Gina Bryson and Drs O’Neill and Packer: The Doodle Dilemma

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Jessica Perry Hekman:  Welcome to the functional breeding Podcast. I’m Jessica Perry Heckman, and I’m here interviewing people about how to breed dogs for function and for health, behavioral and physical. This podcast is brought to you by the functional dog collaborative, an organization founded to support the ethical breeding of healthy, behaviorally sound dogs. The FDCs goals include providing educational, social and technical resources to breeders of both purebred and mixed breed dogs. You can find out more at functionalbreeding.org or at the Functional Breeding Facebook Group, which we work hard to keep friendly and inclusive. I hope you have fun and learn something.

JPH: Hi, friends. Today I’m talking with the researchers who recently published a paper that’s been getting a lot of social media buzz. The paper’s title is “The Doodle Dilemma: how the physical health of designer crossbreed Cockapoo Labradoodle and Cavipoo dogs compares to their purebred progenitor breeds”. This interview was a big party featuring Gina Bryson, who’s the first author on the paper, as well as two more researchers also from Royal Veterinary College (RVC), Dr Rowena Packer and Dr Dan O’Neill. Dan, of course, has been a guest on the podcast before. Gina, Rowena, and Dan walked me through it with the paper does, and does not, tell us about the health of some specific common crosses compared to the parent breeds, and also let me know about additional data that they collected, which we’ll be seeing in some future papers from the group. A quick side note that they refer a few times to the RVC, which is the Royal Veterinary College. Again, that’s the institution where they work. Another side note, I’ve started going by my middle name, Perry, because I like it better. My pronouns are still she, her. You’ll hear Dan call me Perry a few times during this episode, so I wanted to explain so people weren’t confused by that. Jessica is still my legal and professional name, if it helps to contextualize, we can think of Perry as a nickname, on with the episode. Welcome to the Functional Breeding Podcast. Gina, Rowena and Dan, I’m so glad to have you all here to talk about this exciting new paper that you have published recently that a lot of people have been talking about online. And I am going to start introductions with Gina, who’s the first author of the paper. So Gina, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? I’m thinking things like, you know, what program you’re in, what degree you’re seeking, what your area of interest is, that kind of stuff. 

[Citation for referenced paper:  The doodle dilemma: How the physical health of ‘Designer-crossbreed’ Cockapoo, Labradoodle and Cavapoo dogs’ compares to their purebred progenitor breeds, Gina T. Bryson, Dan G. O’Neill, Claire L. Brand, Zoe Belshaw, Rowena M. A. Packer, Published: August 28, 2024  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306350  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0306350]

Gina Bryson: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. So I completed a undergrad degree in bio veterinary science at the RVC, and it was in my final year that I kind of fell in love with the animal welfare modules and also kind of research based work, so I decided to do a master’s in research, and was lucky enough to be offered a project with Rowena and Dan exploring ownership of designer cross breeds. And this was funded by the Kennel Club Charitable Trust, and I actually finished this last September. So since then, it’s been mainly like writing up the studies, and next year, hoping to pursue a PhD in canine welfare, also with Rowena. 

JPH: Excellent and so well, that leads into Rowena, who has not been on the podcast before. I am hoping to have her on again, just her in the future, but Rowena, I’m really glad to have you here. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about what your job is, what you do, what your area of interest is?

Rowena Packer: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, and I’m more than happy to come back as many times as you want. So my background is in companion animal behavior and welfare science quite broad within that.   I’ve had a lot of interest in the past in chronic and inherited disorders in dogs, both from a biological perspective. So the interplay between things like physical confirmation and health, the interplay between health and behavior, and also quite a strong theme around the human element. I think the more you study welfare, the more you realize that actually these are nearly all entirely man made human issues. So learning more about owner attitudes, owner knowledge, owner two kinds of fields together. 

JPH: Excellent. And then Dan. I think Dan’s been on the podcast a couple of times already, so we’re fairly familiar with you. And for those who haven’t listened to his other episodes, I’ll link to them. They are fantastic. Dan, how did you get involved with this paper?

Dan O’Neill: Yeah, thanks Perry for inviting me back. This paper fits within a wider body of work that Rowena and I have been doing at the Royal Veterinary College for the last 14 years. We started our PhDs on the same day, ended them on the same day, and essentially we’ve been looking at dogs. I love the name of your podcast, because that’s what we’re doing, looking at dogs and how they are functional, and unfortunately, how many of them are dysfunctional. So this study is just part of that wider work, and we’re trying to explore how different forms of breeding, in this case, towards designer cross breeds, may or may not, help their function, their health. And also, as Rowena said, look at the world from the owner’s perspective, the dog perspective really is most important from welfare, but every dog has an owner, so we’re interested in the owner’s perspectives and how these dogs are [muffled] [held?], the cost of the dogs looking after them. Future research, we’ll probably talk about it later. And that Regina is doing is looking at the behavior of these dogs, or even husbandry and grooming. So essentially, this fits into a decade of work that Rowena and I have been doing. 

5:50

JPH: Fabulous. So, and I’m curious about how this particular paper got started, and I’m realizing too that, as I asked everyone, sort of how you are all working together? I’m still not completely clear. Maybe Gina can clear this up. Is it one laboratory? Is it two laboratories? like Gina? So in the United States, at least when I did my PhD, there’s clearly a laboratory with a principal investigator who’s running the laboratory. And I have always thought of Rowena and Dan having their own separate groups, although I can see that you two collaborate a lot. So Gina, are you working with one of them more than the other? Or how does, how does that work?

RP: She’s got a heady mix, haven’t you got a bit of poor Gina  [laughter].  I think Dan and I, at times, I feel like we’ve had a separation, really, haven’t we for nine months, because I’ve been off having a baby, but we’re generally like a two headed monster, I think, at RVC, so we do have separate but also it’s a very overlapping Venn diagram, if that makes sense. So with this work, specifically Dan and I have been working on the pandemic puppy phenomenon since 2020 when we were all stuck at home. Dan obviously is very desk based, as an epidemiologist, working with big data, I, at the time, was doing some, actually quite clinically based, hospital based research, and was like, right? We need to do something that is only on computers, and I’m not going to end up with any disease spread because of me. And we worked on that, looking at differences in purchasing behaviors and acquisition of puppies during that time, and that has kind of exploded into the last four years, really, hasn’t it? We’ve ended up with so many spin off studies from that and actually very iteratively, following the results of one study into the next, which is actually very satisfying. You know, so often you do a study and at the end you’re like, I’d really like to look at this, and then either the funding doesn’t happen, or the student isn’t in the right place, or you don’t have the stars aligning. But for this, we had our first pandemic work, as part of which we found that there was a big surge in designer cross breed acquisition during 2020 which kind of piqued our interest. Dan had also confirmed that in the Vet Compass database, so it looked pretty legitimate that in the UK, at least, we were seeing more and more and it’s flocking to these dogs. We then were very lucky that we had a really fantastic summer student, funded by you four [U4?]  in the UK, who looked a little bit more into why this was happening? And the three big hitters there were: [1] that people wanted dogs that were hypoallergenic. Maybe a question for the next podcast. [2] They wanted dogs that were good with children, and [3] they also perceived that designer crossbreeds were generally healthy, more so than purebreds. And that is where we then took the leap of going. Okay, well, if there’s these three big belief systems that are driving this new demographic trend, not just in the UK, we know that we’re seeing this in North America, in Australia. Is any of it actually true? Is there anything that’s actually going to come out as reality, like expectations versus reality of ownership of these dogs? And that’s where Gina stepped in with this project that, as you said, was kindly funded by [UK] Kennel Club Charitable Trust.

08:58

GB: And I think it’s also important to mention that the other two authors of this study, Dr Zoe Belcher and Dr Claire Brown, are also members of the pandemic puppy team. So we are all kind of under that umbrella. That’s how we all tie in.

DO: So just to add to that, it’s a very interesting question you asked, Perry, because historically, you’re absolutely right. A lot of research tended to be done in labs, and the labs had a hierarchy, and there was somebody at the top, certainly since Rowena and I started our work at the RVC, we’re kind of breaking that mold quite a bit, and the vast majority of our work involves very diverse, widespread teams. We, just at the drop of a hat, will bring in people from other institutions, other disciplines, people from medicine, human medicine. So actually, there are dozens of ways that we’re breaking the mold of what was previously perceived to be how science was done. But breaking down that thing about laboratories, and you work within your laboratory, and you work with your own people within the laboratory, that kind of model isn’t how we work. So your opening comment there is absolutely right. It is. It is very loose and flexible. The arrangement between Rowena’s team, and the Vet Compass team and lots of other teams, and that’s how it should be. And like Gina, just seems to flip in and out of Vett Compass and Pandemic puppies and and other projects at RVC. And it’s wonderful, and we all learn … [multiple people talking].

