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'Designer' Hybrid Fashion Dogs continued |
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A Dog is for life,
not just for fashion.
Most fashion trends stem from the celebrities and Hollywood, nicely engineered by the industry or company which has most to gain from the rise in popularity and subsequent increase in sales. When Sylvester Stallone purchased a Puggle (Pug/Beagle) in 2005 everybody wanted one and by November 2005, 90% of requests for designer dogs were for the Puggle. The mixed breed dog had risen to fame after being featured on the cover of the New York Post.
Handbag sized dogs as seen carried around by the likes of Paris Hilton were the next to become 'popular' or at least sought-after. Jennifer Aniston was given a Puggle by her ex husband Brad Pitt. The doggie fashion accessory sparks a whole new market for designer dog leads, designer dog jewellery, designer dog clothes as well as all the usual trappings that are directed at the companion dog owner. Accessories for the designer dog are hugely expensive with people spending thousands of pounds to clad their pets in the latest designer gear.
Clarissa Baldwin, Chief Executive of the UK's Dogs Trust said:
| “A dog is not just a trendy item like a handbag that can be discarded once the fashion has passed. A dog lives on average 13 years, costs about £8,000 over the course of its lifetime and we are worried what will happen to the growing numbers of designer dogs in the UK once the trend wears off." |
And trends ALWAYS wear off as quickly as they are created. The difference is that this 'stock' is not packaged up in boxes in a warehouse costing only storage fees, this 'stock' is real lives of sentient and sensitive creatures, born and bred over thousands of years to trust in mankind to handle and care for them responsibly and be as reliable a companion to them, as they are to us.
A spokeswoman for the RSPCA said:
| “Our view is that it is totally unacceptable for anyone to acquire a pet simply as a fashion accessory or on a whim; animals are sentient beings and require lifelong care and commitment." |
With 50 cats and dogs a day pouring into the RSPCA's shelter over the Christmas holidays adding to the thousands of animals being looked after in shelters across the UK the abandoned designer dogs will just add to the misery and escalate the problem, as if it wasn't bad enough already.
The newly formed American Canine Hybrid Club's supervisor, Garry Garner, explains the difference between a mutt and a designer dog as:
| “With a mutt you don't know the dog's background but with a designer dog you get a family tree so you know what breeds are in your dog." |
The spokeswoman for the American Kennel Club, Lisa Peterson disagrees with this notion:
| “None of the designer dogs would qualify as a purebred. It would need a whole list of qualifications, including a parent club, generations of photographed, documented dogs, and generations of health records. It usually takes decades, if not centuries, to register a purebred." |
More than 200 designer dog breeds are listed with the American Canine Hybrid Club. The dogs' parents must be pedigree/purebred dogs. The first breeder to create a new hybrid chooses the resulting dog's name. From 1992 to date, 8,500 Labradoodles, 7,500 Golden doodles and 7,500 Puggles have been registered. Garner said:
| “I would expect what we register is a small percentage of the hybrids out there." |
Anna Schindler, a breeder of Labradoodle (Labrador/Poodle) and Golden doodle, (Golden Retriever/Poodle) says:
| "I think the Golden Doodle and Labradoodle will continue, just because they are good dogs." |
However the Editor In Chief of 'Dog Fancy' magazine, Allan Rezni says:
| “Crossing breeds, adding fanciful names and charging outrageous sums for these dogs is a recent trend that's only taken off in the last decade. It's indicative of a society that loves labels. Having a dog that is part spaniel and part poodle is not enough, it has to be a Cockapoo." |
Another breeder, Kathy Burgess specialises in breeding mini Golden Doodles. People who admire the nature of the Golden Retriever but have not got room to house them will opt for the mini version. Burgess breeds a male 10lb Poodle with a female Golden Retriever to get a 30 lb dog. She then has blood samples checked at a laboratory to see when the female will be in season. She has blood samples tested from the Poodle for genetic diseases and after all this the female is artificially inseminated. Burgess comments on the process saying, "It is very technically challenging." She didn't comment on how financially beneficial this 'challenge' is for her.
