To not understand the obsession with ‘doodle’ breeds

[CherryValley5]

Eg: labradoodles, cockapoos etc.

They are absolutely everywhere! Why are people actively seeking out and paying pedigree prices for dogs that are effectively mongrels? Behavioural problems are all too common, not to mention hereditary health issues due to poor and unethical breeding - I am a dog owner and the vast majority of doodles, ‘poo’ breeds etc that I meet are incredibly hyperactive, with owners who have no clue how to deal with them. Obviously there are exceptions, some are lovely but as a rule of thumb they’re dogs that I tend to cross the street to get mine away from.

The breeder who created the labradoodle calls it his ‘life’s regret’ - that speaks volumes in my opinion!

Where do people think the ‘pure breeds’ come from? Do people honestly believe that their ‘pure breed’ wasn’t actually a ‘cross breed’ of some kind, at some point in the past? The mind boggles.

Yes. Thank you. But most people who know their pedigree dog breeds are already aware of all this as to how different breeds came about and what their function is.

But I still don't understand the point you are making or where you stand. Are you saying that nothing should ever be purebred because crosses are genetically "better"?

My doodle is fab!! Perfect little dog. Honestly he hasn’t even needed any training.
I do realise I’m going to sound like a complete crackpot now but I’ve never trained my dogs and neither did my parents. We just communicate with them and expect good behaviour and get it. Just talk nicely to them and sometimes show them what to do and they have generally been as perfect as an imperfect living thing can be.
People over complicate having dogs. Whenever I see a badly behaved dog up
close the owner is always doing weird shit when communicating with them.

I have a 13 year old cockerpoo, no health issues, he isn’t a lunatic, lovely with other dogs and anyone he meets.
Tbh I couldn’t give a hoot what you think, each to their own but why so judgmental you sound really bitter - life’s too short.

If you do your research before buying a purebred dog you can find out its origins and whether it is a recent creation or an ancient breed. Most pure breeds have a purpose that they were bred for, in some cases over hundreds of years. None of us are saying our chosen breed was born like that in its exact form thousands of years ago; that would be stupid. Where on earth did you get this idea? But some breeds have been in existence in the same form for hundreds of years and do breed true. That is what a purebred dog is. The lines can be traced back for multiple generations without being outcrossed. If you want to see an old breed take a look at the Anatolian or Kangal dogs for a start. You might find it interesting.

@AubrieDog Sure. Some time tbd in the future, cockerpoos will be ‘pure breeds’, in this case.

None of it interests me that much. What does upset me is overbreeding. Looking at some of these poor ‘pure’ dogs these days, compared to what the breed looked like eg. 100 yrs ago. Eg. The slope of GSD’s backs, the squashed faces of brachial breeds. And so on.

My cockerpoo is an adorable delightful mix of who knows. She’s actually got a cockerpoo mum and some sort of champion cocker spaniel dad. So a mix of a mix, and couldn’t be any more perfect a family dog. She loves our cats, our children etc. Wouldn’t say the cats reciprocate but can’t have everything..

I think it's an odd choice on the face of it. The poodle lab crosses make a lot of sense I think, but the not the cockapoo.

However, at the time they were first being crossed deliberately, which IIRC was over 20 years ago, it was coming out of cockers being a bit of a fad, but there were people having a lot of problems with them. Some due to temperament issues with the rage syndrome, but also a lot of eye and ear issues.

I think the idea with that particular cross was to keep a smallish, non-shedding dog, but get rid of the genetic issue with rage syndrome, and hopefully the ear and eye issues as well.

An awful lot of the small sized dogs don't have the best temperaments for families, so the desire was to have that along with non-shedding. It seems to me it's a more understandable idea if you are thinking from that angle.

Plus - both breeds were widely available for crossing. It's all very well to suggest people get some unusual breed, but they are usually not that available. Most people don't want to fly in a dog on an airplane and it's probably not best to encourage that.

I like mixes. My dog now is what I call a "farm dog" which suits us very well. I think there is a fair bit of heeler in there and I'm told BMT, but who knows what else. My last dog was some sort of PB/Boxer cross and was a very strange guy but extremely lovable and good-hearted.

Not everyone needs or wants a cookie cutter personality in their dog.

I am saying that the KC system is bad for dogs because it misunderstands how genetics work. So it should be changed.

The combination of breed standards plus closed stud books is very bad for dogs. Even more so when they cease to be working breeds.

If it isn't changed, a lot of breeds, particularly the ones with smaller numbers, will suffer and perhaps disappear.

And actually - I am not sure you are quite understanding. It's not about crosses as such.

It's about genetic variation in the population.

People are trying out crosses in order to get more variation because the way pb dogs are managed doesn't allow for it, or often really to try and get around problems caused by the purebred dog industry. But you can have dogs with less restricted ancestry without making every generation a cross.

It's worth thinking about how dog breeders try and fix the problems they have caused in many breeds. They do it by decreasing the breeding population and restricting the genetic pool even more.

That shows a serious misunderstanding of how population genetics works.

Yet you don't care that all poodle crosses are bred for money, not purpose, so temperament and health goes out of the window? You're angry about some pure breeds having issues that dedicated breeders are attempting to improve, but don't care that people are farming out poorly mixed mutts that could have terrible health issues or temperaments?

How strange.

The KC system does allow for outcrossing though...

But the requirements for outcrossing are such that most people can't be sufficiently organised enough or get enough sensible people involved to actually do it.

The frame work for it IS there, and it HAS been done... the desire amongst breeders is not there. That is the problem.