RP: Really fun. It’s like, it’s proper team sports science. And I think breaking down those hierarchies and everybody just getting stuck in I think often we end up with papers with a lot of authors, which I know in some countries, is seen as a negative thing. You know, if there’s too many people getting involved, too many cooks, but actually, I think it’s more the merrier when people can get involved and bring different perspectives. As you said, Zoe, she works with us closely on lots of different studies, brings in some really nice social science and qualitative perspectives. Claire’s amazing organization and planning these pretty enormous data sets at times. So I think everybody bringing something to it, and obviously somebody leading it, and having Gina, in this case, we were extremely fortunate to have such a passionate and very talented master’s student, because clearly that is early in your career, and not everybody manages to get potentially multiple very good papers out of one emerald So, yeah, hats off to Gina.

11:26

JPH: So what, what attracted you to this, to this project, Gina? What question were you trying to answer? And I know that Rowena, she touched a bit on what the questions were that this paper is about. But maybe you could, could give us a more, more detailed and sort of specific coverage of what was what you were trying to answer here.

GB: Well, I think the fact that designer cross breeds are clearly so popular in the UK, and yet, kind of like delving into kind of the research done in articles, it revealed that there was very limited kind of evidence and research conducted into, like, specific designer cross breeds. I mean, there’s lots of papers out there that use the term crossbreeds and include them in their study, or, like mixed breeds, but actually, kind of the specific crossbreed, like the known crossbreed, there’s very little out there. And I think we kind of thought, well, this is clearly a big knowledge gap, which seems strange considering how popular these dog breeds are. And I think it was important that we looked into that further, because the canine demographic of the UK is clearly changing. We need to kind of keep our research up to date with that. And if designer crossbreeds are kind of filling people’s households and becoming even more popular, like the canine welfare research needs to reflect that.

13:03

JPH: They’re certainly becoming massively popular here as well. I mean, that’s, it’s a trend that shows no signs of going away anytime soon. So, all right, so well, how, how is the, how does the paper approach, asking this, this problem, how did asking this question? How did, how’s the paper designed? How did you collect data, like, how did that all work for you? 

13:22

GB: So we kind of wanted to look at various different aspects of design, across breed ownership. I think our main focus was health, especially as that hadn’t really been looked at before. And I think a lot of people use, perhaps anecdotal evidence to decide whether designer crossbreeds are going to be healthier or unhealthier than purebreds. So we really just wanted to focus on that kind of comparison, that health comparison between the designer crossbreeds and the purebreds. We wanted to focus on the specific breeds, the cockapoo, the Labradoodle and the cavapoo, because a recent UK dog breed demographic study showed that they were the three most popular designer crossbreeds. So it made sense to use those three and their subsequent parent purebreds, and therefore we decided to focus just on those three. I’m aware that there’s probably lots of others that are popular in the UK, like goldendoodles and sprockets, but we wanted to kind of keep it quite neat and concise with those three to start with. So that’s why we wanted to focus on those three popular designer cross breeds. Um, Rowena. Did you want to add anything on those specific breeds that we chose? 

RP: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the fact that we’d seen that specific surge, we’ve seen that the Labradoodle is kind of the forerunner of the designer crossbreed phenomenon coming out of Australia. And again, there’s so much complexity and nuance of this. We know, for example, the Australian Labradoodle is different to what we probably see in the UK, and that it’s not that f1 plus cross of just the Labrador with the poodle, which we’d see more commonly in the UK. And then we’d seen specifically the rise in cockapoos. And then the year, as we said, of the pandemic that the cavapoo became the pandemic darling. It became the new small kind of, I guess, more leaning towards handbag type, dog designer cross breed, that really surged. That was in our own study. But also we saw one of the major sites in the UK for selling dogs online, Pets For Homes, and they also put out reports about their sales statistics, and they had a pretty shocking surge in the number of buyers per dog for the cockapoo, they were the most common dog that was sought out in 2020 so I think it was important that we focus in on those we had in our previous work, looked at designers more generally when we were looking at acquisition of known crosses. But that is quite a broad church. We know, for example, some of the say working breeds. So when we might have some like Springer cross Cockers, that seems to be quite a different beast in terms of being bred for, say, a working function, versus these three primarily companion breeds. So I think they kind of fit neatly as a package for this study.

DO: Can I interject a little bit there as well? Just at a broader level, dogs were domesticated, maybe some people say 10,000 20,000 30,000 years ago. But dog breeds were really invented in the 1800s early 1900s so that was when the whole creation of dog breeding happened. Well, the whole thing is starting again now. And it has been for the last 10 years, the world seems to have, or a lot of the world seems to have, rejected the traditional pedigree dogs, or purebred dogs, and they’re recreating new breeds. And these three breeds we have here, the cockapoo, the cavapoo, Labradooodle, now are breeds the same as the traditional pedigree breeds were all designer crosses when they started. So in other words, all we’re doing is reinventing the wheel, it’s what humanity does. And one of the goals here with Gina’s work was that maybe we could do it a little bit better this time. And rather than starting with inventing a breed purely because A, I’m capable of having this breed B, it is distinct enough, different enough to other breeds. So in other words, I make it smaller, bigger, no nose, longer nose, no tail, no hair, whatever. Something distinct. Maybe this time we could use the evidence so that we’re starting with dogs that are functional, going back to the name of your podcast. And in essence, what we were trying to do here is to produce one of the seminal papers that could help spark the new wave of dog breeds, but actually start from the dog’s perspective. And a dog, I think, if we would ask them, would like to be healthy, not to be born with poor innate health, baked-in health issues? So essentially, that was driving motivation here.

GB:I just yeah, just wanted to add to Dan’s point is that many of today’s purebreds did originate from crossbreeding, such as like the Silky Terrier The Golden Retriever, they were products of intentional breeding between different pre existing breeds, and therefore they could actually be considered designer dogs, but they later gained a purebred status and then with other breeds as well. For example, at the Irish Wolfhound necessitated crossbreeding with other breeds in order to kind of keep that breed going as well. So, oops, sorry,

JPH: yeah, oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.. I just wanted to because, I’m hearing, and I completely agree with everything you’ve said. I’m hearing in my head the people who will point out that there are breeds that have come from land races that really came from, you know, sort of these, certainly these more open populations, but not from crosses. And I just want to acknowledge that’s true. But there are a lot of breeds that did come from crosses, and so, you know, both things can be true. And I just wanted to, I don’t want people to not be able to hear your point because they’re distracted by the fact that it’s not every, every breed, it’s, it’s many breeds. Sorry, go ahead. 

GB: You know that’s, that’s all I had to say.

19:40

JPH: Okay, great. So, so you started looking at these particular designer crosses, and then I believe you also looked at the parent breeds, right? So those were the the breeds that you started with, was the parent breeds and the designer crosses. So then how did you collect this data?

GB: So we created a survey using REDCap, which is like a survey program online. It was quite a large survey, bless the people that actually completed all of it, because that was very large. So we

RP: People like to tell us about their dogs. Okay, it was long, but well completed. So they do tell you about their dog, and they tell you everything they’ve ever known, every sniff, every fart, the whole lot you need to know everything about that dog. So yeah, we might beat people up a bit with long surveys, but if they answer them, you’re just making us emboldened to make them even longer.

GB: That’s so true. And we so actually considered of five sections. So we had the first one which was on, like the demographic, kind of like your normal owner details. Then we kind of had purchasing details as well, which was included in that section. We then went on to a health section. This was then followed by hypologenicity and grooming care. We then had a behavior section, and then finally it was like owner expectations versus reality.

JPH: Excellent, yeah. And I noticed that it was not Vet Compass. I was expecting it to be Vet Compass. Did you decide to collect this data through a survey, rather than go through Vet Compass? I’m just curious.

GB: Dan, do you want to?

21:36

DO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The so, so essentially, it isn’t either or within the wider framework of this work, we’re actually doing lots of these different studies, and Rowena can talk about another study that a wonderful researcher called Lizzie Ewings is doing within Vet Vompass, we also have studies ongoing on various different I’m using invertico as breeds, because these dogs are breeds, and even with veterinary clinical records in other countries, like we have a study on helping with a study in Denmark that’s looking at Labradoodles. So it isn’t either or. It is simply choosing what is the most appropriate vehicle to answer the question you have at hand. Vet Compass gives us really, really, really good veterinary clinical data, and the notes are recorded by vets. So we know the data are very robust, but what we wanted to do here was to also capture owner data. So the owner’s gender and their background, we wanted to capture their views, their opinions, were they surprised, sadden when they got this dog and discovered they had to get the dog groomed every six weeks, and the expense of that. So essentially, for the wider question we wanted to ask here, veterinary clinical data didn’t give us enough information. Veterinary clinical data focus on what it does, which is veterinary care. So essentially here, we wanted a much bigger, much more holistic question to be asked and answered and we had Gina as well to do it, so we were lucky.

