At its Upfronts presentation on May 13, Netflix dropped the usual pile of announcements: a Will Ferrell comedy, an East of Eden series with Florence Pugh, more Love is Blind. Buried in the same press run was a line that made every dog person sit up and every cat person narrow their eyes. Starting in February 2027, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show streams live on Netflix. The biggest, oldest, most televised celebration of dogs in America is moving to the same platform that streams WWE Raw. And there is still no cat equivalent anywhere on it.
What actually got announced
The 151st Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show runs January 30 through February 2, 2027. Daytime breed judging and agility events happen at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, streamed live on Tudum.com and the kennel club’s own site. The evening group competitions and the Best in Show finale come from Madison Square Garden, live on Netflix on February 1 and 2. Over 3,000 champion dogs, 200 breeds, one Norwegian judge named Espen Engh deciding which dog wins the whole thing.
This is a real handover, not a side deal. Westminster has been on Fox Sports since 2017, and before that USA Network aired it for 32 straight years. So the show that taught Americans the difference between a Doberman and a Weimaraner is leaving traditional television entirely. If you want to watch Best in Show in 2027, you need a Netflix login. That is a strange sentence to write about a dog show, and it tells you exactly where the entertainment industry is heading.
Why Netflix wants a dog show
Netflix has spent the last two years quietly turning itself into a live-events company. WWE Raw airs there every Monday night on a deal that runs for the next decade. Boxing, Major League Baseball, five NFL games in 2026 including the league’s first game in Australia, the NFL Honors ceremony, stand-up specials, awards shows. The pattern is clear: Netflix does not want full season-long sports packages, it wants one-off events it can promote like premieres. A dog show fits that template better than almost anything. It happens once a year, it has a built-in finale, and the audience already knows it exists.
The numbers back the move. Fox Sports pulled the most-watched Westminster in five years this February, with 600,000 people watching Penny the Doberman Pinscher take Best in Show, and the Masters Agility final drew 1.24 million, up 57 percent year over year. Dogs are not a niche. They are a reliable, low-drama, family-friendly broadcast that nobody fast-forwards. If you have read our piece on why cats knock things off tables, you already know animal content holds attention in a way scripted television envies. Netflix noticed the same thing.
The cat-shaped hole in the schedule
Here is the question nobody at the Upfronts asked. Netflix now streams the Westminster Dog Show, WWE wrestlers, NFL games, and competitive ladies-man comedies. Where is the cat programming? There is no live cat show on Netflix. There is no CFA Cat Championship broadcast, no agility special, no annual primetime event built around the most popular pet in the developed world. The platform that will spend real money to fly an NFL game to Australia cannot find a slot for a cat.
Cat people will tell you this is fine, because cats would refuse to participate anyway. They have a point. A dog show works because dogs want to be there. They trot, they pose, they make eye contact with the judge. Run the same format with cats and you get 200 champions, 3,000 hours of footage, and a Best in Show winner who spent the entire broadcast under a folding chair. We covered the deep version of this in our look at why cats knead: cat behavior is not built for performance, it is built for comfort. A cat does not audition. A cat decides.
But the absence still says something. The entertainment industry has decided dogs are content and cats are decoration. Dogs get the live broadcast and the Madison Square Garden finale. Cats get the meme, the reaction GIF, the background of someone else’s video call. One species gets a trophy on streaming, the other gets to be the internet’s unpaid mascot. We are not bitter about this. We are simply noting it, loudly, in a blog post, which is the most cat thing imaginable.
What a cat Westminster would actually look like
Let us play it out, because Netflix clearly will not. Picture the broadcast. The agility course: empty, because no cat ran it, three cats are asleep on the equipment. The breed judging: the judge approaches a Maine Coon, the Maine Coon leaves. Best in Show goes to whichever cat was least annoyed by the lighting. The commentary team spends 40 minutes describing a tail flick. Ratings would be either catastrophic or the biggest thing Netflix has ever aired, and there is genuinely no way to predict which.
The honest answer is that cats already have their version, and it is not a show, it is the entire internet. Every cat is a permanent, unscheduled, free broadcast. There is no off-season. The Westminster move just makes the imbalance visible: dogs get a structured event with a Norwegian judge, cats get an unstructured 24-hour stream watched by everyone, forever, with no rights deal and no royalties. If you enjoy the chaotic side of online pet culture, our history of cat memes from Victorian cabinet cards to AI brainrot is the closest thing to a Westminster archive cats will ever get.
The real takeaway
Strip away the cat-versus-dog joke and the Westminster deal is a genuinely useful signal about where television is going. A 150-year-old institution that survived 32 years on USA Network and nine on Fox just decided its future is a streaming app. Live events are the new theatrical release. The thing you cannot pirate easily and cannot skip, the thing that happens once and rewards being there, that is what platforms now fight over. A dog show is not a strange acquisition for Netflix. It is the purest possible version of the strategy.
And somewhere in a Netflix conference room, eventually, someone is going to look at the success of the dog show, look at the cat-shaped gap in the lineup, and pitch a live cat event. It will be a disaster. It will also probably break records. We will be watching, mostly to see the exact moment the Best in Show winner walks off the stage mid-coronation. February 2027 belongs to the dogs. The cats, as always, are playing a longer game.
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Originally published on Pudgy Cat
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