Wallace Havens, the man that bred the popular Puggle, over 20 years ago saw his breed's popularity increase in late 2005 directly due to the dog being purchased by celebrities. Suddenly his dogs had four figure price tags, appearing on television and in magazines.
Mr Havens owns the Puppy Haven Kennels near Madison in the US. He breeds puppies in a 4,300 square foot building housing around 400 dogs in kennels. There are three such buildings and in total there can be as many as 1,600 canine inmates at any given time. Now Haven breeds many types of hybrid dogs. It seems that every breed can be bred to another breed and have a readily insatiable market to profit from.
 At the Puppy Haven, Pugs are being bred to Yorkshire Terriers to create Pugshires, Pugs to Shih Tzus to create Pug Zus, Pug to Bichon Frises to create Pushions and so on and so on. Not only are Pugs used but other breeds such as Beagles and Basset Hounds creating Bagels, Basset Hounds and Shar Peis make Sharp Assets. Havens is looking into breeding the mini St Bernard that has all the traits of the St Bernard except it is the size of the Shih Tzu, though Havens has publicly stated that no St Bernard dog will actually be used in the mating. As the list goes on so the names begin to sound farcical but the more unique the name, the more the label-conscious public fuel the demand for what is now just another commodity.
Worldwide there are hundreds of dogs already in existence that suit all the requirements that any human should ever need. What is it that attracts people to purchasing a designer dog? If it were the attraction of owning a dog, and only that, then surely there is already an exhaustive and more than sufficient list of breeds to choose from. The truth in our opinion is simply that those breeds which have been around for a long time don't ignite the 'trendy spark' which is lit by an Iphone, a refrigerator which talks to its owners, a car which can drive itself, or a wristwatch which tells you the phases of the moon.
Surely anybody interested enough in dogs to warrant their becoming an owner of one would not be affected by 'breed boredom' when faced with such a wonderfully diverse selection as has been around for decades or centuries? This is where the trend is most worrying. How many people are becoming dog owners when they would not have otherwise done, had there not been a 'quirky' or 'catchy' label attached to their designer choice of crossbreed? With the immense number of dogs going to rescue shelters as it is, what will be the impact of such a group of semi-interested people getting into the dog scene? Its hard enough to keep sincere life-long dog lovers in company with their canine friend when serious behavioural problems occur, and surely it won't be anything but more problematic to convince these fad-frenzied victims of fashion to put in that extra bit of effort to overcome behavioural and obedience problems when they inevitably occur with their 'dogue a la mode'?
With a designer dog, just like choosing a new outfit, you can choose the size, the colour, the coat length and even the activity level. Then again, just like that new outfit, the novelty soon fades and the designer dog can be cast aside to become someone else's problem. Unfortunately unlike an outfit, a dog will suffer trauma, fear, lack of companionship and instability from being 'cast aside' as it fades out of the spotlight of fashion, which is by definition the very nature of fashion, so it is surely inevitable that a great many dogs are being primed for untold suffering and uncertainty and all for one objective, to line the pockets of those who think little enough of the concept of canines to treat them as merely a lucrative commodity to trade in the first place.
Designer Dogs and Rescue Shelters
 Already rescue shelters are seeing a huge influx of designer dogs as their fashion conscious owners seek the next 'oodle' or 'uggle' as their current 'lifestyle enhancement'.
The sale of designer dogs in the UK has had a knock on effect as the sales of traditional breeds fall.
Sales of West Highland Terriers for example are down 40%. It would be nice to hear that such sales drops were due to people becoming aware of the canine overpopulation problem, and that they were finally choosing the more ethical option of rescuing a dog from a shelter, but of course this wouldn't carry any social status or 'pulling' power for attracting interest from friends and strangers alike. How many times have you heard: "Oh my Gaad, you have a rescue dog!! Can i take a picture?!" Just doesn't quite fit does it? Maybe if people sought more inward reward for their canine interactions than external social peer group attention, a great many dogs would be saved a very unstable future.
