Comments on: Purebred Vs Mutt – Are Mixed Breed Dogs Healthier?

By: Peter D Jones

Peter D Jones — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 09:20:24 +0000

Purebred dogs are something of an offence to nature, and it’s strange that we would encourage this kind of practice in dogs when it would would be considered abhorrant in humans. For example, lets imagine someone decided they were going to breed ‘purebred’ Japanese people, deliberately restricted the gene pool to Japanese people who met some arbitrary criteria in an old book and paired them up to exagerate the features that made them distinctive. Within a few generations you would have humans who were an horrific, inbred charicature of what someone thought they should look like, and that person would rightly beconsidered a monster.

By: Lucy

Lucy — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 10:09:19 +0000

In reply to prince ajiero. Puppies can only be registered with the KC if both parents were registered themselves, so I'm afraid not.

By: Em

Em — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 18:51:37 +0000

Anyone have an idea of what kind of mix the dog in the “Are mutts healthier?” image is?

By: prince ajiero

prince ajiero — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 14:30:35 +0000

if a pedigree male mate a non pedigree female…will you call their puppies pedigree????

By: Niram

Niram — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 12:05:22 +0000

In reply to TK.

Yes, you’re right. Recessive just means that one needs two recessive alleles of a gene in order to be expressed, whereas a dominant gene is normally always expressed (There is also incomplete domination, but that’s not that important for this topic).

Now like you said recessive genes aren’t per se bad. They can be beneficial or just express a certain phenotype. However, almost all diseases in mammals are on recessive genes and rarely dominant (Because animals/people with dominant diseases die out quit fast). That’s why it’s important to outbreed dogs again in order to increase genetic variance: The higher the variance, the lower the chance of having a puppy with two recessive alleles of a gene that cause a terrible disease.

Some purebreed fanatics claim that mixing two different dogs will only lead to a dog which haves the diseases of both breeds, but this isn’t true, since a disease can only be expressed when both parents have the recessive allele (which is like I’ve said less the case if you cross two very different breeds).

By: TK

TK — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 11:48:38 +0000

If my limited biology serves me correctly, not all recessive genes are considered bad or dangerous. I think it is important to reflect that. For example in humans brown or black eyes are dominant traits while blue eyes are recessive traits. Likewise for brunette and blonde hair, blonde being recessive.
However I am far from being an expert of genetics much less dog genetics, so this comment is just my humble opinion.

By: John

John — Thu, 17 May 2018 20:09:49 +0000

That’s interesting that pure-breeding produces dogs with consistent appearance, temperament, and ability. I bet that’s valuable to people that participate in dog shows or train dogs. There are some breeds that only exist because of human intervention as well.