Designer dogs – cool pets or expensive mutts?
What are puggles, labroodles and dorgis’? No, not characters from a Tolkien or a Harry Potter novel. These are designer dogs and the norm for naming them is to give them portmanteau names, i.e. a Daschund/Corgi combination gives you a dorgis.
Advocates of breeding designer dogs justify the idea saying that hybrids are carefully bred to display desired characteristics and weed out undesirable ones. Thus, if you are looking for a hybrid that sheds less and is gentle with kids, you would go for a cross obtained by pairing a poodle and a labrador. This, according to some, justifies the premium price that designer dogs attract.
Intentional crossbreeds are supposed to reduce specific breed-related genetic disorders. However, an absence of standards and no established organizations of breeders of designer dogs mean that such claims are hard to verify. Designer dog enthusiasts also tout “hybrid vigor” as a factor in favor of crossbred pups but this too is not a verified fact.
Those who find the designer dog business disagreeable say that these dogs are just glorified mutts sold to gullible customers. With purebreds, you know the pros and cons of going in for a breed. There is no such guarantee with a designer dog. Also, the increasing demand has led to an increase in the number of “backyard breeders” which leads to a spate of such novelty puppies that are poorly bred and many have to be euthanized because they are too sick or there is no space available in dog pounds. Dog enthusiasts decry the demand for designer dogs when there are so many dogs languishing in dog shelters.
This said it is difficult to defy the power of a trend, especially when the trendsetters are people like Jake Gyllenhaal, James Gandolfini, Sylvester Stallone and Julianne Moore. All these Hollywood A-listers are proud owners of puggles that can cost anywhere from $900 to $1200.
First generation hybrids exhibit uniformity in type because the parents have little genetic variation. This uniformity of characteristics is lost when later generations are mated and what is achieved is a mishmash of characteristics; while on one the other hand mating specimens from breeds more removed from the original leads elimination of undesirable characteristics.
First-generation hybrids tend to be fairly uniform in type, because each has one set of genes from one parental breed and one from the other, and each parental type has limited genetic variation. However, this uniformity is lost when first-generation hybrids are bred to one another because they are sampling from parents each with more variability at each gene. That’s why second generation progeny tend to be a mishmash of characteristics of both original parental breeds, often with no two looking alike. For this reason, breeding second generations of designer dogs often isn’t attempted.
To round off the article, here are some random designer dog facts
Designer dogs are “mixed-breed” and not real breeds; a slightly ruder term for mixed breeds is “mutts”
Designer dogs are bred using two different breeds; designer breeds themselves are not used for breeding because the results are variable; designer dogs do not breed “true”… so you do not necessarily beget a labroodle litter with two labroodles.
The craze for designer dogs is fuel for the puppy mill industry and the desire for designer dogs often stems from shallow needs to ape some starlet or sport what’s trendy.
A designer dog is not healthier physically or mentally than a purebred or any other mixed-breed dog that you may wish to obtain from a dog pound. The cantel is a designer breed where you “can’t tell” its progenitors; it’s a secret. Beyond its poodle and bichon contributors, the creator of this breed is not willing to divulge more.
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Missy Elliot - September 11th, 2007 8:41 pm
Julianne Moore doesn’t own a Puggle. She owns a black lab mix. Just FYI (you can google image to see photos).