RP: It allows for that interplay as well. So for any individual dog to be able to have data on its health, on its behavior, on the aspects of ownership, and as you said, Vet Compass is extremely powerful for that stripped back health data, but the wider context about that owner and the lifestyle environment that dogs live within is kind of lost. You know, it’s a trade off for all these things. It says that Dan says they’re all trade offs, and it’s just another piece, I guess, of the research jigsaw. It’s not to say that we can’t do that going forwards, or that that wouldn’t be a good thing to do going forwards, but I think this first foray here to get that kind of initial, wide picture, this just felt like that. Fit fit best from a research design

GB: Also with we found that with veterinary clinical data, there were some challenges, because veterinary practices still tend to use a generalized label of cross breed for a lot of the crosses, so it was hard to distinguish between the specific ones that we wanted to look for. So that was another important reason why we wanted to use owner reported health data. But we’re kind of hoping that maybe in future, veterinary professionals and clinics might be encouraged to record like the parentage, if possible.

JPH: More data would be great for everybody, wouldn’t it?

DO: But even, even just to add to that, so within Vet Compass, we get breed as recorded by the veterinary practice, which is great. Within this particular study, we were interested not just in whether the dog was a cockapoo, but maybe which generation it was. Going back to Gina’s earlier comment about these dogs now being breeds, the original design of crosses are breeds. By virtue of having been bred for 2, 3, 5, 10, 50 generations. In this particular study, it meant that we were able to ask which generation there were, and the results showed that just 20% of the dogs in the study were reported as f1 so the first original cross. So that means 80% of these, if they’re not f1 are later generations, which again adds to the whole story and the data and the evidence to say these dogs now are becoming genuine breeds. They are the product of cockapoos crossed with cockapoos now from multi generations. So we couldn’t get that level of information from the veterinary clinical record. So it, as Rowena said, a beautiful word, jigsaw. So we are creating this giant mosaic of information by cherry picking where to go to answer the specific bits that we’re interested in. 

JPH: Yeah, and I think that’s an important point too, that I know a lot of people who think about designer breeds assume that they are all f1 crosses, and I know I believed that for a long time, until I started getting into this world of how we breed dogs, and started discovering how frequently they are, in fact, not even F2, but multi generational mixes, and that a lot of breeders are, that that’s not a bad thing, that a lot of breeders are, you know, curating their lines in the same way that that purebred breeders do, to try to bring out particular traits that are particularly what people are interested in. Yeah, Dan, 

DO: And it gets even more complex than that, because the the like, if we have Cavapoo, we assume it’s a Cavalier and a poodle, but certainly within Vet Compass when we look at the portmanteau names, the names that are created by merging a bit of each of the parent breeds names, we’re now seeing 3, 4, 5, 6  different breeds mixed.  And interestingly, in the last two or three years in Vet Compass, what I’m now seeing is designer breeds been listed as one of the parent breeds, so that the public are accepting there is this breed called cockapoo, and I’m deliberately crossing that breed with something else, with a Jack Russell, so that the wider public are accepting these dogs as breeds, as Rowena said earlier. And we will see whether the Gina’s work dispels this they perceive the Well, certainly the people who are buying the designer breeds are perceiving them as healthier and more hypoallergenic and better with children, whether the evidence bears that out, is a different story. But people’s perception is their reality. And one of the other I said earlier about Vet Compass pandemic puppies breaking original molds of science, one of the things we have been trying to do is to look at the world from the owner’s perspective, rather than try to look at the world from a scientific perspective and impose that view on the public. If the public perceived these dogs as breeds, they are breeds. If the public perceive these dogs as healthier, they are healthier, until the evidence says otherwise. So all of this is just trying, like we’re all struggling through life, trying to work out how the world works. It’s constantly changing, and all we’re trying to do is give people tools here to help them to better understand the world around them. And if I buy a certain type of dog under the belief that it’s hypoallergenic and healthy and easy to look after, and that dog turns out to make my skin come up in a rash and to have lots of health problems and cost me a fortune, and to then need to be groomed every six weeks and cost me a lot of money. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody had done a little piece of research and actually told the world that instead of letting social media tell these stories that may or may not be true. So essentially, that was the driver behind this,

28:26

RP: About those social constructs, I think, you know, we take it for granted the kind of breed terms. There’ll be people who are absolutely inflamed by the fact that Dan is saying that these dogs are breeds. But you know, we have to think, you know, the Kennel Club is only 150 years old. It’s not that long in the grand scheme of humans and dogs, or of humanity in general. So I think having a history lesson, I think, is really important. And a lot of this, as Gina said, you know, you only have to cast back a few decades to see that many popular purebred breeds were known to be crossed at that point. And I think we’ve had obviously this inertia since the studbooks were closed. But realistically, the world of dogs is still out there. We need to think outside the box, given we’ve got so many health issues in dogs, and I say dogs in general, that you know, being a bit more creative with how we use their genetics to create, as you said, these functional dogs kind of necessitates, like shaking off the shackles of the kind of institutions that might be changing their own thinking too. You know, I think it’s just not these thoughts are imposed on the public and taken as read by I think a lot of people were actually, there’s different ways of thinking and being, I think, with this, 

JPH: Yeah, and I just as you were talking about closing the studbooks, which I think is one of the main things that people point at when they say, is it a breed, or is it not a breed? Does it have a registry, and are the studbooks closed? When Dr Allison Skipper came on this podcast to talk about the history of registries and studbooks, she pointed out that registries only closed their studbooks in most breeds a couple decades ago? Well, I say a couple of several decades ago, right in the some of them, as late as the 1960s 1970s so it’s really not as long ago as many of us think, although before living memory for for many of us, as it turns out these days, not for some of us on this call, but

DO: sadly, 19 

JPH: Well, you say the 70s. I was, I was alive in the 70s, but I was not aware of dog breeding in the 70s.  Alright. So Gina, why don’t you start telling us what you actually found?

30:32

GB: Oh, yeah, I was actually, I was going to discuss about, discuss about, like, the gathering of the data as well, because I know that you mentioned that earlier. So the survey was disseminated across multiple social media platforms. We also had the help of a lot of amazing UK animal charities, large organizations as well, for example, like pets for homes, pet plan, they did an amazing job at sending the survey out to people that use their services. Also went to Crufts as well, with flyers, kind of talked to the purebred like representatives as well, and obviously the Kennel Club also helped to promote the questionnaire. I think there were multiple times that Dan and Rowena described the methods as quite shameless. I became a bit of [muffled]

RP: I’m so glad you’re talking about this, because this is like one of the if, when people say, Oh, how did you get a survey of that size? Because, as we’ve highlighted, this is quite a prescriptive population. They’re under five straight designer crosses and a handful of purebreds, and you get nearly 10,000 usable responses. It was literally Gina being absolutely dogged. There is nothing that this woman won’t do to get data points. She was absolute, like you, you were, you were very Jack Russell energy for that entire period of, yeah, being very tenacious, asking anyone and everyone. And the good thing there is also, it means our results are just that bit more generalizable. It wasn’t that we were going for one specific source and relying on it, having that sampling net cast as widely as possible in really diverse ways, and particularly because we know a lot of these owners are probably going to be younger. Our previous work found that younger owners are often attracted to designers to try and get that population making sure that we got across the social media platforms that Dan and I weren’t either aware of or weren’t able to download on our rickety phones, because we are not, sadly, under the age of 25 like Gina. So that was extremely useful to have that involved.

GB: And I think especially like you say Rowena, is that like designer cross breeds do seem to be quite popular amongst, like the younger population, and especially on Instagram. You now have accounts that are specifically for dogs, and a lot of that are designer cross breeds as well. So like the world of designer crossbreeds on somewhere like Instagram is huge. 

JPH: So what was the size, the number of answers that you got? What’s your what’s your data set like?

GB: So we received, I think it was 10 and a half 1000 [10,500] responses. But then, after cleaning, so ones that perhaps hadn’t been completed properly, were missing quite important data we like. The final analytic data set was 9402

JPH: that is very respectable. So do you, would you like to tell us about, about what you found, or do you want to go into, I think you’ve already, you’ve talked a bit about what kinds of questions you asked already? Do would you have more you would want to add to that? Or do you want to start talking about findings? 

GB: No, I think we can discuss. I didn’t know if Dan wanted to discuss a little bit about the actual disorders and why we chose, why it was the 57 disorders.

