I know mixbreeds will be relatively free of diseases but what about the AKC breeds?
AFAIK, it will vary from breeder to breeder more than breed to breed. You have to ask if the parents have been genetically tested, X-rayed, etc. for breed-specific conditions. Also, get a health guarantee. They should last for the life of the dog, not just 6 months or a year.
I doubt anyone has actually counted all the problems up and and can give you a definitive breed with the lowest frequency. However, here are some things one should be aware of:
Some breeds have genetic defects or pretty close as part of their breed standard. Bulldogs are such a breed. If you purchase one you can be sure they will snore and have a high likelyhood of getting skin problems in all the folds, throat and traheal problems from their pushed in faces, and will not be able to bear puppies normally. That’s just part of the Bulldog package. If you get a Great Dane you can expect it to die by the time it turns 9. That’s just how it is. Ditto Boxers and cancer.
In a similiar vein - skin problems and Sharpei, back disease and Daucshund, ear problems with Cocker Spanials (and any other breed with hair in the ears).
Dogs that have been or are now extremely popular - Collies, German Shepherds, Poodles, Cocker Spaniels, Retrievers, Min. Schnauzer, etc. When the price for the breed is good and a breeder can place any puppy produced - inferior parents are bred unscrupulously. Puppies with all sorts of problems are not eliminated from the gene pool, and genetic defects are propogated.
On the other hand, extremely rare dog breeds tend to have very little to no genetic diversity and have lots of problems due to the high amount of inbreeding.
So your best bet is to look at moderately popular breeds in which many of the breeders are fanatic about their dogs - things along the Gordon Setter, Whippet, or Border Collie. Then research which diseases are most common in the breed you like best.
VERY good post, Long Time First Time .
I can personally vouch for Gordons, I came here specifically to recommend them. If you buy from a reputable breeder, you will be buying from someone who has a long-standing love affair with their breed. (Not just Gordies, of course, but any reputable breeder; Gordies are just where my experience lies.) hips, elbows, eyes and heart will have been tested before breeding. The parents will normally have beenshown, displaying correct body type for the breed. The breeder will not sell a puppy to just anyone that shows up with cash in hand; they will ask you questions, contact referances, possibly do a home inspection. You will be given a contract with a written guarentee that this dog is and will remain physically sound. Getting Nick thgis summer, I felt like I was adopting a human baby, but he was wel worth it. He is mentally sound, physically gorgeous, and talented beyond belief. This is not to say nothing will ever go wrong with him, but the odds are in my favor that they won’t.
Gordons are somewhere midway in AKC popularity. That, to my thinking, is where you want t choose a breed; too popular a breed, you have irresponsible breeders out to make a quick buck, breeding anything to anything, resulting in puppies with health and/or mental problems. Too rare a breed, too small a gene pool. have always said Gordons are one of the best kept secrets of the purebred dog world, and I like it like that ! 
This is not really true. Mixed breed dogs come from two sources: accidental matings or puppy mills/backyard breeders. With the accidental matings, the chances are that the most common results will come from dogs which are popular (on the grounds that there are more of them around).
As as already been pointed out, the more popular the dog, in general the more of them are bred and by people who want to make a dollar and could care less about things like health testing.
Crossing two breeds of dog doesn’t mean that any genetic faults will cancel out, you might end up with a puppy who has the worst of both parents. Labradors and Golden Retrievers are both prone to hip dysplasia, which means a cross of these two breeds will be as likely to have HD as any purebred pup.
Puppy millers breed for profit, they don’t care about health testing, and they’ll breed what is popular from what dogs they can get their hands on. A lot of the little, fluffy, mixed breed dogs that start in pet shops and end up in pounds in Australia have problems, such as luxating patellas, elbow dysplasia, mouth and teeth problems, etc.
Puppy millers spread the idea of “hybrid vigour” produced by crossing breeds, but it is scientific nonsense with no validity at all when you start looking at the dogs they are producing.
Some mixed breed dogs will be healthier, say a farm dog bred from working lines, but the health is a product of selecting for soundness and working ability, not crossing breeds as such.
Long Time First Time’ has given good advice. I’d also suggest that if you’re looking for a particular breed of dog, you take your time looking for a very serious, ethical breeder who knows her lines of dogs, does the health checks and breeds to the standard and not to the extremes of the standard.
