Designer Dog Breeding and Why I Object To It

Every once in while, someone will come up to me and ask what breed my Spoiled One is. I usually say "pound puppy special" Some people, though, really persist. They want to know what exactly he is. Hey, if they want to play guess the breed, I'm game. Then there are the ones who talking about trying to breed the 'perfect dog' or about designer dogs.

Designer dogs are deliberately bred mixes of poodles (usually) and something else and given a cutsie name - golden doodle, labradoodle, snoodle, puggle, ad nauseum. Now I have a mixed breed dog. I think he is a wonderful dog, but I really hate this little trend, for several reasons.

1.) It's just a marketing ploy

Basic marketing - create a need that only your product will fill, then fill it. So what? Well, if people need a dog, there are a hundred and something being euthanized at the shelter tomorrow. Big ones, small ones, mixed ones, pedigreed ones, even doodle variations. The market is glutted with dogs. That's one city. And most of them are being euthanized because there are no homes. Why produce more dogs to take up more potential homes, when there aren't enough homes in the first place?

Another problem with creating an imaginary need for designer dogs is what happens when people realize that they have been flim flammed and really don't need the dog. They can't really take it back and return it for store credit.

2.) It's poor genetics

You sometimes hear the rationalization that there is nothing wrong with it - lots of dog breeds were created by crossing existing breeds. This is true. Lots of breeds were created this way. But it takes many, many generations to evenly distribute and set the desired characteristics. You don't just mate two different breeds and call the puppies a new breed. The puppies that result from a first generation cross vary greatly in type and characteristics. And if you breed the cross-bred puppies, you get even more variation. You see, each puppy gets half its genes from the sire and half from the dam, but when the parents are labradoodles, the genes the puppies get can be almost all Labrador, almost all poodle or anywhere on the continuum of Labrador to poodle. Maybe it will shed, maybe it won't. No way to tell. What happens to the puppies that don't happen to have gotten the trendy characteristic?

Another genetic problem is that the breeders who have the best lines and have honed them over generation of dogs are not going to want to throw that effort away to produce cutsey puppies who won't reflect that effort. Designer dogs don't breed true. They can't be shown. The characteristics that the breeders have been honing for generations will be muddied or not apparent in the mix. So, you get your breeding stock for designer dogs from people who don't care about the future of the dogs or have any investment in improving their lines.

(Just to remind you all, I have a mixed breed dog. I think he's a wonderful dog. But I don't believe in deliberately breeding mixed breed dogs!)

Yet another problem I have with the creating new breeds idea is we already have way too many breeds. We have breeds for every task or preference. Every time a new breed is developed, it creates a small inbred subset of dogs. We already have registries full of small subsets of inbred dogs. We don't need any more.

3.) There is no need to do this

There is no unique need that designer breeds fulfill. Most of the justifications I hear are either that people want a dog that doesn't shed due to allergies (get a poodle, shots, or a fish tank) or that the puppies are soooo cute. All puppies are soooo cute. Even the ones they are euthanizing.