The Modern Kennel Conumdrum - Designer-Dog Fights

The New York Times Magazine
Cover story: Designer-Dog Fights
By Jon Mooallem
February 4, 2007

In the proud and punctilious history of purebred dog breeding — which
has policed the sex lives of dogs with unbending vigilance since the
Victorian era — the mongrel has been regarded as, at best, an
unfortunate accident and, at worst, a disgrace. Yet one rainy morning
last fall, Wallace Havens walked the long aisles of his kennel,
introducing me to his newest mutts as though enumerating miracles.

Unlatching a cage door, Havens would cradle a puppy against his
fuchsia cowboy shirt and announce: "Well, here's a Shih Tzu crossed
with a Havanese" or "Here's a silky crossed with a Yorkie." Then he
would put the puppy back with its litter mates and mom and, through
scattered bursts of barking, move on.

It took awhile. The dim, 4,300-square-foot building housed about 400
dogs, most of them puppies, in 120 elevated cages. It is one of three
whelping houses at the Puppy Haven Kennel, the 1,600-dog compound
that Havens has built up over the last 30 years in the outlands north
of Madison, Wis. Nearby, an affable elderly couple hosed feces from
slats below the cages, and their daughter, another of Havens's 14
paid employees, swiftly handled one squeaking pup at a time, issuing
dewormer. Here was a "bichon-poo." There was a "schnoodle."

Havens moved on, like some strange Noah touring his ark — in which
every tidy two-by-two had been split apart, jumbled and recombined
into a single animal: "That's a Chihuahua-bichon . . . here's a half-
American Eskimo and half-Lhasa apso" — his voice lifting each time as
if to ask, What will they think of next? But he had dreamed up a lot
of these things himself.

Havens, a towering man of 70, has spent much of his career breeding
cattle and owns a chain of Play Haven day-care centers. He is best
known as the originator of the puggle, a pug-beagle cross with an
irresistibly wrinkled muzzle, forlorn eyes and suitable dimensions
for cramped city apartments. He first marketed puggles 20 years ago,
but by late 2005, the dog suddenly had a cadre of celebrity owners,
four-figure price tags and a brimming portfolio of magazine write-ups
and morning-TV appearances. Puggle-emblazoned messenger bags and
ladies' track suits followed. For a time, in New York especially, you
couldn't swing a cat without hitting a puggle.

So-called designer dogs became popular a decade ago, beginning with
the Labradoodle and other poodle crosses that sought to affix the
poodle's relatively nonshedding coat to other breeds. But the puggle,
a designer dog with no clear design objective, seems to have set off
an almost unintelligible free-for-all. Pugs alone are now being bred
to Yorkshire terriers, Shih Tzus, bichon frisés, Pekingese, rat
terriers, Boston terriers, dachshunds, Jack Russell terriers and
Chihuahuas to create, respectively, Pugshires, Pug-Zus, Pushons,
Puginese, Puggats, Pugstons, Daugs, Jugs and Chugs. Beagles mount
Bostons. Chihuhuauas do Yorkies. Beagles and basset hounds are making
Bagels; bassets and Shar-Peis are making Sharp Assets — "a more laid-
back dog that says, `If you don't feel like taking me for a walk, no
big deal,' " Havens's Web site claims. Poodles are being pushed
further into a goofy taxonomy of portmanteau labels: Maltipoos,
Eskipoos, Doodleman Pinschers.

Given the roughly 350 inherited disorders littering the dog genome,
crossing two purebreds and expanding their gene pools can be "a
phenomenally good idea," according to one canine geneticist — if it
is done conscientiously. Still, past canine fads, like the run on
purebred Dalmatians after the movie "101 Dalmatians," have ramped up
production at inhumane, large-scale "puppy mills." And fickle owners
often end up abandoning those dogs once the trend passes. Thus, for
show breeders who have spent much of their lives studying and
refining a single pure breed — like the men and women congregating
next week at Madison Square Garden for the 131st annual Westminster
Kennel Club Dog Show — the rise of mutts as commodities has been
bewildering and embittering. Many traditionalists see mixing breeds
as somehow irresponsible in and of itself. As one pug breeder with a
two-time, No. 1 show bitch to her credit told me: "There was only one
really perfect thing on the face of this earth, and he was crucified.
To us, the pug is pure."

Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Product Manufacturers
Association, told me, "You're going to have a real battle here"
between hybrid dog breeders and "the purists who say this is all 25th-
century voodoo science." The rift seems to epitomize a peculiarly
American tension: between tradition and improvisation, institutions
and fads. The American Canine Hybrid Club, one of a growing number of
hybrid dog registries, will soon recognize its 400th different kind
of purebred-to-purebred cross. There are meanwhile roughly only 400
pure breeds of dog in the world, and the American Kennel Club, the
world's largest purebred registry, has recognized only 155 of them so
far in its 123 year-history. It will not be registering Poovanese or
Cavoodles any time soon. "What would our registration stand for
then?" a spokeswoman told me. "Anyone could make up a dog and
say, `This is a dog!' "

Dogs have always been a product of their times. Designer dogs may
only promise what dog breeding always has: the chance to create a
custom-designed ideal, a more convenient, useful animal suited to our
needs, whatever they happen to be. So, then, to what extent are these
new mutts a remedy for what's wrong with our old dogs and to what
extent are they a symptom of what's wrong with us?