34:32

DO: Yeah, so good question. So, part of this was our overarching goal here was to look at the big picture. So we’re trying to compare these three designer cross breeds versus their parent breeds. So based on previous Vet Compass studies, we had picked the three breeds anyway, because we knew they were very popular in the UK. And based on previous Vet Compass studies, we knew what were the most common disorders overall. So again, we weren’t aiming yet. Niche, rare disorders, or even rare genetic disorders, whatever that means, we can unpick whether that’s even true or exists. We were looking at stuff that’s common. This is taking a completely utilitarian approach. It was the greatest good for the greatest number of dogs, so common breeds, common disorders, and comparing between the two groups, the designer and then each of the parent breeds. Before we go on to the results, it’s worthwhile saying in the methods, we used a multi variable approach. So this is my epidemiologist bit coming out, but the majority of studies use what’s called a univariable approach. So I literally just compare the probability of Disease X in a cross breed versus the probability of Disease X in the parent breed. But there might be lots of other differences between the cross breed and the parent breed that could account for that difference, such as maybe one or other of them is younger or older. Maybe the disease is more prevalent in males versus females, and maybe the sex ratio was different, as Gina says, maybe the owners of one or other are younger or older, and maybe that means they’re more likely to detect problems. So in the methods that Gina used to use multivariable modeling, and that took account of owner gender and owner age. So in other words, it was stripping away those effects. And then for the dogs, it took account of their age, their sex so male or female, their neuter status and insurance status. We’ve done a lot of work in the UK showing that insured dogs are more likely to, well, they’re more likely to get lots of different things, more likely to get veterinary care. They’re more likely to be diagnosed with disease, more likely to be treated. So in other words, in the methods, Gina was hugely robust in stripping away differences, so that we were getting back to the core comparison between the coreness of the design of crossbreed versus the coreness of the purebred. So that was the methodological side, and that’s pretty rigorous, because the majority of papers don’t use multivariable methods when perhaps they should.

JPH: So as we start thinking about what the actual results are, I’m realizing that in order to personalize this a little bit for the people who are listening, it might be useful to ask what kinds of narratives there are, particularly on social media, about these crossbred dogs, both positive and negative. What were the what were the questions? In that sense, obviously not scientific questions. I think we’ve done a pretty good job here of talking about, from a very researcher oriented standpoint, what kinds of questions you were trying to answer, but I wonder if you could answer what the social perceptions are of these dogs, and how you were trying to address that? 

RP: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is one that really divides people, because we’ve got each end of the spectrum, which I think is quite uncommon for a lot of dog issues, where we’ve got such polarization. But we’ve got a whole, I wouldn’t say, faction, that sounds a little bit too harsh, but we’ve got a whole grouping demographic out there of people who are within the belief that designer cross breeds are by virtue of being a cross is healthier. And you know, when we think in the UK, and since the obviously UK based study, we’ve had a lot of media narrative around purebred health in the last 15 or so years, not least because of some of the work that we’ve done from our VC but in general, including media pieces, there’s been a lot of discussion around pedigree dog health, particularly, and how that’s a negative and that this kind of solution offered to the public is to cross them. And I can see how, as a simple message for people outside of our bubble, who you know the important people to get to, because they’re the ones that are out there in large numbers, have accepted that and then bought those dogs in their numbers. And I think that’s where, when people are confused about our approach of looking at general health, which I know some people are uncomfortable with, versus a piecemeal disorder by disorder approach. That’s what people were thinking. They think these dogs are generally healthy, and that’s okay if they still accept that they’re going to have some dog related issues and perhaps some identifiable breed related issues. But if people think that, that means that this is this robust super dog that has no veterinary issues, and then don’t prepare for that, for example, with insurance, with appropriate financial planning and veterinary care availability, then that is a problem for those dogs. We’ve also got that flip side of the kind of demonization of crosses, and I think this is where we conflate a lot of issues. And I think Dan and I also often talk about this as a kind of welfare Whack a Mole. There are so many overlapping issues going on with this, and I think some of it has been because the tradition of breeding designer crosses has to a degree, for some breeders, been based on commercial aims, which, you know, that’s a discussion for another day. Is it okay to breed for money? That everybody will have a different answer, but it’s to fill a niche. Fundamentally, you know, dogs, legally, at least in the UK, are seen as property. People can buy and sell them as they please, with relatively minimal legislation to influence what they do, and because they haven’t had some say, like the richer heritage of potentially decades or breed tradition of some of the purebreds. I think that lack of kind of background and narrative has led to people saying, well, people are just doing this for money. They’re not doing it for the improvement of this new type of dog, or they’re not even a breed. And I think, you know, that’s in part, has been echoed to a degree in some of the veterinary community. People seeing dogs coming in of designer cross breeds that do have some profound health issues, and wanting to push back against this and say, this isn’t a great thing to do guys, but sometimes I think that coming across, there’s some negativity that people shouldn’t buy them at all, or perhaps that they are far worse than purebreds. So this is where we kind of found ourselves at the start of the study, in the middle of people saying, Oh, they’re way worse, oh they’re way better. Like, where do we go from there? And Dan has done some fabulous work with Vet Compass in the past. As he said when we first started our PhDs, when I had my Brachy [brachycephalic] hat on and he had his crossbreed versus purebred hat on, there’s lots of really nice data there about the relative lack of differences between them. But I think when we first started our PhDs back then, you know, 15 years ago, there wasn’t this big explosion of the designers, and they do feel like they fit quite a different niche to your what we would in the UK, called Heinz 57 your mixed breeds, your completely mishmash breeds. So I think being able to address that and help you know a lot of our work, we’re not doing ivory tower research here. You know, we’re doing questions to try and have an impact and give answers to the public. So it felt like really low hanging fruit to try and pull apart the kind of perceptions and potentially misconceptions of the public in terms of these two quite extreme viewpoints on all of the other ones in the middle to try and, as Dan said, have a very data driven approach to try and influence the public in a positive way for dog welfare. As we said, we’re not scientists who want to just publish papers and be in our ivory tower. We want to have data and results that will have a real impact for dog welfare, and by proxy, the people who care and love those dogs. So we were very much trying to look for, if people are looking for a generally healthy dog, is that what they’re getting, and is it superior to what some people are saying it is in terms of purebreds?

42:37

JPH: Well, Gina, is that what you found, or what did you find?

GB: Yeah, and I think as well, bringing in this concept of hybrid vigor as well is quite important, because I think that’s where these kind of beliefs that cross, like designer cross breeds are going to be generally healthier kind of stems from. But the kind of data and research looking into hybrid vigor effects is like in dogs, it’s very varied anyway, so I think this is why we really wanted to hone in and, like, kind of look at it for like, the specific designer cross breeds. I think probably Dan would be able to kind of go into more detail about the actual hybrid vigor rationale.

DO: Yeah, it’s kind of Yeah. And then we’re going to come back to the big reveal, Gina, where you can reveal the results. Pull back the curtains, 

JPH: We will and Dan, as you’re talking about this, just make sure to include that there are people out there who believe that hybrid vigor can’t be applied to dogs, because hybrid vigor is only about crossing different species, and dogs are all the same species. So I just wanted to throw that out there. As you’re talking about hybrid vigor, that would be a good thing to cover.

DO: Well, that’s a trigger word for me, anyway, species, so essentially, going way back, my PhD started 2010 it fell off the back of pedigree dogs, exposed as did Rowena’s, which is why we’re [twinnies?] for the last 14 years. But essentially, my PhD was looking at crossbred, the whole group of crossbred dogs, designer and general crosses versus the whole group of purebred dogs. And the assumption was that the purebred dogs would be much, much, much sicker. Similar study to this, looking at the whole spread of common disorders in those two groups of dogs showed very little, if any, difference between those two groups. So in other words, the cross breeds, because most dogs in the UK are of a breed, maybe 80%, the cross breeds essentially are just regression to the mean. There are crosses between various different mishmashes of parent breeds, and essentially we were not seeing major differences between those two groups. The hybrid vigor phenomenon, obviously, is huge in plant production and in production animals, where you do get greater production of milk or meat or fur, you do get more rapid growth, but dogs really aren’t bought and sold and acquired for the rate of putting on muscle so we can eat them. They’re bought and sold because they’re companions by and large. And that’s probably not a phenomenon that nature has evolved hybrid vigor to fix to make animals better companions. The trigger word you had said earlier was species. To my mind, I’m kind of growing closer and closer to perceiving each breed as its own species, species of groups of animals that can only breed with themselves and create young that are the same as the parents. Essentially, because mankind stepped in in the 1800s and created breeds, we’re imposing that structure on dogs. So French Bulldogs breed with French Bulldogs and produce French Bulldogs. From a human perspective, this is where Rowena was going earlier. If we have a French Bulldog and we cross it with a Jack Russell, that’s just creating something different, it’s now outside of the species. I’m using inverted commas are French Bulldogs. So hybrid vigor? Does it exist in dogs? Maybe it does, maybe doesn’t. The evidence here from a health perspective, we’ll see what Gina’s results are, but the evidence here, from the studies to date, from a health perspective, among dogs that are generally healthy in the first place, from a physical point of view, suggests it has a low level of benefit. And we’ll come back later to the questions this study didn’t ask. But this study wasn’t deliberately looking at crossing breeds that have poor innate health. Some further work that Rowena and I are doing is looking at that specifically, looking in that particular study of crossing pugs with other breeds to see if the designer dog is healthier than the pug or the other parent breed. This one pretty much was looking at designer crosses that come from parent breeds that weren’t extreme confirmation. So again, we have to look at what this set out to do, but what it didn’t set out to do, and it really just set out to see if we pick a bunch of dogs that are pretty normal, but they’re purebred, and we cross them to create dogs that are pretty normal in terms of confirmation, but that are not purebred. Does the health differ? And then Gina will tell us whether it does or it doesn’t. Yes. Gina,

