If you are thinking about purchasing or opening your home to a mixed breed, continue reading this article for more information about choosing the best dog for your family.

Mixed Breed Dogs Vs. Pedigree Dogs

If you are not overly attached to the idea of owning a dog that comes with pedigree status, there are many great reasons for choosing a mixed breed dog over a pure breed dog. For one, there is a much greater availability of mixed breed dogs. There is also a lower purchase cost, and perhaps best of all there are the benefits of hybrid vigour.

Hybrid vigour is a term used to describe the strengthening of the gene pool and general health status resulting from crossing different breeds of the same species. In the canine world, this leads to a more robust dog that is far less susceptible to contracting genetically inherited health issues and diseases.

Purchasing A Hybrid Puppy

There are lots of advantages to getting a puppy or a young mixed breed dog. The chances are that you will be able to find out the make-up of a dog with relative ease from the breeder or current owner. The alternative may be trying to ascertain the dog’s lineage by looking at it and assessing their personality traits to the best of your ability, which can really be a shot in the dark.

Adopting a younger dog in any situation gives you the benefit of being able to shape their temperament, personality, and obedience right off the bat, rather than inheriting previous habits, characteristics, and life experiences, and all of the problems and challenges that may arise from them.

You may also be able to purchase a puppy with at least one pure breed parent that could have inherited many of the traits of that breed, without the price tag of the “brand name” dog.

Buying Or Rescuing An Adult Mixed Breed Dog

Dog rescues and rehoming shelters are chock-full of mixed breed dogs of any number of lineages, some of which are obviously mutts with highly mixed ancestry, but some of them may have physical and character traits similar to that of pure bred dogs; they just come minus the pedigree papers and high price tags!

Adopting an adult hybrid breed dog will enable you to see what the puppy grew into as far as coat type, colour, and length are concerned, removing the question of what a mixed breed puppy will look like and grow into! This also takes away the chance that a puppy might grow up to be much larger of a dog than what you were hoping to bring home.

The drawback to adopting an adult mixed breed dog is that you are also adopting any behavioural problems, character issues, diseases, or other health conditions that they are already afflicted with, and, as with any other adult dog, you will need to patiently work with them and care for them to overcome these issues.

Hybrid and “Designer” Dog Breeds

Some mixed dog breeds are called hybrid dogs, or “designer” dogs. This may sound rather special or elegant, and sometimes come with a great consumer demand, but the truth is that they do not differ genetically from any other cross breed or mutt despite their purebred title amalgamations such as Labradoodle or Puggle, Cockapoo, etc.

That said, breeding hybrid dogs is a deliberate and purposeful practice to produce a puppy with the most desirable characteristics of each of the parent breeds, and much thought and planning goes into these designer hybrids.

Designer breeds are becoming increasingly popularity within the UK, and although they are not formally recognised by the Kennel Club, they often come with prices that are comparable or even higher than that of single-pedigree dogs. The benefit to these designer breed dogs is that they come with the same advantages as any other mixed breed dogs, most importantly including the hybrid vigour.

Selective breeding to combine two desirable dog breeds is not an exact science, and although the desired end-product is to create a puppy with the most desirable traits of both parent dogs into one - even two hybrid dogs within the same litter, can be vastly different from one another as with any other mixed breed dog.

If you are thinking about purchasing a hybrid or designer breed dog, and have a specific idea in mind of what you are looking for, just remember, that the dog will not be classed as pedigree and you should not allow yourself to be talked into paying an exorbitant prices for your dog.