Chapter 2

      Dawn of the Frankendog

      This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I’ll try my best to fake it.

      —Larry Wall

      The Allegory of the Labradoodle

      The custom-designed dog craze began in the 1980s with Wally Conron and the labradoodle. Conron was a puppy-breeding manager for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia when a Hawaiian couple asked if he had any dogs who would help the woman, who was suffering from vision problems, and that the husband, who was usually allergic to dogs, could tolerate.

      Conron was determined to solve this dilemma and hypothesized that if he crossbred a Labrador, a common guide dog breed, with a poodle, whose coat is less irritating for allergy sufferers, he could provide a dog that would accommodate the needs of both the wife and the husband. After he mated the dogs and the mother gave birth to five puppies, he waited until the puppies were five months old and then collected hair and saliva samples from them and sent them to the couple. The husband had no allergic reaction to the samples from one of the five puppies; the samples from the other four caused allergic reactions. Conron then repeated the experiment. Of the samples from the next litter, ten puppies, three did not irritate the man’s allergies; samples from the other seven did.

      Conron gave one of the dogs whose samples did not irritate the man’s allergies to the guide dog association to train for the woman, but they refused, saying they only wanted to work with purebreds. So, as a marketing gimmick, Conron announced that the dog was a purebred of a new breed he had created. He called it the “labradoodle.”

      The story of Wally Conron and the labradoodle is disturbing on several levels. First, why did the guide dog association refuse to train a dog simply because the dog was not a pedigree? Second, why did Conron assume that any one of the dogs could be a good match for the couple? It needed to be proven that the selected dog would not ignite the man’s allergy and would also be a good guide dog for the woman. Guide dogs are part of a unique pairing, rather than a mass-produced, any dog will do pairing. Third, the experiment involved seventeen dogs and what the crossbred puppies would be like was unknown. Conron could have caused fifteen dogs to be born with birth defects that would lead to a lifetime of health issues. The mother dog could have suffered or died giving birth. And then, of course, what would happen with all the other puppies? Conron planned for the couple to take one puppy, but there were no planned homes for the others. If they had been born with health problems, it would have been even harder to find them homes.

      Conron’s decision to mastermind a labradoodle haunted him for years. Once his invented breed became publicly known, demand for it exploded. And this is despite the fact that, as Conron learned, labradoodles don’t breed true. Their coats can differ, their behavior is unpredictable, and most aren’t hypoallergenic. In the years since Conron’s experiment, he has frequently admitted that a mixed-breed dog cannot be considered a purebred and that he only called his puppies members of a new breed because he wanted the Royal Guide Dog Association to train one of the dogs to help the woman suffering from vision problems. In 2014, the year mixed-breed dogs were admitted into the Westminster Kennel Club show for the first time, he was particularly outspoken about his mistake.

      In an interview published by Psychology Today on April 1, 2014 (“A Designer Dog-Maker Regrets His Creation” by Stanley Coren), Conron said:

      I opened a Pandora’s box, that’s what I did. I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy. . . .

      Today I am internationally credited as the first person to breed the labradoodle. People ask me, “Aren’t you proud of yourself?” I tell them “No! Not in the slightest.” I’ve done so much harm to pure breeding and made so many charlatans quite rich. I wonder, in my retirement, whether we bred a designer dog—or a disaster!

      The story of Wally Conron and the labradoodle is an allegory of experiments and consequences. And though it’s not my mission to ease Conron’s conscience, it must be said that he wasn’t the first person to mix breeds to create a third breed, or a variant of a parent breed. It’s thought that the first designer dog in the modern history of the United States was born in the 1950s. It was the child of a cocker spaniel and a toy or miniature poodle, called a “cockapoo” or “spoodle.” Information about this breed’s inventor, birth location, and the impetus behind its creation is hard to reliably locate, but it does help flesh out the timeline of the custom-designed dog industry.

      Celebrity owners of labradoodles include Jennifer Aniston, Barbara Eden, Christie Brinkley, Henry Winkler, and Tiger Woods, and, as usual, what celebrities have, the public wants. People pay thousands of dollars for labradoodles. Many purchasers assume they’re getting a dog that will be hypoallergenic, but find themselves sneezing when the dog comes close.

With the demand for labradoodles came the usual response from money-hungry puppy mill operators: careless breeding and ample supply. Puppy mill operators also mix a wealth of other breeds with poodles. New breeds ending with “oodle” are born left and right. Each time, two parent dogs are exploited for the experiment and offspring at high risk of genetic diseases are born. The parent dogs suffer, the puppies could be sentenced to a lifetime of suffering, possibly with short life spans, purchasers end up with expensive medical bills for their dogs, and shelters end up with abandoned dogs and must decide whether to keep them alive or euthanize them, a sad practice often performed when a home cannot quickly be found for an animal. The government does not keep tabs on how many animals are euthanized each year, but it’s estimated that approximately 1.5 million shelter animals are euthanized in the United States each year.1

      The Pit Bull: A Cautionary Tale

      Featured in the television show The Little Rascals, Buster Brown shoes advertisements, and the film Fame, the pit bull was once and is still, if carefully chosen, considered a good family pet. Pit bulls were companions to President Theodore Roosevelt and Helen Keller, and were once viewed as “nanny” dogs—loving, loyal, and wonderful with children. The love for this breed began to wane about twenty-five years ago as its reputation was degraded in response to news reports of dogfighting and vicious mauling incidents.

      The bulldog is one of the parent dogs of the pit bull. Beginning in England in the 1600s, the bulldog was used to hunt boar, herd sheep, and participate in bullbaiting and bearbaiting contests, a blood sport extant since medieval times that involved pitting a captive bear or bull, confined in a ring, against dogs. The dogs would fight the bear until the dogs or the bear were dead or the fight was stopped. People would bet on the winner. In England’s Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, bullbaiting and bearbaiting were banned as inhumane. Enter dogfighting: a blood sport for gambling that was designed to fill the gap. As animal fighting—dogfighting and cockfighting—was neither a new sport nor one unique to England (it was already popular in Japan, the Philippines, and Mexico, to name a few examples), the bulldog, with its proven prowess at bullbaiting and bearbaiting, seemed like a good candidate to transition into the dogfighting arena. The bulldog was strong and loyal, had a strong jaw, and was an unrelenting attacker. But there was room for improvement.

      For “improvement,” the bulldog was crossbred with a terrier, a dog that is smaller and easier to handle than a bulldog and has an enormous prey drive. Their offspring, with its prey drive, size, strength, stamina, and love of people, which is important for the safety of human handlers, resulted in the perfect fighting dog and may have been the first custom-designed dog. The new breed was what we today call the American pit bull terrier. In this case, rather than crossbreeding to develop hypoallergenic qualities, the crossbreeding was intended to cause