The Buda Wiener Dog Races

Buda calls itself the Wiener Dog Capital of Texas, and it earned the title in a park beside the old main street. The Buda Lions Club ran the first races in 1997, after member Diane Krejci saw an identical event in Savannah, Georgia. About three dozen dachshunds entered that first year, under the banner The Amazing Wiener Dog. By the years just before the pandemic the event was drawing close to seven hundred dogs and as many as twenty thousand spectators, several times the population of the town at the time. It paused for two years and returned in 2022. The heats anchor a weekend festival in the park, with a parade, a costume contest for the dogs, food stalls and live music going on around them. The format is simple and the outcome rarely is. Dogs run a short straight course in heats, released at one end and called from the other by an owner holding something the dog wants. A meaningful proportion of entrants stop, turn round, sit down or leave the track altogether, which the crowd enjoys at least as much as a clean run. Everything the races raise goes to Lions Club causes: sight and hearing programmes, scholarships and local charities. It is the same model that keeps Wimberley Market Days running twenty-odd miles west. A surprising amount of civic funding in small Texas towns rests on one absurd annual event apiece, and Buda's is among the most successful of them.