47:36

GB: Yes. So when we actually look at the results, in a nutshell, basically, there was no significant risk, no significant difference in the health like the disorder comparison for like 86.6% that was the number that we got where there was no difference whatsoever between the designer cross breeds and the purebreds.  and this kind of … 

JPH: Sorry 86.6% of disorders, of dogs,

GB: Of the disorder comparisons, and then of the 13.4% that did differ, designer cross breeds had higher odds for 7% and then lower odds in 6.4%.  So again, pretty balanced for whether it’s going to present higher or lower odds in these disorders. It challenges our hypothesis as well, because our hypothesis was that designer cross breeds we thought would be healthier due to kind of the anecdotal evidence and everything that we’ve discussed. So the fact that there’s very little difference, there were certain patterns that I think are still important to kind of take note of. So in particular, skin and intestinal disorders. All three designer cross breeds had higher odds of ear infections than their non poodle parent breeds. And additionally, all three designer cross breeds had higher odds of certain intestinal problems as well, like vomiting and diarrhea compared to poodles. But then, on the other hand, certain designer cross breeds had lower odds in particular musculoskeletal disorders, so something called patella luxation or slipped kneecap Labradoodles and cavipoos had lower odds for than poodles. So all in all, it. It’s very balanced. I know that probably is quite frustrating. It probably comes across as a very like vanilla. There’s nothing extreme going either way.

50:14

JPH: Is, would you say that it’s the case that the parent breeds had particular predispositions to particular disorders, and that the cross breeds then would sort of show the disorders of a particular parent breed, depending on how you’re comparing. So that if a poodle has more of one particular disorder, the cross breed might have less of that compared to a poodle, but it might have more of a Labrador based disorder compared to a poodle. Do you see what I’m saying? And is that? Is that a way that we can characterize,

GB: Yeah, almost like falling right in the middle they kind of present like predisposition wise. I’m not sure if Dan wants to kind of go into more detail with that, because I can see him nodding,

DO: Yeah. Well, no, it was only more, just because Perry had said the when we said the percentages, just to explain where that comes from. So to try and get the full spread of diseases, we pick common disorders. So we pick 57 of them. We had three Labradoodles, cockapoo, cavapoo And each of those were compared to two parents. So literally, was 57 times three times two. So it’s 342 comparisons. And that’s the percentages Gina was reporting. And that’s when we said we were looking at big picture stuff, right? So this isn’t zooming in on any one specific disorder. This is saying, add a big picture, a global picture, and the majority of those disorders, there was no difference. As Gina said, 86% the ones that were higher in the crossbreeds roughly matched the ones that were lower in the crossbreeds, six to 7% each. So really, this is the, you know, the original statistician, epidemiologist was a guy called Francis Galton, way back 100 120 years ago, and he came up with that term regression to the mean. And it’s just when you, when you, you cross various different entities. He was doing it on humans, actually tall and small humans, but in this case, it’s dogs. You just get something that’s roughly in the middle. If the parent breeds are extreme in some way, then that thing in the middle may be substantially better than the severe parent. In this particular case, the parent breeds Labradors, Cocker Spaniels, they’re not particularly extreme. Therefore the product isn’t particularly extreme in any way as well. And that’s kind of now that we look back in it, it’s kind of obvious. But as Gina said, our anticipation was that the designers would be healthier. That was our hypothesis. But this is the beauty of science. You know, when you do a study, a large study, and you you have very rigorous methods, and then you get a result that doesn’t go the way you think it’ll go. That’s the most wonderful, joyous moment in science, because you actually think, heck, we’ve we’ve learned something here, and the world is better after Gina, post Gina, than it was pre Gina, because we’ve now solved a problem that we didn’t even know existed, as in, that we were living in a misconception.

RP: I think another joy from that is just the amount of doors it opens. I think, you know, I feel like sometimes, as working in and researching, you are just working as a detective, what’s the next issue? What was the next kind of worm? So we constantly got tons of worms exploding when we’re reading results, and the fact that we were surprised by those results, but then didn’t get, there’s lots of reasons to discuss as to why that might be, and as we discussed at the start, that it only answers certain questions that we know in those first five years which are important. Hey, you know, we want dogs, in their early life, the prime of their life, to be healthy. You know, we obviously want them to live long lives that are healthy for as long as possible. So some of the disorders that are often talked about more in a genetic context, like cancers, are extremely important too, and we need to explore more about those going forwards. But realistically, if you start becoming unwell under five, then we’d be concerned about those individual dogs, particularly those issues are chronic, such as skeletal conditions that are progressive, that we ideally would want to see little to no disease in this population, whether they’re purebred or designer crosses, if we want to have truly functional companion dogs here. So think it’s opened up more kind of counter worms in terms of thinking about, okay, so what about the future of these dogs? Do they have different trajectories in terms of their healthy aging or not? But I think when we think about your commoner dog owner who has acquired a lab or a Labradoodle, what is that first few years of their life going to look like? Is it going to be that different? And I think this is what we were getting at with this study.

GB: I just wanted to add as well. Zooming out even further is, as mentioned earlier, this questionnaire also looked at behavior, grooming, care, hypogenicity. And so these results, even though they didn’t appear in this paper, they will be appearing in further papers. I know that there’s quite there’s been quite a few comments on like articles and just across the board, I think people in particular are very, very interested in the behavior. So it’s not that we didn’t, we didn’t look at it. It’s just on its way.

JPH: I was starting to make a note to make sure that I asked you exactly that question, so I’m glad that you answered it, and I would love to have you all back to talk about those papers, because I think that is crucial. I think that in those first five years, exactly we wouldn’t expect to see, hopefully, any really serious medical disorders, but that is where people are starting to grapple with behavior problems, which are going to show up, often somewhere between one and two years of age. And absolutely, when you have that doodle coat that you know, is it hypoallergenic? I did a an interview with some doodle breeders way years ago, and when this podcast was first starting out, in which we basically talked about, you know, it may or may not be actually hypoallergenic for some people, but the difference is the coat stays on the dog instead of falling off into the house, which can mean that it’s less likely to go up your nose, which is a benefit. But it also means that you definitely have to get those dogs groomed, and that can be a massive problem for a lot of people. And I don’t think that is really talked about sufficiently the problem. Yeah, Rowena,

56:50

RP: And I think all of this, as you said, the grooming issue and the vet care issue, I don’t know what the states are like right now, but in the UK, we have a really severe cost of living crisis. We have a lot of dogs that are not being presented to vets with emerging health issues. We’ve got some other research ongoing about people often delaying seeking veterinary care, or, for example, using Dr Google to try and work out what it is if there’s a home care alternative. And we see that, for example, with grooming, people doing DIY grooming. And that might sound quite benign, but I think both the dogs behaviourally and their kind of emotional welfare and also physically, we know that big pairs of scissors near to dogs eyes and sensitive bits is not a great idea if you don’t know what you’re doing. This is becoming more and more important in light of how common these dogs are becoming, but that people are going to be less equipped financially to manage the day to day lives of these dogs. I think when we think about functional dog in today’s society, some of it has to be that they are relatively low maintenance, you know, to be able to thrive from a health and behavioral perspective, with owners who might not be able to afford, for example, training and behavior advice. We are, the needs the society to come together, to be able to give that as low cost or free, or we need to, ideally, both. We need to be breeding towards dogs that don’t require that, and we have owners that are sufficiently equipped with the knowledge to handle these issues if they do arise. So, yeah, I think function, what is the function? Is a big question of the modern dog. It’s evolving. And I think the last few years of research that we’ve carried out has been it’s given us whiplash. Really, there’s something new every year where we think Crikey. We need to throw that in as a research question from where can we get some funding quickly? Can we get the ramp out quickly? But things are changing, as we said earlier, in terms of demographics, but situation of owners. So I’ve got off my soapbox now.

