A couple of weeks ago the New York Times Magazine did an article about designer mixed breed dogs like puggles and labradoodles. In the article it said that a puggle has to be bred from a pug and a beagle. If you breed two puggles you just get a mess.
Can some dog breeding expert elaborate on what kind of a “mess” you will get. What would it take to develop a true puggle breed?
Looks at username of OP.
:dubious:
Who is she?
Sparty gave up on breeding after Papa Sparty got sick of Sparty humping the furniture. Therefore, Sparty doesn’t know a lot about breeding.
Inquiring minds want to know.
I am by no means a breeding expert and don’t know how to explain it, but I do know that if you breed a peke and a poodle you can get really cute dogs. If you breed two peek-a-poos you can get some of the weirdest looking things I have ever seen. Imagine a long-legged dog with a poodle coat and a peke face. A lady who used one of the vets I used to work for bred two peek-a-poos despite the vets advice against it; she had to give the pups away when she was expecting to sell them.
It basically comes down to hybird genetics. In simplified terms the first generation cross, the F1, will recieve one of each pair of chromosmes from each parent. That means that the F1 will be genetically exactly half pug and exactly half beagle. And as a consequence although they will all be genetically unique they will also be quite physically uniform because they posess approximately the same ratio of dominant and recessive genes.
With the next generation cross you no longer have that uniformity. A pup could inherit all the pug chromosomes from its father and all the pug chromsomes from it mother and end up being a genetically pure pug, or a gentically pure beagle for the same reasons. Or it could recieve just a single pug chromosme and end up only a fraction pug, or any other ratio. Added to that you can get any assortment of chromosomes. One animls might get the head genes from one grandparent and the tail and coat from another, another animal might get equal mixes of tail, coat and legs but get pure all the growth chromosmes from a single parent.
As a result the F2 generation can end up genetically any proportion of either grandparent, from being genetically purebred to being a perfect hybrid like the parents and anyhtingin between. And that means the results are unpredictable. You are now breeding mutts with totally random genetics. That;s what they mean by a mess: unlike the F1 the F2 are totally unpredicatble. No two litters and no two pups are the same. You end up with Heinzhounds.
What would it take to develop a true puggle breed? Decades of careful breeding and a lot of linebreeding (read inbreeding). See the problem is that puggles look uniform because in simplified term they get one dominant chromosome from one parent, and one recessive from another. So for example they might have a uniform coat colour because that colour is dominant and they inherited a gene for that colouration form the pug parent. Only the pug colour is expressed, but the white underbelly of the beagle is still there, it is just masked. To develop a puggle breed you would need to breed out that recessive white underbelly so it never showed up. That is very tough because an animal could carry that trait and not show it.
And then when you’ve got uniform coat colour you need to repeat that for every other trait: ears, legs, nose and so forth. And each generation will improve on the standard only slightly.
BTW, do these people not know that a puggle is the name of a young monotreme?
Simple explanation:
A puggle is a mutt made from 2 purebreeds, a labradoodle is a mutt made from two purebreeds, the same goes for all these other “designer breeds”. :rolleyes:
These are not breeds, they are mutts. Now you take two of those mutts and mix them together and you just compounded their muttiness and you have no clue what you’re going to get.
Many current breeds did get their start from mixing with other breeds but it took many, many years and generations and breeding for the qualities you were looking for in the new breed. This doesn’t happen by just continually breeding two purebred dogs of different breeds, that, my dear friends, is simply breeding mutts.
I love how they’re calling mixed breeds “designer breeds” and charging big bucks for them.
Not that mixed breed dogs aren’t great, they are. But that’s what the dog is and you really have no idea when you see a puppy if it is actually is a mix of those two breeds or the the neighbors dog down the street. When I was a kid lots of mixed breed dogs were sold as cockapoo’s. We had one that wasn’t a poodle or a cocker. She was a nice dog, but how do you know?
I’ve spoken to people that have paid more for a ‘jug’ or other designer mixed breed than I did for my dog with papers.
I’m surprised there’s not more of a demand for space alien-type dogs
I would think that pure breds were designer dogs because they were bred for a purpose, ie companionship, herding, guarding etc.
They’re called Designer Dogs because there are people gullible enough to pay big bucks for something if you slap a designer label on it.
You would think the first generation of designer mutts would be as unpredictable as subsequent ones. When breeding Labradors and poodles together, let’s say, do most of the pups have the expected and desired combination of traits, or is there a wide variation of which only a fraction are sold as labradoodles? When you get to the second generation, common sense suggests that since you’re now breeding two similar looking dogs you’d get a similar result. Though let me be clear that I totally understand that common sense isn’t always correct about things like this.