Puppy farms and backyard breeders are making huge profits by creating new designer breeds to swell their already overloaded coffers. The process of 'creating a new designer breed' can be summed up as choosing a couple of dog breeds and working out if their two names can be joined to make a catchy name tag which people will find amusing. The breeding process then begins, with the sales almost generating themselves through the catchy name they carry.
 Many organisations are calling for legislation to be implemented as hundreds of dogs are born with genetic deformities and subsequently dying or ending up in rescue shelters with little chance of being rehomed. To produce a Puggle that is reasonably uniform in its physical appearance, every dog must be bred from scratch. Instead, penny pinching puppy farmers are playing Russian Roulette with their stock which often goes horribly wrong. If this comes as a shock, consider the point that such instances are hardly going to be popular headline news during such an outbreak of high fashion, and that's of course assuming the guilty parties would dare to talk about it to anybody except other like-minded individuals involved in the same lucrative schemes.
On October 27th 2007 in Australia, the Adelaide Post carried an article on the designer dog breeding disaster. It reported how these dogs were pouring into rescue shelters dumped because of deformities, disease and overshot jaws as breeders paid scant attention to the health of their breeding stock. The Australian Animal Welfare League and the South Australian Canine Association are calling for crossbreeding to be regulated. Donna Sullivan, the Animal Welfare League spokeswoman said:
| “Their reproductive systems are so overworked to feed the want for designer dogs, their mammary glands are loose or enlarged and occasionally the uterus of an overworked dog sits outside the body, they are abandoned when they are unable to produce more pups." |
Donna Sullivan went on to say that designer crossbreeds came from unregistered breeders who were under no obligation to limit the number of litters they forced their dogs to have. Sue Whelan from the Hahndorf Interim Animal Shelter said that designer crossbreeding was a massive industry with no rules to stop faults being bred. Sue Whelan went on to say:
| “Our records over the last seven years show a dramatic increase in these designer dogs ending up at our shelter with all kinds of defects. There is a whole pet farming industry and you don't really know what has been crossed with what and a lot of these dogs aren't bred responsibly. Most of the time they come in totally matted because people are buying these cute fluffy poodle crosses and not realising that they need to be almost sheared like a sheep at least twice a year. We clip them back and find all these problems with their hips and jaws." |
Puppy farms are churning out more and more designer dogs to meet the ever increasing demand. These farms are like factories where puppies are manufactured as fast as the bitches can produce them.
The puppies are shipped en masse to pet stores, private customers and across the world. Many are too young and frail, and subsequently die in transit whilst others that are too sick to sell, end up in rescue shelters or worse. Of course we only know of those which appear in rescue shelters, because the shelters report on it. Who is reporting on the unknown number which are drowned, left to die from starvation or dehydration, or killed by a breeder who sees no financial pragmatism in paying out to euthanise a dog when the job can be done for free in other ways? Before you assume that this practice surely can't be going on, take note of the fact that it still goes on in much greater numbers than most people realise within the puppy farming industry and backyard breeders of pedigree dogs, being equally motivated by money as their designer dog counterparts. To assume that no designer dog breeders would ever do this is the foolish assumption, not vice versa, especially considering that the explosion of designer dog breeders has come at least in part from the already saturated puppy mill community.
 Common health problems include hip and elbow dysplasia, eye defects, cancers, lung disease, deafness and heart disease. Many also have severe behavioural issues. In the US, eight million dogs are euthanized in rescue shelters every year and many millions more are waiting to be rehomed. Our advice before purchasing a designer dog is to visit a rescue shelter where many non-deliberately crossbred dogs (with much less catchy names) are duly waiting to be given a loving home and probably have been for some time.
Designer Dogs continued
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