58:40

JPH: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I have two things to say about grooming, and one is from my experience working in the shelter medicine world, which was that when we had neglect cases coming in, for some reason, they were fairly frequently little white dogs who had the non-shed coat. And the number of dogs I saw that had severe mats, I don’t think people realize what a welfare issue a mat can be, but I saw multiple, multiple dogs whose mats had worked down to the bone. And so I’m not saying that that’s common, and I think most people would catch it before it got to that place, but people don’t realize how much a mat can pull on the coat and how hard it can be to manage. The other thing though, that I want to say about grooming is that right now, I am working with a master’s student at Virginia Tech, where I teach, who’s interested in doing her Master’s study on some of the behaviors around grooming, and I’ve started, I was about to say more, and suddenly realized I shouldn’t just give away her whole project publicly on a podcast before she actually starts it. But, um, but through working with her, I became aware of how a lot of groomers are not really well trained about dog body language, and I started to realize how uncomfortable I would be to have a dog that I would have to send away to a groomer. It’s very hard to know that the dog, when it’s out of your hands, is being managed the way you want it to be managed, and that kind of cooperative care, training a dog to handle the really loud blow dryer in their face is a lot more challenging, I think that a lot of us realize. And so there are some welfare issues around that coat that really need to be addressed. So that’s getting way off on a tangent, but we should definitely come back to it. 

RP: Well, I think this is important, though. I’m glad to hear that you think that’s important, because I think that kind of third fiddle that we’ve got here of health, behavior and the husbandry element, people might be like, Oh, husbandry, but I think it’s huge. I think totally right, from a behavioral welfare point of view, and from the physical kind of health of these dogs, it’s enormous. And it’s, you know, that kind of often paradox by what we want from a dog, you know, in another world where we can chat about Brachy [brachycephalic] where people want the flat face, that’s the issue, where here people want, you know, the cuddly teddy bear looking dog, but then they might not be prepared to actually handle or afford or have the capacity to deal with the management of that. So, yeah, it makes me think of what I think the first conference I ever went to was a youthful conference in Bristol back in 2008. I want to say it was about selective breeding. I remember listening to them talking about low sheep that are, you know, Hill sheep, rather than intensively, more intensively managed sheep, and that they needed to be able to shed their wool to be able to live comfortably. And it comes back to these dogs here. What you think we’ve set them up, that they have such high maintenance kind of environments that are needed in the same way, you know, when we think about Brachys [brachycephalic] and other dogs with chronic health issues, that, yeah, we should definitely come back and talk about husbandry, because I think it shouldn’t be ignored in the within that kind of whole sphere.

1:01:53

JPH: Well, Gina, with all of that, it was there more with the results that you wanted to share? Or hould we continue sort of going down these rabbit holes? Or did you have more you wanted to say about what you found 

GB: With the health results or with the results in general?

JPH: With Sure, with either? I guess I had some, I had some follow up questions where I wanted to start talking about what it means, about to just look at dogs at five years and under which we’ve touched on a bit, but I feel like it’s worth going into, but I don’t want to start bringing us down that road, if you had more you wanted to say, because I feel like I’m just I keep realizing that you are here with three very big personalities, and I don’t want us to trample on you.

GB: Not at all. I’m happy to actually address that question about the five years, because I’m aware that you’re not the only one that has been asking that, and I think it’s a really, a really good question. And basically we kind of ensured that the dogs were all aged under five, firstly, to reduce the age confounding effects on the overall health. So if we kept them all under five, I think, as Dan and Rowena have previously discussed, it kind of reduces the effect that age may have had on our results. But also it’s important to recognize that designer cross breeds are still relatively new, like these specific types, I mean, like the cockapoos, Labradoodles. So the demographic of these breeds is going to naturally be younger, and we’re faced with whether like looking when we’re looking at the numbers that we can get for our study, we want to make it fair. You want the numbers of each breed to be relatively similar. And we’re faced with like, Do you can you easily get, say, like, over 200 Labrador owners and their Labradors are over the age of 10? I mean, that probably wouldn’t be too challenging. But then, can you get over 200 cavapoos over 10? It starts to get a little bit more tricky, and therefore you would end up with the numbers being completely different. So that was another reason why we wanted to have it at a cap of five years. However, obviously, age is really influential on dog health. I would love to explore it further as like a longitudinal study, to explore the effects of age on design across breed health over time, and then compare that with purebred health. And I think that would be so beneficial for design across breed owners, because it would help them know what to expect in the future, how to kind of cater their, kind of, the care. And it also helps vets as well, like how, how to kind of approach, like the aging of designer cross breeds compared to perhaps a purebred kind of aging. I didn’t know if Dan or Rowena wanted to add, add to that.

DO: No, just if I had just one further comment on the five year thing. This study was a cross sectional study, so it was taking a slice through time, so you were getting the age of the animals at the point you did the study. From an epidemiological point of view, there’s a phenomenon called survival bias. So that means that certain animals survive to become older, and other ones don’t. So we find lots of breeds that have really poor health, like the extreme brachycephalics. So French bulldogs, Bulldogs, Pugs, they have a huge rate of drop off, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years. Lots of those dogs die. So we will often find that there aren’t actually that many that survive, and the ones that do aren’t maybe representative of the ones that were born. So again, it’s another reason why, as you start to do work on older populations, it’s not often as representative of the overall set of dogs that were born, as you would think. Hence why Gina had suggested things like doing cohort studies following over time to avoid that survival bias. Rowena, any thoughts?

RP:  I was just gonna say, as well, the work we’ve done with the pandemic, we know that in the last few years, since the peak of the pandemic in 2020 that in the UK, we’ve potentially had a downturn in dog breeding practices, potentially across the board, including with the designer cross breeds and this boom. So puppies that were born from 2020 say, to around 2021 too may have had poorer health. We’ve got some other work from our pandemic puppies stream of research showing the effects of early life, particularly on purchasing practices, things like being seen with mum. So indicators of good purchasing versus poor purchasing have an impact on future health. So I think to have that kind of equal exposure across all of the breeds in terms of that, what proportion of pandemic puppies that they’d have in there, we wouldn’t want to say have lots of purebreds that were, say five plus, that had escaped the pandemic that, you know, that weren’t affected by that change in circumstance where we might have designers that were all much younger and were pandemic puppies as our label of those dogs that were born and raised during that period. So I think it just levels that playing field a bit more by restricting

1:07:49

JPH: Yeah, and I think that all that all makes a lot of sense, and I really appreciate you all being able to come explain what the goals of this paper were and why you made the choices that you made. I’ve seen a lot of conversation online where people are basically, you know, dismissing the results by basically saying it doesn’t answer the question that I expected it to ask. And I think orienting them to there’s a different question, and I love knowing that there’s, there’s the plans of following up on some of these other questions. I also wanted to to ask, is it? Is it maybe the case that, as we’re starting to ask questions about, are there differences between quest breed dogs and specific breeds? Because I think we all know that when we say, you know, when someone makes a sweeping statement, like purebreds are healthy or purebreds are unhealthy. It’s very dependent on what breed you’re looking at. And so does it make more sense to look by breed and compare individual breeds to other breeds and to purebreds? And if so, is it possible that studies like that have already been done? 

DO: Do you want me to just …

JPH: I think that is perfectly a Dan question.

DO: Yeah, just the point you make there is really, really good when. So the first point is people are looking at the paper, they’re coming in with their own question and then trying to retrofit almost a study to answer their own question. Now, if it happens that their question is the one we set out to answer, then that’s great. The paper will answer that question.  If, if we didn’t set out to answer their question, the risk is they just say that the paper is wrong. The paper is bad. It isn’t bad. The paper set out to answer certain questions because it didn’t answer the one you were interested in. So cancer in old Labradoodles. That’s just bad luck. And the next paper hopefully will answer that. Second one was your question. But even at a global level, global dog perspective level, looking at purebreds versus crossbreds, that essentially was my PhD, and I’ve almost come away from thinking that that is even a useful question to ask, because you have to say, what is a crossbreed. And in this case. We’re looking at designers, and we’re calling them breeds, but they are cross breeds, or crosses between breeds, but then we’re saying the breeds. So how do we even define what a cross breed is? Second thing is that often when we talk about purebreds, we talk about them as though it’s a set thing, but the purebred population just reflects the breeds that are popular at that moment in time when you did the study. So when I left general practice, I was in practice for 20 years. When I left general practice in 2009 I had two French Bulldogs in the practice that I had in Kent. I would imagine, if I go back there now, there’ll be 200 French Bulldogs in those books. So if I looked at the overall health of purebred dogs in the UK, using my practice or general population data from 15 years ago, it probably is dramatically worse now, because we have shifted more and more and more towards extreme dog breeds. So So even this concept of what is purebred health is totally dependent on the context, the breed structure that’s there. So increasingly, we’re starting to ask much more focused questions, and that’s what this study did.  On the label, people might walk away with the impression that designer cross breeds are no different in health to their parent breeds. Okay, fine. That kind of is what this one shows, but it only shows it for three breeds, three designer crossbreeds. It does not necessarily apply to all the other ones that the Pugs and all the other Jack Russell crosses and the Sproodles, etc. Literally, you have to zoom in and say, What was the question we asked? We looked at three specific designer crosses and their parent breeds. We looked at them aged under five, and then within that, we looked right across the common disorders. That’s what we did, and that’s what the results tell us. Trying to expand that to answer questions on other types of designer crosses or older dogs, that is really going outside of the robust evidence that this study was able to provide, and that’s really important for your readers to gather. It’s important to know what a study can tell you, but it’s also important to know what that individual study doesn’t tell you. Hopefully, further work from Rowena and Gina and I in various different pieces of work we’re doing will answer the other questions as well. Gina,

JPH: it’s almost like when we do science. Oh, I’m sorry, Gina, let me just say it real quick, and then I’ll hand it to you. But I was going to you. But I was gonna say it’s almost like when we do science, we ask these very tiny, specific questions, big, broad questions. What were you gonna say Gina?

