiser/awareness event, "Woofstock" on the Branford green. Ozzie was on the green with his family, which also includes another sizable mountain dog, Zoe, a Great Pyrenees.
"I brought the dogs to Woofstock, and Melissa came out and said 'Can I take a picture of your dogs?' and I said, 'Sure,'" said Schwall. "People are always stopping us to see the dogs."
Roberts said she asked many pet owners that day if she could take photos of their pups, as she was working on creating a large group of entrants, from which finalists would be randomly selected, for the voting segment of the contest. She said she was drawn to Woofstock because of the size of the canine event.
Next, from 78 dogs entered in the contest, "...ten finalists were randomly picked out of a hat; and then from there, the dogs were put on our website, and we told everyone to go online and vote for your favorite dog," said Roberts.
The contest was published online at http://www.connecticutdog.com/index.html and on Facebook (@ConnecticutDog).
When Ozzie popped up among the finalists, Knapp said she was pleasantly surprised, but she and Schwall didn't expect their dog would win the vote.
"Honestly, I'm not a fan of these kinds of contests," said Knapp, laughing. "Who wants to ask 100 people to vote for my dog?"
"We thought for sure we didn't have a chance, because we thought certainly one of the other dogs would have a child with a Twitter account or something," Schwall added.
Roberts said there was quite an exciting voting horserace going on, right up until Ozzie was declared the winning dog.
"It was neck and neck for a while," she said. "It was good contest to watch, on my end."
Knapp and Schwall attribute Ozzie's win to both his magnetic charm and unusual breed. They chose his name based on his gentle, bear-like presence.
"When was a puppy, he looked like an old man -- he had this deep look on his face," said Schwall. "His true name is Osborn, and the entomology of that, going way back to the old Norse, means Divine Bear."
Knapp said Ozzie regularly pulls people over to greet him when he's out and about. During a photo session with his cover poster outside Town Hall last week, Ozzie's regal presence at the end of his lead literally stopped two cars on Town Hall Drive, with both drivers taking a moment to ask Schwall and Knapp about him.
"Tibetan Mastiffs are very rare. We've heard that he may be the only one in the state of this breed," said Schwall. "They're ancient – these are the dogs that the Dalai Lama has. In fact, they may be one of the founding breeds of other breeds."