`Instant Life'

In the late 1980s, an Australian dog breeder crossed a standard
poodle with a Labrador retriever, struggling to fashion a capable
guide dog for the blind with the poodle's more hypoallergenic coat.
He called the puppies Labradoodles. In 1998, a small partnership
began exporting loping, shaggy-headed pet Labradoodles to the United
States for upward of $2,500 each. Before long, Macy's and Lord &
Taylor sold thousands of Labradoodle stuffed animals to benefit
cancer research; last year, Tiger Woods got a Labradoodle, and a
metal Labradoodle replaced the Scottish terrier game piece in a
special edition of Monopoly.

The Australians selling these dogs had spent a decade breeding
Labradoodles to Labradoodles, occasionally mixing in other breeds to
hone the dogs' coat textures and temperaments in each successive
generation. In the same way any breed is established, they were
manipulating and then fixing the exact traits they wanted so that
their line would "breed true" — i.e., two Labradoodles could reliably
produce Labradoodles with those same traits. But the throng of
enterprising American breeders picking up on the dog's sudden
profitability simply began crossing purebred Labradors to purebred
poodles and selling each litter. Their Labradoodles, like virtually
all designer dogs that followed, were thus not actually a breed but
first-generation hybrids, the result of a one-time-only bout of breed-
on-breed action. Hybrids do not breed true. To yield relatively
uniform results, every puggle, for example, must be bred from
scratch, by crossing one pug and one beagle. Crossing two puggles
produces an undistinguished hodgepodge of largely dissimilar things.

Designer dogs rewrote the logic of the small-scale breeders who have
speckled the Midwest and South since the market for purebred pet dogs
exploded after World War II. Some of these semiprofessionals, who
might keep a half-dozen or several dozen dogs in their homes or
kennels, had been breeding a few hybrids, like the cockapoo, for
decades. But many I spoke to had never considered crossing two of
their purebreds until they saw a designer dog on TV or until someone —
often someone from a city — found their Web sites and called asking
for one.

The appeal of these new mutts is often chalked up to "cuteness"
or "uniqueness," surely two commanding advantages but ones also
possessed by many purebreds and, moreover, by many of the roughly
seven million dogs and cats we surrender to shelters each year.
Michele Markham, who breeds purebreds and hybrids in her home in
central Florida, concedes this point. "People are so influenced by
the idiot box," she says. "They can't think for themselves. They want
whatever they see is hip and cool on TV. Right now, the big fad is
designer dogs. And it's just a fad." But a fad that is healthy and
amiable and zips across the linoleum when you call it, Markham
argues, works just as well as any animal buttressed by centuries of
stately tradition.

A Kentucky woman breeding Maltese and Yorkshire terriers told me that
Yorkies never struck her as ideal family pets anyway; they're
intelligent but overly bossy. She also breeds Morkies now and was
pleased to find "the smartness of the Yorkie and the sweetness of the
Maltese." Markham distills this widespread, if terribly suspect,
opinion on her Web site, this idea that with hybrids we can have it
all: "Designer dogs usually possess the best traits from each breed
and combine them together."

A breeder named Candace Humphrey, meanwhile, didn't talk about
hybrids as a chance to combine the virtues of two breeds. Rather, she
said, hybrids are a way for people to "settle" on a dog after being
able to pinpoint, however superficially, something wrong with various
breeds. "I've seen people say, Well, I'm not having a Chihuahua
because my best friend had a Chihuahua, and it was a wreck," Humphrey
told me in her ebullient drawl when I visited the small and tidy
kennel she has built behind her home east of Nashville. A former
veterinary assistant, Humphrey has bred poodles for 21 years. But
after finding that she couldn't sell a toy poodle for even $200, she
has also been crossing those poodles to Chihuahuas, Shih Tzus,
Maltese, Pomeranians and Pekingese. "I think the majority of the
poodle problem is not the poodle itself," she told me. "It's the
froufrou coat. It's the haircut. Poodles are great dogs. But it's
hard to sell a poodle to a man." Typically, she adds, a husband will
want something like a beagle. "But the woman says, `Well I'm not
buying that slick-haired dog, that beagle, because they're not fuzzy
and cute.' "

Havens's granddaughter, who works at Puppy Haven, says she receives
apprehensive phone calls from men, pleading for a small, apartment-
friendly dog that will please their wives without being too poofy.
They end up with puggles, she said. The breeds that satisfy these
same criteria, like the Brussels Griffon, have seen some of the
highest spikes in A.K.C. registrations over the last decade, as have
smaller breeds in general. Everyone seems to be chasing the next
small thing. Dedicated breeders have shrunk the Alaskan husky into a
raccoonlike throw pillow, breeding it true and naming it the Alaskan
Klee Kai. Even the puggle is now being superseded by the "pocket"
puggle.

"People don't have the space they had before," Bob Vetere of the
American Pet Product Manufacturers Association told me. "Maybe you've
moved from a 30-acre ranch into a two-room, fifth-floor walkup. Maybe
you love the look of a mastiff, but want a 20-pound version of that."
Studies show that adults retain strong loyalty to breeds they've
grown up with. And baby boomers, Vetere said, are unwilling to
abandon the idea of pets as they retire. "Now," he speculated, "maybe
you could wind up being able to crossbreed the dog, to calm the dog
down, to make it a little more friendly, a little more manageable."