1:12:29

GB: Just to support Dan’s comment as well, is that this is one of the kind of first studies ever to really focus on these specific cross breeds, and it’s kind of one of the first of its kind as well. And so there’s not me saying people should go easy on me, maybe a little bit, but like it does, there are loads of questions that have come from this study. Like we are fully aware this isn’t kind of done complete,  that’s it, we have everything now.  And I know that we’re all very keen to continue looking into cross breed health, but also other aspects, like owner experiences in the behavior aspects as well. Like there are so many different things that we can look at from this. And yeah, just Oh, sorry. Rowena,

1:13:27

BRP: no, no, not. [muffled: Shanto, intro,] I think, you know, as you said, it’s fundamentally, when we look at owner decision making about what kind of breed they’re going to buy or cross breed they’re going to buy, you know, it’s a multi faceted decision. We hope that it isn’t just based on  “I like how they look”, which, you know, people may or may not admit to. And I think that’s a key thing here, that this is the first kind of chunk of information we’ve got to try and have a slightly more evidence based toolkit for owners interested in either the purebred or these specific designer cross breeds that we’ve specifically studied to weigh up different things. You know, as we said, it might be that behavior is extremely important because, you know, the context of that family, I think of my own family, you know, I’ve got two young kids. I’ve got cats that will tolerate dogs, but don’t really want, like, wild dogs running around the house either. I have very specific conditions that I can have a dog come and join our family. So I will have different priorities than say Dan, who’s got grown up kids and zero cats from recollection. So, you know, it could be that these dogs are really suited to certain homes. I think risk aversiveness is a really interesting and important kind of concept that we need to explore more around dogs. So when we think about what’s the kind of acceptable risk of a disease that an owner will accept when they’re acquiring the dog. You know, is it okay? You know, we think going a bit off piste here, but when we think about dachshunds, if we’ve got maybe one in five dachshunds slipping discs, is a 25% you know, of your population being affected too high versus here, a lot of the conditions we’re looking at were extremely rare. We were looking at, you know, maybe one or 2% of these populations. So we’re not talking about extremely unwell dogs to start with. I think this is an important point here. So people looking for healthy dogs, they’re not going too far wrong with these dogs. But I think we just need to make sure that their eyes are open to what the issues are.

1:15:23

JPH: Yeah, and I, and I did want to emphasize as well that I think, you know what, a lot of us when we’re talking about health issues in dogs, the issues that we tend to focus on are the really scary ones, which I like to list. You know, cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders like epilepsy, autoimmune disease, those are all things that can’t be tested for and that tend to onset later in life. And so while those are certainly very pressing and important conversations, they are not the it’s not what you set out to answer in this paper. And I tried to hand this to you before Dan, but I do believe Vet Compass studies are the right place to look for answers to those kinds of questions and individual breeds. But think Gina has something to say.

GB: Just to kind of just before Dan. I think he’ll probably continue. We did actually have lots of discussions about this and about health, and we especially looked at disorders that perhaps aren’t necessarily like a kind of risk to life as such, to the dog, but it will be more about like the caregiver burden and also the quality of life. So things like, I’m sure Dan will mention, things like dermatological disorders and things like that that perhaps, like you say, compared to like your cancer and your neurological disorders, perhaps aren’t at the forefront of people’s minds, but we wanted to include these almost like, not lesser disorders at all, but ones that perhaps people don’t immediately jump to, but are the ones that are coming through the doors at vets regularly.

1:17:17

JPH: Sorry, yeah, so actually, I was just thinking about a good way of characterizing your results, which are, um, I imagine, do you? Do you all use the same term Lemon?  We talk about having a lemon law in the US. I don’t know if this is a UK term at all. No. Okay, so it started with cars, the idea being that sometimes when you buy a new car, there’s just a bunch of things wrong with it for whatever reason, and it’s never going to be fixable. And so there was this lemon law that if you buy a new car and it’s just a total mess, you can, you can basically return it and get your money back. And I’m not going to, I don’t know what all the details of that are, but then people talk about dogs sometimes in the same way, and owners will say it jokingly and lovingly. Is like, Oh, I just got a lemon, but I think that’s very much what you’re talking about here, is that if you bring a dog into your home, and in the first year or two of life, you’re discovering that the dog has GI [gastrointestinal] disorders and skin allergies and all of those things that are not going to kill the dog necessarily, but absolutely can make living with the dog really challenging. Managing the dog’s welfare really difficult, therefore also welfare implication, implications for the humans. So I just, I just suddenly realized that this is how I would characterize your paper as saying, if you’re afraid of getting a lemon, then does the breed, you know, does the breed versus the parent breed versus the designer mix matter in terms of the risk of getting a lemon. And I think that what you’re saying is that for these particular breeds and mixes, there’s no real statistical difference in whether you’re likely to get a lemon. Does that sound ….

DO: Yeah, I think that’s actually a very, very good summary. So, so just on picking a couple of the bits you said there, so it in the one sense you’re saying, and quite rightly, the disease of aging or importance, or cancers and arthritis and neurological disease and dementia, right? That’s really important. However, from a basic animal welfare perspective, welfare or the impact of diseases can be assessed by the severity of disease, yeah, so obviously cancer is pretty bad, but also by the duration. So if we have disorders that onset at a very early age, so we have dogs with otitis external ear inflammations, and it recurs again and again and again, or even disorders that people say aren’t really important at all, such as impacted anal sacks or blocked anal sacks, well, that doesn’t really matter. But if it happens to these dogs repeatedly, a couple of times a month or whatever, for the whole of their lives, the cumulative welfare impact is huge, and that’s another one of the reasons why we were interested in this early age phase. Because actually, even though the disorders per unit of time might not seem that severe, the cumulative impact on the dogs is huge, absolutely huge, because of the lifetime impact. So so there and but again, there’s no one perfect way to answer all these questions health and disease. These are complex topics, and we come at it from different perspectives. You had hit on them a slightly different point there, earlier as well. That kind of is important when, certainly, my background is as a veterinary surgeon, and historically, I had medicalized welfare. So from that, I mean that my concept of welfare was whether dogs were healthy or not healthy, right? But you nearly always see when people talk about welfare, they’ll talk about health and welfare almost as though they’re two separate things, or health sits within welfare. And that’s what Gina’s study is absolutely genius at doing. Where this paper one definitely is the health aspect, but it sits the health within the broader welfare. So that’s the behavior, so the psychological welfare, which, generally we’re not measuring in health studies, and then husbandry, which is all the issues that Rowena was talking about, about dogs needing to be clipped every six weeks. We have another study ongoing within Vet Compass, looking at Gabapentin usage, which, which is kind of used, obviously, it’s painkiller, but also an anxiolytic, and that one of the quite frequent usages of that is being dispensed for dogs that are going to be clipped. Because these dogs get anxious and they need sedation. They need calming before being clipped. So this is where the whole this paper here is critical, but it sits within the broader set of studies that Gina is going to come out with in the next two papers, and then it’s just for these three specific designer breeds that we’re looking at. So again, this is apologies to your listeners who may be looking at this paper expecting it to answer every single question that exists on designers. Sorry, it doesn’t. The reason it doesn’t is because the world is just too complex for that. So we’re back to our mosaic and our jigsaw, and we’re just creating our picture of the world based upon each individual study contributing a little bit of information. Rowena?

