| DOGS CONNECTIONS | |
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| A Celebration of Dogs: links, articles and images. | |
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Mixed Breed Dogs
There don't seem to be too many good web pages up devoted to mixed
/ random bred dogs in general. Here are a few American Mixed Breed Obedience Organization Dog Park.com In Praise of Mixed Breed Dogs Purebreed Dogs vs Mixed Breed Dogs
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How I got involved with Mixed Breed Dogs: When I lived in Charlotte, NC, dog owners were required to purchase licenses for each animal. These were very expensive for me as I usually had about 15 dogs at any one time. Spayed and neutered animals got a price break as did animals being shown in competition. All of my rescue and non competition animals were neutered, but I was showing German Shorthaired Pointers at the time, so had a few un-altered dogs. In order to purchase the licenses at the reduced cost, people had to go to the animal shelter with proof in hand. Of course going to the shelter meant visiting the incarcerated animals. I approached this annual task with mixed feelings as I knew I would invariably adopt a dog every year. One of these dogs was Laura - my first mixed breed dog a collie / golden crossbred. A strong influence on my choice to adopt a mixed breed dog was a slogan published in some of the dog magazines by one of the national Animal Welfare groups: "Until there are none, adopt one." Laura was a medium sized, very active, happy acting dog when I first saw her at the shelter. She had been there for a month (a very long time for a dog to stay in the shelter). The shelter staff told me she was about two years old. Well, I wanted a smaller dog, so I adopted her. Laura was spayed by the shelter. Over the next few months this medium sized "two year old" dog more than doubled in size and became my largest dog (bigger than my dobermans). I now know to take shelter workers estimates of dog ages with a "grain of salt." Laura must have been about five months old when I adopted her. She was pretty wild at first, obviously had not been in a house and had virtually no manners. Once after I left her inside for a few minutes she jumped up on my work table - scattered all of my papers, lamp etc and totally trashed my living room. At wit's end, I put her in the van and started back to the pound. However, after driving a couple of blocks, weeping until it wasn't safe to drive, I turned around and brought her home. We had to make this work. We started training lessons. We also got a good comfortable crate. A few weeks later I fostered a black lab who provided her with lots of company. Eventually (many hours of training and a bit of maturity) Laura became a model dog - a perfect dog...She will be 13 this coming winter. A completely obedient lovely dog who will be much missed when she goes to the bridge. Breeders of purebred dogs give all sorts of excuses as to why mixed breed dogs are just as prone to illness and unsoundness as purebred dogs. However in my experience (with many mixes now), this is not true. Mixes do have a genetic advantage that can make them less susceptible to disease. Random breeding rules out the expression of many of the recessive genes which cause some of the terrible problems we see in purebred dogs. |
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by Judith
Van Noate, Humanities Librarian |
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