We may see in designer dogs the potential, however real or empty, of
making dog ownership easier. In the '80s, Vetere noted, the number of
pet cats in America exceeded the number of dogs for the first time,
after scoopable litters hit the market. People were working longer
days; more families were two-income. Cats, already equated with self-
sufficiency, could now be left all day without us having to muss with
that box as frequently or with such fetid intimacy. An equally hassle-
free arrangement with your dog meant hiring a pet sitter.

"Manufacturers asked themselves, `What's a pet sitter really
doing?' " Vetere went on. " `He's feeding your pet and letting your
pet out. Well, we could do that.' " Over the last decade, the
industry has devised an almost Jetsonian, automated existence for our
dogs, and the outpouring of products alone suggests how eager we have
been to resolve a number of curious problems. Dogs can be attended by
timed, refrigerated feeders and water fountains, monitored by Webcam
or consoled through PetsCell cellular telephones around their necks.
Cutout kitchen doggie doors were good, but new doggie doors — like
the motorized Power Pet, triggered by a sensor in the dog's collar —
are better, since homeowners worried thieves might shimmy through.
The Power Pet slides up and swiftly deadbolts shut again ("Your pet
will think it's on the Starship Enterprise!" the manufacturer
claims), permitting dogs to safely exit and relieve themselves,
perhaps on the specialty sod patches now replenished each week by
delivery services. Small dogs are increasingly being litter-trained.
Minefields of mildly electrified mats keep curious ones off of
furniture. "Now," Vetere said, "if you want to keep your dog and
still want your freedom, there are things you can do."

Katherine C. Grier, a cultural historian and author of "Pets in
America," told me: "The dogness of dogs has become problematic. We
want an animal that is, in some respects, not really an animal. You'd
never have to take it out. It doesn't shed. It doesn't bark. It
doesn't do stuff." I found even the maker of Amazing Live Sea-
Monkeys, which launched its tiny crustaceans in 1960 with the
slogan "Instant Life," now forcefully rebranding itself, targeting
parents who refuse "to get stuck with caring for another living
thing."

A History of Making Distinctions

While it is easy to mock the faddishness of designer dogs, it bears
remembering that many of our haughtiest purebred lines are themselves
recent human inventions, willed into being amid a surge of similar
excitement. The purebred pug itself may have been the first, real
American canine craze. Though its origins are older, the pug toddled
its way to distinction in the 1870s, appearing on calendars, trading
cars and as stubby-faced ceramic tchotchkes. Its celebrity owners
included the queen of England.

The purebred dog as we know it was still a relatively new idea at the
time. Dogs had long been grouped loosely according to the work they
did. But it is not altogether clear what exactly people meant
by "breed" before a new class of Victorian dog breeders began shaping
the species with unprecedented intensity. With the advent of dog
shows and centralized, recorded pedigrees in the late 1800s, the dog
fancy — the culture of competitive show breeders — pushed for strict
physical uniformity within breeds and complete segregation between
them. They made more and more finely honed distinctions until even
their kennel clubs' own, once-sufficient categories ("Black and Tan
Terrier Dogs Not Exceeding 11 Pounds Weight") splintered into far
more individuated ones.

At the same time, they were founding legions of new breeds: crossing
existing ones and selectively inbreeding only the puppies they liked
until the line bred true. Descriptions of what each breed's ideal
specimen would look like were written in "breed standards," a measure
against which dogs could be judged in the show ring. Since winning
dog shows is the goal of dog fancying, the standards remain "the word
pattern breeders are striving to create in living flesh," as the
A.K.C. puts it. In retrospect, the difference between regularizing an
existing breed and inventing a new one can be foggy, particularly
since fanciers, anxious about their own social status, scrambled to
distinguish their lines with estimable back stories. Breeders of the
Spinone Italiano, finally admitted by the A.K.C. in 2000, trace their
breed to a fifth-century-B.C. description of a bristly haired pointer
with good endurance.

Not every Victorian was pleased by the fanciers' work. The old guard,
accustomed to hunting or working with dogs rather than parading them
around as showpieces, dismissed these new concoctions as "modern
fakes." An 1877 New York Times article denigrated Dandie Dinmont
terriers — a small, fluffy-headed companion — as "long-legged, long-
tailed, long-backed rickety looking homely beasts." A tittering
luxury class, an article in The Century Magazine charged,
had "ransacked" the species "to pander to its bizarre and eccentric
longing for novelty." The growing cast of new and distinctive-looking
canine characters whipped up a tumult of silly consumerism. A well-
bred St. Bernard might cost $5,000, there were frequent canine
weddings and tea parties and even by 1884 there were 1,500 different
styles of dog collar for sale in Manhattan, including the "Langtry."
One entrepreneur sent tailors uptown two or three times every week to
fit "aristocratic pugs" with satin-lined garments.

The new middle class spoke explicitly of "civilizing" the dog so it
might better reflect its master. Cities were tidying themselves up,
pushing unsavory things like abattoirs and coal-burning plants
farther out of sight. Why not reform the dog as well? Grier describes
fanciers crossing the sort of slobbering bruisers being bet on in pub-
basement dogfights, then shrinking each successive generation and
painstakingly standardizing its markings. Eventually, they unveiled
the Boston terrier, which resembles, Grier notes, "a spiffy little
black-and-white fellow in a tuxedo." It was swiftly promoted as "the
American dog."

Breeds are thus less found in nature than arduously hewn from it.
Arbitrariness must be squelched. When two golden retrievers mate,
they will make exceptionally similar-looking golden retrievers only
if, genetically speaking, we leave them little choice. (Between two
human relatives, there is a 29 percent chance a given gene will be
identical; between two dogs of certain breeds, it is 96 percent.)
Moreover, once each unique and self-perpetuating shape has been
conjured, it must be vigilantly maintained. Otherwise it could sink
back into the muck.