RP: yeah, I think from that [muffled: Ashay], it’s worth saying that you know that there is work ongoing in this area trying to take steps forward and how we wouldn’t want people to take away from this paper. I did a radio interview a couple of days ago that I thought was going to get misconstrued, that I thought inbreeding was a good thing. I was like, no, no, this study does not say that inbreeding is a good thing, and also doesn’t say that cross breeding is a bad thing, and you’re in those specific circumstances where crossing your breeds with another breed to gain something new from that second breed. Obviously it’s difficult, because Dan, I’ve argued before, are you taking something away from the first breed or the second breed, but by combining them, you’re going to get some new traits. So I think this is where Dan’s alluded to the work that we’re doing with extreme brachycephalic breeds. So thinking about breeds where the kind of crux of their health issues is related to their physical phenotype and their conformation, that the most rapid way to make change to their confirmation and to try and reduce the prevalence of those conditions related to it is to change their body shape dramatically through crossing. And we’ve there’s a whole world of questions to ask. So when we think about how many different breeds could potentially benefit from that approach, it might not be popular with the public, but some work we’re also doing looking at kind of desirability, but it’s a completely different question to what we’ve answered here. We don’t want people to come away saying, well, Oh, what about Puggles? Or, what about all of these kind of brachy [brachycephalic]  crosses out there, who, again, might not have intentionally been bred for some of them with health in mind. You know some of these breeds? We don’t really know their origin story. Do we? You know that it’s difficult to pin down where all of these breeds have come from, but fundamentally, we’ve got a lot of hope that actually crossing could be extremely beneficial in those circumstances, and we’re working on that actively right now. So I think there’s lots of I feel like this podcast, I don’t want people to hate us and be like, you’re just saying you’re going to do this bit next, and this bit next that is, unfortunately, the iterative nature of science and that, you know, we’re always adding to it. But I think that is a massive caveat to this paper. We were very keen that people didn’t come away saying that all crosses don’t have some kind of benefit from being a cross, because, as Dan said, that concept of innate health, they can have a massive injection of innate health straight into that gene pool if we cross the right breeds together. And it’s interesting where we think about the rationale of, say, crossing. We know some of that for Labradoodles, but say for cavapoos and cockapoos. Why those two guys? There’s lots to learn about potentially the backstory there, but given it looked. Like these crosses are going to keep going forward. You know, we’ve just looked at three of the most common ones in the UK, just plenty more popping up all over the world that are more or less common in different countries. So trying to keep abreast of what’s popular, what, what are people interested in, and what, how are they doing out there, I think is really important.

1:25:19

JPH: And I think it’s, you know, what we said before about regression to the mean, I think is actually an important point to think about that a lot of people talk about. Well, if you, you know, if you cross to a purebred, then you’re bringing in problems to the purebred. But I think that what you’ve shown here is that whereas a purebred may have a higher risk for a particular disorder, the mixed breed will be in the middle and have a lower risk of each individual disorder. It may have a higher risk of a larger number of disorders. But I kind of, I kind of like breeding away from not only extreme conformation, but more extreme risk of particular disorders. And so while that is not what hybrid vigor is, technically, I think it’s a related concept that where you have these closed populations that have drifted to a place where they have high risk for particular disorders. And yes, you’re going to see different health patterns in the mixed breed populations, but you’re not going to see such high risk for particular disorders. And I kind of like that.

JPH: Yeah, and anything, anything that helps to improve the quality of lives of the dogs is important. It kind of then opens into another topic where Rowena had just started to go there, which is these two terms of crossbreeding and out crossing. And from the human perspective, they may well actually be the same a lot of the time, but the wording is really important. So when we think about the designer crosses. We’re thinking about cross breeding. We have two different parent breeds, and sometimes the parent breeds are already designer crosses. We’re crossing them to create this new entity, this Labradoodle or cockapoo or cavapoo. The outcrossing is where we have one parent breed with some issue we’re concerned about. So maybe it’s genetic diversity in English bull terriers, or maybe it’s extreme confirmation in pugs. And we’re trying to bring in a little bit of some other breed, or some other type of dog, to either put more genetic diversity in there, or to breed away from some extreme conformation. But in essence, we’re still trying to have that original breed, but now a little bit healthier, because it’s less extreme or it’s more genetically diverse. And from the public’s point of view, they’re kind of the same thing because they’re both crossing between various types of dogs. But from the human’s perspective, if I’m a pedigree breeder, those are two totally different things. One is hopefully improving my breed a little bit. The other is creating something totally new. It goes back to my comment earlier about each breed almost being its own species and but these are human concepts. They’re just made up concepts. Breed itself doesn’t exist outside of the head of a human. It is a completely fabricated concept. And we have just decided that a pug must look this way. And somebody wrote some stuff 100 years ago that said how a pug should look, and then humans have interpreted so these are all made up terms and concepts in the first place. But from the dog’s perspective, going back to your comment, provided the direction of travel is towards less disease and more health then from welfare perspective, that’s perfect.

 JPH: Well, I think we are getting close to wrapping things up. Gina, do you have any any last thoughts? Have we covered what you want to cover?

GB: I think so. Yeah, definitely. I’m just conscious because obviously, I am very new to, like, the whole kind of research and this kind of community and this industry as well. So I’ve been like relying on Dan and Rowena to articulate correctly what the paper is meant to show. I think, probably the most, one of the important things to kind of just say again, is the fact that we will be following this up with two more papers as well, which hopefully people will be interested in. And then, yeah, just luckily for me, I’m pursuing a PhD in canine welfare next year, and yeah, we’re currently just looking at funding for that, which is really exciting. But no, I’m just, I’m really grateful to have this opportunity. And. To kind of be with Dan and Rowena and discussing the paper with you.

JPH: Well, you have some great mentors to help guide you through, but you seem to be doing a fantastic job so far. So well done. I know, I know it’s hard when social media doesn’t understand exactly what your paper says and they want it to say a particular thing. I’ve been there. So hopefully this podcast helps get the word out about what your intentions were. And yeah, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the next two papers, and hopefully we can have potentially this whole team back, or someday when you feel comfortable. So I will be, it’ll be, it’ll be great to see you, to see where you go with all of this.

GB: Thank you,

DO: And thank you very much Perry for inviting us on, as you’ll have gathered from this podcast and some of the previous ones. The goal is all about improving animal welfare. It’s about adding evidence that generally comes from the wider public, so not necessarily evidence from laboratories, but these are data gathered from the public that compass or data gathered from veterinary records ruinous pandemic puppies again from the general public. So we’re trying to create citizen scientists, and citizen science here, where the general public provide the data, we do the analysis, and then we feed it back again to the public. And the idea is to just keep reshaping human decision making such that it is more robust, more reliable, and it puts more priority on the world as the dog sees it, rather than the world as we see it. And that kind of would be my final message. Please to all of your listeners, try to look at the world from the dog’s perspective.

JPH: Rowena, any final thoughts?

RP: Yeah, I think here, as you’ve said, we can sometimes be victims. We might feel of the media and pretty sweeping headlines, but I think here, as we were talking about earlier, we it’s sometimes a bit of an enigma how the public get information, and sometimes, I think even if they get a slightly shonky title. It’s a very mediatastic Journalist title to a story, if that just at least makes them question. You know, if it’s the titles we’ve had in the UK, if you know, designer crossbreeds or crossbreeds are no better than pedigrees, even if it just makes them have a little bit more critical thinking when they go about acquiring a dog. This is probably me being very optimistic, but that’s what I am. That’s I think you have to be to work in dog welfare, if it just makes them do that little bit of extra searching and not just rest on their laurels that these dogs are a okay, then I think we’ll have at least gone a little bit further down that road towards a kind of journey of improving dog welfare. 

JPH: I mean, I think the first step is having the evidence, and then the next step is figuring out what to do about it. So I applaud you all for working on that first step. So thank you so much for coming here and for taking so much time to explain this all to us. I’m really excited to see the next few papers.

DO: Thank you very much, Perry, see you next time.

JPH: Hey friends, some of you have asked how to support the podcast, so we’ve set up a Patreon page for it. For a small monthly pledge, you help us pay for producing this podcast, and in exchange, you get a chance to suggest questions for podcast guests, and you get early access to podcast episodes to find out more. Go to patreon.com/functional breeding. You could also help promote the podcast through subscribing to it through the podcast, up of your choice and by leading favorable reviews. If you’re interested in supporting the functional dog collaborative more generally, or finding ways to get involved, go to the functionalbreading.org website and click the support link. Thanks to everyone who has helped out. We could not do this without you. 

Thanks so much for listening. The functional breeding podcast is a product of the functional dog collaborative and was produced by Attila Marta. Come join us at the functional breeding Facebook group to talk about this episode or about responsible breeding practices in general. To learn more about the FDC. Check out the functionalbreading.org website. Enjoy your dogs. 

Paper discussed in this podcast: 

Citation for referenced paper:  The doodle dilemma: How the physical health of ‘Designer-crossbreed’ Cockapoo, Labradoodle and Cavapoo dogs’ compares to their purebred progenitor breeds, Gina T. Bryson, Dan G. O’Neill, Claire L. Brand, Zoe Belshaw, Rowena M. A. Packer, Published: August 28, 2024  

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306350  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0306350

Prior Podcasts with Dr. Dan O’Neill:

Dan O’Neill, MVB, PhD, FRCVS: Disorder Testing  https://functionalbreeding.podbean.com/e/dan-oneill-mvb-phd-frcvs-disorder-testing/

Dan O’Neill, MVB, PhD, FRCVS: VetCompass and Inherited Disease

https://functionalbreeding.podbean.com/e/dan-oneill-mvb-phd-frcvs-vetcompass-and-inherited-disease/