There were types, but that's not the same thing as a pure breed. In the vast majority of cases you could get the odd interloper, because there wasn't a strict rule around pedigrees or anything like that.

You also had a situation where the only breed standards was a healthy dog who could do the job, and most dogs were part of the breeding population. That's not the case now, breeders are trying to meet a fairly detailed standard that is pretty uniform, and most dogs are considered pet quality and neutered or spayed.

It can, and maybe that is the direction it will go in one day. I don't know if I think their framework is really what you'd want.

But I don't think so as long as there is this idea that you can create perfect dogs by meeting the standard and breeding out more and more genetics that you don't want it will really work. Because people see variation as anathema to the idea of a breed.

Why do you keep saying that? People have told you all kinds of functional reasons for such crosses. You just keep ignoring them.

Why do you think GSD's and Pugs have been bred to be unhealthy messes? If not money, what is the better motivation involved? People actually deliberately made them that way, it wasn't an accident.

? You’ve just made all that up. Bizarre.

As a cockerpoo owner,I totally get it. Without training most dogs are badly behaved. With training, they are brilliant, friendly, loyal, soppy dogs. I’d definitely have another.

But doesn't this in itself give every reason why the rarer breeds should be supported rather than being allowed to die out because owning a purebred dog is out of fashion? Shouldn't we be promoting and encouraging people to want to own these rare working breeds that are on The Kennel Club Endangered List?

So KC breeders breed out of pure, ethical goodness in their hearts. How silly of us all to forget this 🤭

It's more complicated than that.

Because the nature of the kennel club system tends to lead to a narrower genetic profile in the breed, in a small or rare breed that can mean there really aren't enough dogs in the breeding population for it to be healthy.

As an example, when Duck Tollers were accepted for registration a number of years ago, the standard said white marks on the chest weren't preferred - these were common however in the Toller population. So breeders since then have attempted to breed them out. That has lead to a reduction in genetic diversity as more of the same non-marked dogs were used and the marked dogs were used less. Though ironically, the breed standards says nothing about tolling behaviour so you now how non-marked duck Tollers that don't toll - and these meet the standard better than the remaining population of dogs that were not registered, but are still used as working dogs.

How is that preserving the breed?

The other thing is, having a lot of people suddenly interested in a rare dog isn't necessarily good for the breed. It leads to an explosion of sub-par breeding in a lot of cases. It can mean that where a breed was concentrated before, it becomes dispersed. So you get tiny, non-viable populations spread around large distances. Even if they swap out dogs from time to time it's not as good as having the population within a smaller area where travel is easy and you get a lot of mixing of the population.

Ah, okay, thank you for the explanation @TempestTost

No rare breeds for me then, clearly. I will stick with what I know.

Most people don’t gaf about “lineage” or “pedigree”, maybe because it’s a bit odd…idk.
I’m very much a longdog person - so a different type of mongrel. Nobody is ever “why would you have THAT instead of a pedigree” about my dogs - everyone is used to longdogs and lurchers. Not everyone likes them (the ribs, the pointy face, the weight of the world on their bony shoulders) but they don’t mock the ownership of them either.
I’m surrounded by cockapoos where I live. They are all lovely, if a bit noisy sometimes. The naughtiest dogs in the street are a flat coated retriever and an Airedale terrier. The dogs I’ve know in the past few years who have dropped down dead under 5 years old are a Newfoundland, a Bernese mountain dog, a short haired German pointer, a frenchie, and a malamute. All “health tested”, from “reputable breeders” and KC registered. I know numerous goldens/labs and GSD with dodgy joints and a fairly young age. Poo crosses are v cute, if that’s your style, highly trainable, if a little energetic, mostly don’t shed, are fun, and you can tuck them under your arm and fit them in a small car. None of my dogs are very trainable, or very cute, or can be picked up or put in the back of a fiesta and my house and clothes are covered in hair, but I’m supposed to think the poo owners are the daft ones?

My poo cross is 35kg, so she's not fitting under my arm 😂

To be fair, I was not in any way suggesting that dogs 500 years ago came with a pedigree certificate showing their parentage, clearly that would an be absurd claim to make and is obviously not the case. I was merely highlighting, in response to the post in question, that it is not necessarily as simple as every named breed in existence being a recent cross of x,y or z other named breed and that some "types"/groups of domesticated dog do in fact have very ancient lineage and have bred relatively true for hundreds or indeed in some cases (like Greenland Huskies/Akita and Kangal type dogs) thousands of years. I also did not claim that in the intervening years there were absolutely no interlopers/accidental matings - perhaps my wording is clumsy and you made the assumption that was what I believed/suggested/implied. It would obviously make no sense to imagine that is the case. In fact, several of my own dogs have been from imported working bloodlines and have grandparents that are unregistered mountain dogs with a single forename not a long "fancy" breeders affix. Clearly there is no way for me to know (without having access to DNA testing at least) that there is nothing else in their ancestry and I would not claim such, but nor are they a recent cross of x,y or z other named, recognisable breed. This is what I was highlighting in my other post.

I am not, in truth, much of a dog person and have very little interest in or knowledge of any breed outside the Livestock Protection Dog group. I am, however, fed up of being lectured by people, be they my friends, family or random strangers, because they disapprove of my choice of dog breed/type. In much the same way, I suppose, that doodle/poo owners are tired of being criticised for their own choices. That is my reason for posting on this thread, I'm not a breeder or a show person or any sort of geneticist, I am merely a pet owner with a preference for a specific type of dog and I have that much in common with most of the other posters on this thread, albeit that we favour different types/breeds of dog.

And you seem to consistently ignore that the vast majority of pure breeders do it for money too.

How strange.