"Frankly a pug is a recessive gene," says the show breeder Jutta
Beard. "The entire pug. If they're left to their own devices, or you
don't breed carefully, they won't keep their flat faces." Beard
recently bred one of her bitches and, out of six puppies, found only
one close enough to standard to keep. "They all had ugly pug heads,"
she says. "They didn't have good nose rolls." It is not uncommon to
keep none. Generally, show breeders label these rejects "pet quality"
and sell them to us, who aren't likely to notice their esoteric
shortcomings. Fanciers' contracts with pet buyers require that the
puppies be spayed or neutered. "We don't want anybody breeding any
dogs that we don't think are worthy of breeding," Beard explains.

Selective breeding has long been our only way of making sense of
dogs. It is how we shaped our entourage of hunters and herders from
what was previously a muddle, a way of coping with the dogness of
dogs by organizing the raw materials of their genome into utilitarian
packages. A breed, particularly the more stringent idea of one modern
fanciers strive for, may really be a kind of well-branded,
trustworthy consumer product.

"Predictability is what you pay for when you buy a purebred dog,"
says Daisy Okas, assistant vice president for communications at the
A.K.C. "Are you really active? Do you need a running partner? Then
you might want to look at getting a border collie. But do you live in
a 500-square-foot apartment in Manhattan and work all day? Then a
border collie, for you, is going to be a disaster. That's why they
cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Because groups of people over
decades or even centuries have been carefully breeding that dog to
have certain characteristics and a certain temperament."

But keeping each breed the way we like it requires not only
tremendous effort but also tremendous cooperation. A breed is
exasperatingly democratic: a fluid and often unforgiving amalgam of
the tastes and skills of every person breeding it. For example, the
A.K.C. has no choice but to register anything that's the product of
two registered German shepherds as a German shepherd. And yet Mark
Neff, a canine geneticist at the University of California at Davis,
says, "I can go out and find the most bizarre German shepherds in the
world, and I can start crossing and inbreeding them," selecting for,
rather than against, their eccentricities. Gradually, he could
produce some deviant dogs. They could be lithe and spotted. They
could be dwarfs. "I would be despised," Neff said, but his dogs would
be German shepherds by virtue of their all-German shepherd pedigrees.

For better or worse, we've turned the dog into a record of our
priorities, of everything we actively select for and against, but
also of what creeps in and we don't bother to expel, including, of
course, genetic diseases. "You've removed natural selection and
replaced it with artificial selection," Neff says. "Dogs are now
subject to the whims of humans. And as soon as humans get involved,
all hell breaks loose."

In the 1990s, Mark Derr, author of "Dog's Best Friend," led a burst
of criticism against the A.K.C., railing against the "appalling human
practice of breeding mutant animals for ego satisfaction." (Notably,
this was just as the Labradoodle, and the potential for an altogether
different kind of dog we chose to see in it, was first rearing its
nonshedding head.) After a century of breeding dogs chiefly for looks
and not sufficiently controlling for health, Derr reported that 25
percent of dogs of A.K.C.-recognized breeds suffered at least one
genetic disorder. The litany of defects and degenerative conditions
starts at bad hips and stretches toward the absurd: bull terriers
with a particular neurological disorder can spend 80 percent of their
time chasing their own tails.

One way for animal breeders to blot out such troublesome recessive
genes is to make careful and calculated crosses with other breeds and
then breed those hybrid dogs back to dogs in the original pedigree.
But dedicated fanciers have resisted compromising the integrity of
their pedigrees. Instead, they have been financing genetic research
through the A.K.C.'s Canine Health Foundation and sending cheek swabs
and other DNA samples to labs in the hopes of discovering markers for
these conditions or curing them outright. Already, breeders have the
tools to identify probable carriers of certain defects and refrain
from breeding those dogs — if they choose to. Again, it is a matter
of priorities, and purging pug dog encephalitis and preserving a
line's faultless nose rolls can be two conflicting ones. In rare
instances, the whole rigmarole boils down to a freakishly
direct, "Sophie's Choice"-like scenario. Recently geneticists
discovered that the mutation contributing to widespread deafness in
Dalmatians is the same mutation that creates its signature spots.

Purebred Paradise

On opening night of the Pug Dog Club of America's National Specialty,
a week of pug-only competitions held this fall at the Olympia Resort
in Oconomowoc, Wis., white picket fences divided the hotel ballroom
into show rings. Vendors of pug clothing and pug portraiture lined
one wall, and a hundred pug puppies capered over the flowered carpet,
waiting to be judged in the annual Puppy Match. A gaggle of far more
motley human shapes looked on.

Ray Kolesar, a wiry, uncommonly excitable fellow in suspenders and a
Puppy Match T-shirt, offered to show me around. Ray and his wife,
Patt, editors of Pug Talk Magazine, breed pugs on five acres in
northern Wisconsin with a "training building" and treadmills for
winter. "I'm thinking about putting a swimming pool in for the dogs,"
he told me shortly after I arrived. "This hydrotherapy thing is big
right now."

Kolesar got an exquisite kick out of telling everyone he introduced
me to that I had come to talk about designer dogs. The subject
inspired zero enthusiasm. "It's a mixed-breed dog," many told me,
either with disgust, bafflement or disinterested aplomb, but always,
it seemed, with the conviction that this was a sufficient rejoinder.
A 78-year-old Southerner chatted at length about puggles, then
ushered me back into the crowd with a good-natured: "Good luck! I
hope no one whips you before you leave!"