It might take you some time to find the right breeder, but they are out there, and you might have to wait for a litter and jump through hoops to get a puppy, but the payoff will be in terms of soundness and good temperament.
You could look for working lines of purebreed dogs or dogs from working dog registries, since both will have been bred for working ability and soundness.
My other thought would be to think about a Greyhound. For big dogs they tend to be both sound and long-lived, and they’re very sweet dogs to live with.
Just want to second this point. Mutt doesn’t necessarily mean health.
The first mixed breed dog I owned had more problems than any other dog I’ve had. She’s a retriever/collie mix - She went blind at 5 years due to progressive retinal atrophy (a collie problem) and is lame due to bad joints (a retriever issue). But she’s very sweet.
And for the love of your pocket book, stay away from Bernese Mountain Dogs. They’re a walking vet bill. We were taught in school that outside from the intense risk of cancer for Boxers, no other dog has so much potential for genetic illness. A good rule of thumb is to stay away from breeds that have extreme bodily/facial characteristics. Such as really long ears, short snouts, stubby legs, long bodies, huge amounts of excess skin, etc.
Any reason why you’re asking? Are you looking into getting a dog? If so I would highly recommend going to the pound and even getting a mutt. In general they ARE genetically healthier than purebreds. If you insist on getting a purebred, then look at breed rescues first. Rescue a life 
Oh and last but not least, Cockapoos, Labradoodles, and any dog who’s name is a mixture of two breeds are NOT purebred. They’re mutts. Glorified mutts, but mutts nonetheless.
Mutt doesn’t *necessarily *mean health, but as a general (and undeniable) principle, a greater variety of genetic “raw material” is less likely to lead to the kind of trademark diseases/deformities/disorders associated with purebreeds; after all these disorders are of course the result of inbreeding.
As noted above, a dog that comes from two unscrupulously bred purebred parents is not necessarily going to be free of genetic defect. But a dog that comes from many generations of mixed breed parentage–a “Heinz 57” as opposed to a “Cockapoo”–is generally (not necessarily, but generally) less likely to have the kind of genetic defects associated with some purebreeds.
Purebreeding = inbreeding, and if it’s not done carefully it can lead to (and has led to) some very serious health issues in many breeds of dogs. To second the good advice given above, if you want a popular, widely overbred breed of dog, do a lot of research and be extremely careful to find an irreproachable breeder. You’ll pay. If you must have a purebreed, spend the time to find a breeder who has a provable reputation among other breeders. (Of course, as a former dog trainer with experience with a lot of breeds and individual dogs, I personally recommend a mixed breed every time. Save a life by removing a dog from the overpopulation stream, rather than adding one.)
Isn’t a cockapoo the white, strange shaped dog that Baretta used to keep?
Wouldn’t dogs that are closest to wild (maybe Akitas, Basenjis, Malamuts?) be the least purebred and therefore fewer genetic disorders? Or is that a bad simplification?
Actually, I think it’s more a case of how energetically defects have been culled out of the breeding line, and how large the breeding population is, rather than how close to the original wild pooch a breed is.
So the choosiness of the breeding has a big effect - German Shepherds are prone to hip problems, but the Schaeferhund association in Germany has a truly ferocious list of requirements for what they are willing to certify as a ‘proper’ dog. If a dog has even the slightest trace of a problem, not only will it be struck from the approved breeding list, but possibly all its siblings too. Lots of puppies with only minor problems are destroyed, which is a shame, but it does prevent problems being passed on.
A German Shepherd with the VS stamp on its pedigree is probably going to be healthier than a German Shepherd with a KCA pedigree, which is probably going to be much much healthier than some random farm puppy. One day when I have a house in the country I’m going to Germany and get one .
Needless to say, dogs which have been bred for some bizarre bodily characteristic in preference to good health are to be avoided at all costs. Why somebody would want to genetically mutilate a dog the way they have with bulldogs and so on is beyond me - if some random mutt had a pup with the defects of a pedigree bulldog, it would be put down immediately.
Not a fan of bulldogs, I really doubt that the English Bulldogs of today can do the job of bulldogs 100 years ago.
So the American Bulldog would be healthier then?
