Puppy Power!

The new crossbreeds

It’s no mystery as to why these dogs are so popular today.

In our jet set world, everything is made to order. Custom cars, custom clothes, custom homes-it was only a matter of time before we got around to custom canines. Actually, the concept is nothing new. Long beforethe ancient Romans were buying designer togas, purpose breed dogs were all the rage. Our ancestors had fast dogs to run down game, massive dogs to fight enemies and tiny dogs to adorn laps. Over the ensuing centuries, breeders crossed a little of this to a little of that, let it settle, and started over again, until they’d created canine specialist to fill all niches-hunting, herding, guarding, toting, and just keeping company. Today, as many as 750 breeds exist in the world, and the American Kennel Club (AKC) recognizes about 150 of them. But that still doesn’t seem to be enough; after all, its human nature to speek the unique.

A new dog for a new era

These days, the “beautiful people” are frequently seen sporting a different sort of dog: crossbreeds, often rescued from shelters. Some of these mixes are so adorable that people have begun wanting their own dogs just like them, and breeders have found a new market amoung those who want so-called designer dogs-breeds not found in the AKC registry.

Of course, cross breeds is hardly a modern development: that’s how most pedigreed breeds got their start. Many purebreeds were once crosses, and most are mixes of severalbreeds. The difrence between those and todays hybrids, though, is that those dogs were then bred amaoungs themselves and selected for desired characteristics generation after generation, forming their own distinctive breed. Designer dogs are(almost)always the first generation cross of purebreds.

Today’s designer dogs may be trendsetters, but they’re still following in others’ paw prints. Way back in the 1960s. Cockapoos (first generation crosses of Cocker Spaniels and Poodles) gained an ardent following, and pekeapoos (Pekingese Poodle crosses) were yapping at their heels. Back then, though, they weren’t called designer dogs. They were viewed as purebred wannabes, not as posh pooches.

Science steps in

Another factor that sparked the designer dog revolution was media reports about hereditary health problems in purebreds. To understand this, you need to know a bit about genetics, as well as a bit about purebreds classified and mated.

When kennel clubs began registering purebreds, they allowed any dog of that general family type to be registered as the breed. At some point, registrations closed, leaving a fixed number of potential canine fathers and mothers (called sires and dams). What wasn't known at the time was that all of us, dogs and humans, carry from five to seven recessive genes that, if we carried two copies of any one of them, would result in some type of hereditary disease. Because humans are a bunch of mixed breeds, we don't often end up with a mate who carries the same bad recessive gene as we do, so its unusual to produce an affected child. In at-least purebred dogs, its different. Because those early canine sires and dams carried some random bad recessive, and because all present-day purebred dogs descend from them, there's a fair chance that dogs carrying the same recessive gene might mate, creating a puppy with the disorder by that recessive gene.

The solution? Widen the breeding options, deepen the gene pools to create crossbreeds that don't share the same bad recessives. That's one argument for breeding dogs by design. The trouble is that the idea works only within limits. Cross two breeds that share the same disorders and it doesn't work at all. Cross two hybrids again after the first initial cross, and you're right back where you started-maybe even worse off: those hybrids will stand a good chance of carrying recessive genes and producing pups with two of the recessive and thus a disorder. Any good breeder will study the genetics and health problems of each parent breed, screen for these problems, and avoid breeding parents that share the same disorder. A designer dog should never be just a random mating "to see what happens." Instead, the best mixes blend breeds that can reasonably be expected to produce desirable physical and behavioral traits.

The advantage of purebred dogs is their predictability. To a degree, you can pretty much know how big they'll get, how they'll look, and even how they will act. Generations of selection have produced dogs that live to retrieve, hunt, dig, run, herd. pull, fight, or snuggle. Fortunately, the first generation cross of crossbreed dogs bred from two good purebred representatives should look and act like other crossbreed dogs from the same parent breeds.