"We've worked so hard with our pugs," one man said. He talked about
tackling genetic health problems, sending in the brains of your dead
dog for autopsy. "These are tough things to do," he stammered. "As a
breeder, you dedicate your life to the breed, and to see it
corrupted, it just grinds you."

While designer-dog sellers often claim to combine only the most
functional and lovable qualities of each breed, here I was being told
just the opposite: that mixing breeds would create an intractable
slop house of each breed's most problematic traits. "A pug has no
doggie sense whatsoever," said Jutta Beard, who had driven to
Oconomowoc from Maryland in her motor home with one husband and 13
pugs. "You put this dog out on the next street over, and it will
never find its way home. Now a beagle has wanderlust. It's a little
hound breed. It puts its nose to the ground and just goes. So now
you've got a dog with wanderlust and no doggie sense."

Many offered the same analysis. (One woman projected a "confused"
puggle: "He wants to run, but he doesn't know why he wants to run,
and he doesn't know how to get home.") The back and forth can seem
endless. Virtually noseless by now, purebred pugs are prone to
belabored breathing, sensitivity to heat (they couldn't survive
outside air-conditioning in parts of the country) and a pitiable
propensity to bash their eyes into whatever they're trying to smell.
Puggle enthusiasts praise their hybrid as elongating the smooshed-in
snout we have bred onto the pug. But Patt Kolesar managed to dispute
even this seemingly self-evident improvement. In a recent Pug Talk
editorial, she claimed that the puggle shortens the nose on a beagle.
And beagles need powerful noses since they are hard-wired to sprint.

What everyone seemed to dread is that a newfangled dog that looks
cute as a puppy can ambush owners with unanticipated health or
behavioral issues. The presumed predictability of a breed allows
breeders to educate prospective buyers about its idiosyncratic
snares — and to judge who should be trusted with them. One woman said
that she interviews a buyer for six weeks and conducts at least one
home visit before she will relinquish a pug. The purebred Siberian
Husky Club of America, meanwhile, devotes a portion of its Web site
to outlining why Siberians make difficult pets and why you probably
shouldn't get one. As further insurance, fanciers operate breed-
specific "rescue" organizations, resettling pets that ultimately
can't be cared for to keep them out of shelters. But Pug Rescue,
Beard said, is strictly for pugs, not puggles. "Who's going to take
care of that dog when the fad fades?" she asked. She went on,
detailing the pug's worst qualities, transitioning into the beagle's
and concluding, finally, that the puggle must be "a shedding,
snorting wanderlust dog that's going to pee all over your house."

Hybrid haven

"People who raise pugs have called me and chewed me out real good,"
Wallace Havens told me one morning. We were making the long drive to
Puppy Haven, soon infiltrating Amish country. "It's like a sin to
them," he said. "They've strived all their lives to breed the perfect
pug, with all those things that they want in a pug" — the perfect
furrowed face, the big infant eyes. Then here he comes and makes
something else out of it. "It hurts their feelings," he said with a
kind of plaintive sincerity. "I understand that."

Havens's creation has similarly been pirated. One of every four
litters that the American Canine Hybrid Club now registers is a
litter of puggles. There are 40 breeders registering at least one
puggle litter with the organization every month. As ads for puggles
have proliferated on the Internet, some people, Havens said — people
who don't know better — are now breeding pugs to any old foxhound and
selling them as puggles, at puggle prices. Some are crossing puggles
with puggles and passing off those disorderly second-generations as
puggles. "It's giving the puggle a bad name," he said.

Havens has since diversified. He is now doing 35 different hybrids,
as well as many purebreds, selling about 3,000 puppies annually. He
has also worked out multigenerational formulas for combining five or
six different undisclosed breeds. He gives them deliberatively
uninformative names like the Tiny Mite, the Pee Wee and the Miniature
St. Bernard, which has no St. Bernard in it whatsoever. The problem
with puggles, after all, was that the recipe for making them was
right there in the name.

Crossing dogs is as much an art as pure-breeding them, Havens
insisted: it takes judgment. In fact, genetics teaches that purebred
breeding and hybrid breeding are both time-tested ways to order
nature into predictable products. But the promise of each can easily
be ruined by the sloppiness of human nature. A group of very similar
schnauzers and a group of very similar poodles will make an equally
consistent crop of schnoodles. But there is substantial variation in
dogs registered in the same A.K.C. breed. And that variation is only
exacerbated by the variations in shrewdness and good sense of the
people picking out which individual dogs to cross. Mixing breeds
doesn't guarantee the puppies won't inherit genetic defects or other
troubles. An epileptic schnauzer and a ravenously misanthropic poodle
will only yield so genial of a schnoodle. And how adequately is that
schnoodle socialized during puppyhood? Is it raised with the close
human contact and vacuum-cleaner roars it will encounter in a home?
Will it contract a virus in cross-country transit or in an
overcrowded kennel or pet store and die?