I can tell you for a fact that isn’t true of Basenjis, and it’s back to the “low popularity = small genepool” issue. Basenjis can have a genetic disorder called Fanconi’s syndrome, and it’s fatal. Some number of years ago, breeders made an effort to introduce new breeding stock by obtaining dogs from Congo-area tribes (many of whom did not want to part with their dogs); I’m not sure how far they’ve come with that plan, but it’s still an issue that should make one screen very carefully before breeding the dogs, and/or purchasing a pup. (For that matter, this should be the case with all dogs.)
I was thinking (especially given the greyhound comment above) that some of the heartier breeds tend to be very similar to the ones that were first domesticated. I saw a program about the Salukis that Bedouins keep, and they seemed to be pretty disease-free, from what I saw.
Most people have quite informative posts. All I have to add is that, in general, breeds that are classed as “working dogs” rather than those bred solely for conformation or looks are likely to have fewer problems. If part of what they look for in the breed are certain behavior traits and the ability to perform tasks, there is a lot less pressure to breed to extremes.
Hi,
Instead of looking to AKC, why not look to working breed registries? Someone has already brought up the German Shepherd, but I know some of the field dog registries that are not so heavily into breeding for conformation would do as well (field cockers as opposed to AKC cockers, field reg. hounds, etc). Any breed that has had an emphasis on conformation vs. function is going to have more problems. Conformation breeders (not all, but many) are notorious for line breeding to an extreme to “fix type”. As a working dog person (Border Collies), we want such a flexibility of working type that severe linebreeding is not helpful. Border Collies are a good example of this- I’m on my 8th or 9th Border Collie, most of my dogs are not closely related but still very fine working dogs and NONE of them have any genetic defects. I know of very few that do, and most of those dogs were “backyard bred” or 2nd-3rd generation from actual working dogs. I wouldn’t recommend a Border Collie unless you are a dog person with a lot of time, but if healthy is what you are looking for- working dogs can’t be beat :).
Pedigree English Bulldogs can barely stay alive without continous veterinary assistance. I’m not familiar with the American variety, but I would assume they are healthier - they certainly can’t be worse, unless they need to be kept in an oxygen tent or something.
The AKC has done more to hurt dog breeds that any other group. They push hhard for appearance, and for a long time extremes of that appearance - over general health, intelligence and freindliness. The English Bulldog being one good example, but there are many others- in fact, likely the best example is the German Shepherd, once a good solid & TOUGH working breed, now a breed which is very pronce to genetic disorders and is often just plain dumb.
I’d second or third the pound variety - if it’s looks you’re after, keep going back until you see a puppy with the potential looks you are after. My dog is from the SPCA, I went about 4 Saturdays before I saw a puppy I thought looked cool - she looks Border Collie, Spaniel cross. Most of the dogs at the SPCA are picked up in poor areas of the city and look like pit bull/staffie crosses, with a kind of brindled colouring. The only problem is trying to work out what they will look like when grown up, but you can make a fairly good guess.
This is not going to end well. When I have voiced such opinions in the past, threads have gotten ugly. But I agree 100% and I’m glad to see someone else express this opinion. I rarely use the word “evil” in regard to non-supernatural subjects, but I’m prone to doing so when discussing the AKC.
I’m on a Beauceron list and they’re discussing how AKC acceptance would ruin the breed.
Anyways, to say it again: there is no magical “mutt” gene. A sick dog + a sick dog = another sick dog.
I would recommend starting by just researching breeds that catch your eye. Think on what YOU desire in a dog and soon you should be able to narrow your choices. Try to find a mailing list that discusses the breed(s) and track down some breeders who are just willing to talk and not try to sell.
If they want your credit card number, try again.
In my personal experience, the sighthounds (excluding the Irish Wolfhound) seem to be the most issue-free but that’s changing. More and more cancer is showing up in greyhounds but they still seem to be long lived. The only breed I can’t instantly think of some issues for are Whippets.
But face it. You’re going to be hard pressed to find the perfect dog who will die peacefully at a ripe old age with no defects to speak up. We all want them to live forever.
(My dream dog is a Dobie. Holy crap, health issues galore! I am researching breeders who breed for health, not looks.)
Yeah, I hear that. I am looking for one of the guard dogs but the German shepherds, Rotties and Dobes got so much problems. 