)
A real dog goes fishing!
And plays in the water!
(Ok! So she's not a mixed breed or a puggle! I'm a snob!
Hybrids do not breed true. To yield relatively uniform results, every puggle, for example, must be bred from scratch, by crossing one pug and one beagle. Crossing two puggles produces an undistinguished hodgepodge of largely dissimilar things.
Havens's granddaughter, who works at Puppy Haven, says she receives apprehensive phone calls from men, pleading for a small, apartment-friendly dog that will please their wives without being too poofy. They end up with puggles, she said. The breeds that satisfy these same criteria, like the Brussels Griffon, have seen some of the highest spikes in A.K.C. registrations over the last decade, as have smaller breeds in general. Everyone seems to be chasing the next small thing. Dedicated breeders have shrunk the Alaskan husky into a raccoonlike throw pillow, breeding it true and naming it the Alaskan Klee Kai. Even the puggle is now being superseded by the "pocket" puggle.
Moreover, once each unique and self-perpetuating shape has been conjured, it must be vigilantly maintained. Otherwise it could sink back into the muck.
"Frankly a pug is a recessive gene," says the show breeder Jutta Beard. "The entire pug. If they're left to their own devices, or you don't breed carefully, they won't keep their flat faces." Beard recently bred one of her bitches and, out of six puppies, found only one close enough to standard to keep. "They all had ugly pug heads," she says. "They didn't have good nose rolls." It is not uncommon to keep none. Generally, show breeders label these rejects "pet quality" and sell them to us, who aren't likely to notice their esoteric shortcomings. Fanciers' contracts with pet buyers require that the puppies be spayed or neutered. "We don't want anybody breeding any dogs that we don't think are worthy of breeding," Beard explains.
While designer-dog sellers often claim to combine only the most functional and lovable qualities of each breed, here I was being told just the opposite: that mixing breeds would create an intractable slop house of each breed's most problematic traits. "A pug has no doggie sense whatsoever," said Jutta Beard, who had driven to Oconomowoc from Maryland in her motor home with one husband and 13 pugs. "You put this dog out on the next street over, and it will never find its way home. Now a beagle has wanderlust. It's a little hound breed. It puts its nose to the ground and just goes. So now you've got a dog with wanderlust and no doggie sense."
Many offered the same analysis. (One woman projected a "confused" puggle: "He wants to run, but he doesn't know why he wants to run, and he doesn't know how to get home.") The back and forth can seem endless. Virtually noseless by now, purebred pugs are prone to belabored breathing, sensitivity to heat (they couldn't survive outside air-conditioning in parts of the country) and a pitiable propensity to bash their eyes into whatever they're trying to smell. Puggle enthusiasts praise their hybrid as elongating the smooshed-in snout we have bred onto the pug. But Patt Kolesar managed to dispute even this seemingly self-evident improvement. In a recent Pug Talk editorial, she claimed that the puggle shortens the nose on a beagle. And beagles need powerful noses since they are hard-wired to sprint.
What everyone seemed to dread is that a newfangled dog that looks cute as a puppy can ambush owners with unanticipated health or behavioral issues.
She's so pretty. Is she full-sized now? She's smaller than I expected (or else you're taller than I expected...)
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