This is to say, what we label a dog — how we brand it — doesn't
necessarily have much bearing on its quality. Ultimately, the value
of any dog, purebred or hybrid, is bound up in the priorities of the
people stewarding it through the hazards of nature and nurture. Money
spent on a dog may be best justified as a premium paid for knowledge
about its human breeder: an investment in how deftly he can shape and
distinguish a dog's bloodline from randomness and how reliably he can
tell us what to expect from that dog. Of course, there are doubtless
many breeders of both designer dogs and purebreds who churn out
animals far inferior to the proverbial mutt down at the pound with
three or four breeds haphazardly tangled in it. Nearly half of
American dog owners have long possessed this sort of less purposeful
mixed breed. Surely, many dogs are breeding just as good, if not
better, dogs than a lot of humans.

Havens, for his part, seemed confident in his own practiced
intuition. "Most breeders will specialize in golden retrievers, or
they'll specialize in Labs," he said. "They could tell you the
pedigree of a single Lab from 1900 on up and all the champions in its
pedigree. I can't do that. But if they were to cross a particular
poodle with that Lab, they wouldn't know what the heck was going to
happen. So I feel like I have it on them there." I suggested that if
dog traits were like words, maybe he was trying to speak, or at least
fumble his way through, the whole language. A Lab fancier was
endlessly revising a single sentence. Havens liked the analogy and
jumped into a story about his frustrations when he was breeding
purebred horned Hereford cattle years ago. "It's not something I
learned out of a book," he said. "I learned it out in a field, from a
life's experience of working with animals. That's all I've ever done."

All morning, he had been discharging bitter anecdotes about A.K.C.
dogs he had bought and been burned on: Samoyeds with hip dysplasia,
Westies that went bald. His banker's schnauzer had relentless
diarrhea. Hybrids, he kept insisting, are just healthier. Now he told
me: "If you buy a flower, more than likely the most beautiful rose
you can find is a hybrid. And the best-tasting tomatoes you can raise
are hybrids." Our beef comes from hybrids and, he added, pointing to
the stalks beside the road, so does our corn. He thought a second
more. It occurred to me that this may be what makes him immune to the
purebred world's irrational taboo but also why humane societies
condemn large-scale operations like his that raise dogs under a more
agricultural model. It is what is so constructive and jarring about
Havens's approach: when he looks at a dog, he sees an animal.

Pork, he said finally. Pork comes from hybrids.

`Show me someone who likes to kill a puppy'

Given the range of beliefs and values we bring to dogs, a not
entirely unwarranted paranoia now pervades all of dogdom. Though we
live intimately with those animals, dog breeding remains relatively
unpoliced and unregulated. Reports of deplorable breeders, small- and
large-scale, have shot out of rural America since purebreds first
became profitable in the '50s. Nearly everyone I spoke to, whether
partisan to purebreds or hybrids, condemned "puppy mills"
and "backyard breeders," terms carrying tremendous weight but
ultimately no real definitions. Breeders with 10 dogs were wary of
those with 20; those with 30 feared anyone with 50. Many designer-dog
breeders told me they had received phone calls or e-mail messages
scolding them for "damaging" breeds or simply spilling more mixed
breeds into a world oversaturated with them. In one case, a fancier
had offered to pay for a breeder's dogs to be spayed and neutered
immediately.

Havens handed me a stack of comparable e-mail messages one
afternoon. "I don't really get upset," he said. "They feel like we're
mistreating dogs, and I feel like we aren't. I feel like all dogs
should be bred in a kennel just like mine."

We had just toured the huge and sundry mob of breeding stock that
makes Puppy Haven's high volume possible: about a thousand adult
dogs, housed in a series of long buildings on one half of the farm
with gravelly, chain-link dog runs jutting off in either direction.
As Havens's S.U.V. trolled beside a row of pens known as Beagle
Alley, perhaps a hundred beagles raced into the rain through their
clacking metal doors to bark and challenge us.

The dogs live partitioned into what Havens calls "dog families,"
gangs of five females and a lone stud. A Chihuahua rooted amid
bichons. A Shar-Pei presided over a crowd of beagles like a crumply-
faced shogun. That was an experiment, Havens said, "just to see what
happens."

The scene was rather lawless; later that afternoon, I would watch
four schnauzers nearly destroy a fifth in a fight before an employee
pulled it out of the pen. I happened to spot a poodle stop humping a
Shih Tzu and hobble, very painfully it appeared, into the corner on
an injured foot. When I pointed it out to Havens, he calmly slid a
slip of paper from his shirt pocket and wrote down the pen number,
541, so that someone could check on it after lunch. "Good for you,"
he told me as though I were learning the business.

Havens was recently suspended by the A.K.C. for 10 years after
refusing a follow-up kennel inspection. He claims that the A.K.C.
inspector cited him for things long deemed acceptable, to punish him
for his promotion of designer dogs and his increasing use of another
registry service, thus no longer paying the A.K.C. thousands of
dollars in registration fees. The A.K.C. denies any such motivation,
saying that it has stepped up enforcement of a care-and-conditions
policy over the last decade and is glad to go without registration
income from breeders unwilling to comply. Recent U.S.D.A. inspection
reports show many incidences of dogs kept with inadequate bedding in
near-freezing temperatures at Puppy Haven or with excessively matted
hair or insufficient veterinary care. Havens retired 75 adult dogs,
no longer useful to him as sires or dams, to the Wisconsin Humane
Society over the last year. According to the humane society, many of
the dogs had to be treated for debilitating fears of noise or people
before they could be adopted. Some animal-welfare advocates, while
noting that most large kennels kill older, unproductive dogs, also
condemn shipping them off to shelters, seeing it as a shifting of
responsibility. In response, Havens says that he prides himself on
his unwillingness to put his dogs down and that there is a tremendous
demand to adopt the smaller purebreds he uses.