Originally, the labradoodles were meant to be a hypoallergenic guide dog.
I doubt you would get a hypoallergenic guide dog 100% of the time seeing how labradors shed like crazy.
Now it seems like anybody with a poodle and a lab wants to cash in.
I agree with breeding for a purpose, not with “charging people to own a breed with a goofy name”.
Common sense is linear. Genetics isn’t.
Try the less-simple explanation that Blake offerred above, in post #5. 
(If you read it and didn’t get it, then never-mind. [/Emily Litella])
I’m going to guess not:
“Honey, now that Rex died, I’d like to get a puggle. They’re so cute!”
“Why would you want to get a young monotreme?”
But ignorance has been fought today, since I now know what a monotreme is thanks to Google.
Another thing that is worth mentioning is that “breeding true” historically requires killing a lot of puppies. You breed, you cull out of the litter all the dogs that don’t carry the trait you’re breeding for, then you breed the “good” puppy (once mature) and cull that litter too, etc. etc. A lot of breeders today don’t put down unacceptable puppies but rather sell or give them away as “pet quality” dogs on the condition that these inferior specimens be neutered. But even those “pet quality” dogs are only marketable because they already look like pure-breds even if they don’t technically meet the breed standard for some reason. But to start breeding a new breed like “puggles” would require that a lot of crazy-looking puppies be put down because (a) they don’t display the characteristics the breeder is selecting for, and (b) they can’t be sold as “pet quality” puggles because they don’t look like puggles at all.
This is not true for all labradoodles. My parents got their labradoodle from a breeder who had imported all her breeding stock from Australia where they’ve been breeding labradoodles for decades and there is a breed standard. But since it’s not a recognized breed in the US most of what you’ll see is an F1 mutt.
[opinion mode]
Informed opinion though.
I have a boxer. All boxers come from one female, which the breeder crossed with her own offspring, making, in effect, all boxers inbred. In fact, inbreeding is fairly common and breeding first cousins is done all the time. When you get a champion, you’re gonna try to get as much out of it as possible. A responsible breeder might get four litters off a female, wheras a male, of course, can make as many litters as he wants. The cost of expanding the gene pool can be quite high though. There might only be a limited number of suitable individuals in an area, so breeders take chances. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
There are over 400 official breeds in the world, maybe over 500. It varies from country to country which breeds are recognized and which are not, but I can’t get why people feel the need to create new breeds, possibly reinforcing bad genes. There must be a suitable pure breed among those 400, so you wouldn’t need to invent yet another.
Also, I think it’s a myth that mutts are healthier. With some bad luck, one might end up with the worts traits of two breeds, not the best. Breeding a lab and dachshound (I met one the other day) might get you an aggressive badger hunter, that barks a lot, have an enormous appetite, really short legs and a weak back, coupled with hd.
I love my boxer. He’s such a great dog. But the vet bills have been horrendous, due to allergy.
Mutts aren’t healthier, cross-breeds are. Cross two purebreds and you have a good chance of getting their better traits (hybrid vigor?). Cross any mutt to a mutt, and you don’t get the same effect.
Not true. If you take to pure (in)breds of different breeds, chances are the offspring will be healthier. If that happens, it’s called hybrid vigor. But it might also result in outbreeding depression.
The thing with purebred dogs (or purebred anything, for that matter) is that they’re very genetically uniform. Take coat color, for instance: Dark fur is dominant over light fur, so you could have a part-Black Lab dog which looks black like a Lab, even though it also has light-fur-genes. But a true purebred Black Lab will only have the black-fur genes. Likewise for all of the other traits (or at least, those traits which are part of the breed standard). So if you’ve got a lab stud and a poodle bitch, you know that the stud has two copies of the gene for lab color, two of the gene for lab fur texture, two of the gene for lab-shaped ears, etc., and likewise, the bitch will have matched pairs for poodle hair color and texture, ears, etc. So when you breed them, the first-generation pups will always get one copy each of the poodle and lab genes for those traits: One poodle color gene, one lab color gene, one poodle ear gene, one lab ear gene, etc. In some cases, the lab gene will be dominant, in some cases, the poodle gene will be, and in some cases, you’ll get mixed dominance, but the results will be uniform for every puppy.
On the other hand, when you cross two mutts, the resulting pups can have any combination of the genes. So a second-generation labradoodle might have two copies of the lab ear genes, but two copies of the poodle hair texture genes, so you could get a dog with lab ears but curly hair. Or you could get the reverse, and get a dog with poodle ears but straight hair, or get one which by chance happened to be mixed on both those traits, and hence still look sort of like a “true” labradoodle.