Sickest Dumbass Headline of the Day.

Westminster Remembers Katrina's Lost Dogs

Come on, people. Where are our priorities?

When he was a boy, Hiram Stewart took a bus to Virginia, put a puppy in a paper bag and cradled it all the way home to New Orleans.

For more than three decades, he's cared for dogs in the Big Easy. Usually champion dogs, the kind that will reach the Best in Show ring this week at Westminster.

Still, nothing prepared him for what he saw happening to pets around town after Hurricane Katrina hit. Like that pair of little beagles with the pleading eyes, chained inside a garage.

"Every time a car would drive by, they'd come out, hoping it was their owner," Stewart said. "I knew the situation better than those two poor dogs did. It wasn't going to be just a few days."

Stewart believes those beagles came out OK. But thousands of their companions didn't, and America's most prestigious dog show remembered them — and those who helped — with a moving tribute Monday night at Madison Square Garden.

Hours earlier, the Westminster Kennel Club show started a day after the biggest snowstorm in city history blanketed New York. A total of 2,622 dogs in 165 breeds and varieties were entered — some didn't make it because of the bad weather, though there was no exact count.