In comparison with other large-scale breeders, Havens is
exceptionally forthright and proud of his operation. He has done well
enough to hire a sizable staff, all of whom seem to authentically
enjoy working with dogs. Over lunch at a local diner, I asked them
about the reputation of their industry — of facilities like Puppy
Haven and of pet stores, to which they sell the bulk of their
puppies. Dan White, who was working at Puppy Haven at the time and
has owned pet stores himself, answered adamantly. The impression that
pet stores kill unsold puppies, for example, is out of touch, White
said. Killing a dog is bad business. You drop the price to $50 if you
have to. He went on until Havens, who had been placing classified ads
for puggles on his cellphone (they start as low as $300 now),
interrupted so evenly and with such earnestness that the conversation
was suddenly over. "And show me someone that likes to kill a puppy,"
Havens said.

This may be the good intention at the root of all the excruciating
politics around our dogs. Evolutionarily speaking, the puppy is a
compassion machine. The first domesticated dogs, one theory posits,
were underdogs — softies cast out of the wolf pack who shambled
deferentially into the corners of our camps to scavenge crumbs as
many as 50,000 years ago. Eventually, we seized upon the best hunters
and bred them to be better. We bred those with the cutest, flattest
faces to have cuter, flatter faces — until, in breeds like the pug,
they were nearly as flat as the faces of our own babies. This kindled
an even stronger urge to nurture them, to protect them from the
wilderness. By now, we have commandeered the dog so fully that the
only thing left to protect it from is ourselves.

`It takes a village'

After the Pug Dog Club's Puppy Match wound down, Ray Kolesar was the
last to straggle into the Beards' motor home, not long before
midnight. He was holding a can of beer and bag of potato chips. With
him was the canine reproduction specialist, whom he had dragged away
from her steak and cosmopolitan at the hotel restaurant to oversee
tonight's insemination.

Making purebred pugs is arduous and important business. The pug's
problem is geometrical. A century of selection for the
standard's "square and cobby" body has exaggerated those qualities,
rendering many males incapable of positioning themselves on a bitch,
of procreating reliably without human assistance. Nor can puppies
muscle through the pug's narrowed birth canal; like many breeds,
virtually all pugs must be delivered by C-section. "You'll never have
feral pugs," one woman told me earlier that night. She said it fondly.

Woody, the Beards' stud, is older, and his frozen semen had not
survived FedExing. So weeks earlier, Patt Kolesar embedded a hormonal
implant in her bitch's vulva to bring her into heat in time for
tonight's scheduled "side by side."

Kolesar positioned her bitch, Birdie, on the floor. Woody sniffed
rambunctiously and mounted. As the dog began his dedicated thrusting,
the unlikelihood of him ever managing the transaction on his own was
plain. And so, as planned all along, Jutta Beard crouched behind him
and concluded things with an expeditious right hand. In an instant,
she was holding up a plastic bag with a dime-size clump in its
corner.

The reproductive specialist set about confirming the semen's motility
with a microscope and advised Kolesar to tuck the pipette in her
cleavage. It is a trick, she said, to keep it warm while they
transferred Birdie onto the table and Beard microwaved some skim milk
for "extender," compensating for Woody's paltry output. "It takes a
village," Kolesar said, exhaling deeply as she got up off the floor.

Kolesar showed me a photograph of Woody's father, a famous specimen
named Captain Snappy. The squat, fawn-colored pug with taut, thin
legs stood on a pedestal. Gesturing rapidly, Kolesar praised the
gorgeous angle of the dog's back, the proportions of its face. To
describe the compactness of its form, she invoked the Latin
phrase "multum in parvo," or "much in little," the pug's unofficial
motto. Then she picked up an arresting syringelike instrument. It was
filled, via Woody, with some of Captain Snappy's superlative genes.

Kolesar slid the tool into Birdie. After several minutes, she removed
it and seemed satisfied. Then she inserted her bare finger into
Birdie's vagina and began to wriggle it, delicately and with great
purposefulness. She was "feathering" the dog, stimulating the vaginal
walls as a stud would, so that her muscles would contract and draw
the semen into her cervix. (The surest method of insemination,
Kolesar later explained, and one commonly done, is to surgically
expose the bitch's uterus, deposit the semen directly and then sew it
back up.) As Kolesar worked, Beard positioned herself near the dog's
head, and the Beards' daughter was at center, stroking Birdie's back
like a midwife. This seemed to go on for a long time. Then it was
done.

Eventually a looser mood filled the motor home. The small crowd
shared stories as though after a big meal. Jutta Beard described how
years ago, while she was breeding Rottweilers, one of her bitches was
accidentally impregnated by a dog of another breed. Great effort had
been taken to segregate the bitch, and how the intruder got in and
out of the Beards' kennel was a mystery. His identity couldn't even
be discerned in the gangling, alien faces of the resulting puppies.
Beard had them euthanized.

I asked if no one would have wanted them as pets. "I didn't want
them," she said decisively.

"Man may be said to hold toward the domesticated brutes almost the
same position that God does toward man," an editorialist at Harper's
New Monthly Magazine wrote in 1867, "overruling their natural
tendencies by determining the influences which surround them." The
purebred-dog fancy intensified and accelerated this process. But many
breeders I spoke to seemed to confuse their commitment to breeding
their lines to standard — "improving the breed," as they choose to
call it — with their other commitments: the less esoteric ones, like
financing genetic research, raising puppies lovingly, counseling
buyers about the commitment involved and taking back dogs that don't
work out. They were, it seems, conflating guiding a breed closer to
the ideal physical description they themselves had written for it
with something else: virtuousness.

