A dog form is highly useful for a robot.

Even purely artistic uses need parametric models of organic things though. Games, other non-game modelling, 3d printing.

Both games and general modelling needs parametric versions of basically everything in the model. If you're trying to design and evaluate some cattle processing facility, you'll want a lot of randomly varied cow models.

But I bet the biggest use is games and movies. You don't model every dog from scratch, you take the parametric dog model and move the sliders to get all the different dogs in your commercial or show or game.

The initial ABC dataset is from public Onshape files -- clearly some people had a reason to design a dog model parametrically!