Good morning,

 I am exploring the "designer dog" fenomena as more and more of these crosses explode into the concienciousness of this and other countries.....Just recently someone was looking for a particular colored male cocker to breed to their Labradoodle who is not just a cross of a Lab and a  Poodle but many other breeds as well.    I am not a purist but I do have some concerns about the inability to keep tabs on the genetic carriers since now instead of "knowing" who carries what and allowing for that knowledge to weed out potential problems, now you have a number of potential problems that were not found in one or the other breed and the alphabet soup is now containing many more genetic markers for inherited diseases but are not going to be known until they appear.   It takes years of study to know bloodlines and their potential as all dogs carry an average of 48 inherited genetic defect and when bred to other carriers of any one of them, your pups now have a 50/50 chance of being affectives and 100% carriers.    As you add each new breed, you add that many more genetic defect that can and well eventually mutate into something else.  How would you be able to predict an outcome when the genetic material is constantly being added to?   It is more like pet breeders who breed blindly with no idea what their dogs are carriers of and most deny the fact that they do carry or worse, are affected as there are no clear bloodlines in any breed.

Your comments are very welcome here on this subject as I am not here to put anybody down.  Speaking for myself, I like the fact that the breeds were developed for a specific purpose of form follows function (and the knowledge of the genepool by years of trial and error) but not sure that I agree that they need to be developed as a means to make big money on them because they are unique or have unique names.   If this is the case, then any so called "mutt" should be worth a fortune because there are never 2 alike;0)