"When you're breeding a mixed-breed dog, you're only breeding a dog
for money," Beard told me. "There's no standard there. There's
nothing you're aiming for, other than to put these two dogs together
and appeal to a fad." With no set way to police human morals, she
seemed to be substituting the only clear-cut rules she had: the ones
that spell out what kind of bite, brisket, tail carriage and toenails
look prettiest on a dog. The paradox is that adhering to those
standards has driven fanciers to outlandish and distressing lengths.

And yet having a detailed and complete picture of a breed, and a
tradition behind it, actually seems to help purebred-dog lovers be
understanding owners. The pug lovers I spoke to, like lovers of any
breed, were able to embrace all of the dog's traits because they were
familiar and unique to their breed. They even gushed about what
struck me as the pug's humiliating shortcomings: the snoring, the dim-
witted laziness. Explaining why one of his puppies had recently
gotten its eye banged up while playing, Ray Kolesar affectionately
told me, "A regular dog has a nose."

If dog ownership inevitably requires compromise, then this kind of
familiarity — the hard-won dependability of carefully bred purebreds
or at least their well-established reputations — should be a
tremendous asset to any pet buyer. It should help us make informed
decisions, letting us imagine what compromises a given dog will
require us to make. But what if we are increasingly disinclined to
make any compromises with our dogs at all?

A series of studies at several large British shelters by the animal
researcher Rebecca Ledger seems to suggest just this. Ledger found
that owners could forgive dogs for growling at visiting strangers,
unless the strangers were children. Barking excitedly at the doorbell
was acceptable — perhaps touching, even — when the owner returned
home from work. But barking at passing cyclists was pathologized
as "boisterousness," one of the most common reasons for surrendering
dogs to the shelters. In short, it seems we expect our animals to
have decorum.

"Separation anxiety," characterized by chewing furniture, urinating
or howling when left alone during the day, was another frequent deal-
breaker. But separation anxiety, Ledger writes, "is usually the
result of the owner constantly interacting with the dog by playing
with it," talking to it or sleeping near it. The dog's missing you
is, fundamentally, a corollary of the dog's appreciating you while
you are around. James Serpell, an ethologist who has written
extensively about our relationship with dogs, told me that
owners "want the higher level of interaction a dog offers but do not
want the dog to get upset when they leave it alone." People are
switching back to dogs, but, Serpell added, "they are looking for a
dog that is more like a cat."

Dogs with separation anxiety are now commonly treated with psycho-
pharmaceuticals. Maybe re-engineering the dog itself, hybridizing
newer models, represents "the last piece of the puzzle," Bob Vetere
says. "Will they reach a level of convenience where you have a
postage-stamp-size dog that makes you dinner when you come home and
reads the paper to you before you go to bed? I'm not sure that's
going to happen. But certainly someone's going to try it." After all,
the dog, which we've molded into one of the most physically diverse
mammalian species on earth, has so far been uncommonly obliging to
our needs. Why shouldn't we be capable of driving the entire species
toward its inevitable end, down a millennia-long trajectory from wolf
to stuffed animal?

One psychologist characterizes people as taking a "happily ever
after" approach to pet selection rather than a "marriages take work"
one. If we read a purebred-dog buying manual like Bash Dibra's "Your
Dream Dog: A Guide to Choosing the Right Breed For You" with the
expectation of finding an instantly harmonious buddy, we will only
end up noticing what should be irrefutably obvious: none of these
dogs are perfect. The Havenese is prone to "house soiling;" the
Pembroke Welsh corgi to "manipulativeness or dominance." Beagles bay.
Basset hounds are picky eaters. Greyhounds have "phobias." Sometimes
the signals are downright confusing. The Bedlington terrier, Dibra
writes, "positively despises all other animals" and "will fight them
to the death." It is also "calm indoors and makes a good apartment
pet."

Conscientious designer-dog breeders are surely creating reliable,
healthy, perfectly well-adjusted pets — dogs "truly bred for the work
of the family," as one Labradoodle breeder puts it, rather than for
moving a hundred head of cattle, fighting bears or flushing rats from
mine shafts. But hybrid breeders are also just offering us new dogs,
dogs we don't know enough about to readily find fault with. If they
can't produce the perfect dog, they can at least sustain its promise.

The designer dog's greatest charm may therefore be its almost
Rorschach-like ability to be whatever we see in it: something less
constrained than a purebred, something more distinctive than a mutt.
It gives us the possibility of the perfect companion. And if we keep
projecting that image of perfection onto all its inevitable flaws,
perhaps we'll convince ourselves it actually is.

Recently, I stopped a man in a park to ask about the hulking, long-
legged dog struggling to pick up the tennis ball at his feet. "It's a
Labradoodle," the man said with a freshness that suggested he had
never been asked before — surely an impossibility, though, given the
size and strangeness of the thing. I didn't ask where he had bought
the dog. It was unlike other Labradoodles I have seen: gawkier, with
a very long, straight yet nebulous coat of hair. The man threw the
ball. But the Labradoodle only romped and plodded in place. "They're
really funny dogs," the man said adoringly, as if he had just now
arrived at the right way to explain it.

Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine
about the science of pigeon control.

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Posted on SHARE Yahoo group - Feb. 4, 2007