This is an age-old question. People who had owned a mutt or a mixed-breed dog will tell you that their dog is just as healthy as a purebred dog and lived for just as long, if not longer. To answer the question of whether or not mutts are healthier than purebreds, we need to look at the general mutt population, not specific cases.

Mixed-breed dogs are usually a result of breeding intentionally or unintentionally two purebred dogs of different breed. Most of the mixed-breed dogs are born as a result of unintentional breeding. This means that the parents of the mixed-breed puppy are either unknown or have not been tested for different types of diseases before the breeding occurred. As you can see, we already have a problem since we do not know what diseases the mixed-breed puppy could have inherited. Whether the puppy is a purebred or not, he will inherit genes from both the mother and the father. Some will argue that the bad genes will cancel out, but if you look into genetics a little bit deeper, you will see that this is not true. If any of the parents or both of them had heredity faults or genetic disease or were predisposed to a certain disease, this will reflect on the puppies born.

Purebred dogs on the other hand are usually a result of a breeding between two healthy and tested purebred dogs. We are not talking about puppy millers or backyard breeders or whatever irresponsible breeders are called these days. Puppies from irresponsible breeders could be just as bad as mixed-breed puppies from two unknown parents. We are talking about responsible breeders breeding two dogs with a pedigree that are not related (i.e. avoiding inbreeding). Such dogs are health tested before being bred which will decrease the chances of the puppy having any ailments when he matures. The breeder will therefore ensure that the puppy comes from a proven/healthy stock. The puppies born will have a much higher chance of being healthy than the puppies born from unintentionally mixing together two other dog breeds.

You may say:  “What about all those poodle mixes (-oodles) that are being sold by breeders who intentionally breed them and also do health testing?” The problem with those mixed-breed dogs is that not every puppy will properly inherit the desired traits. What I mean by this is that these dogs are bred supposedly to create a hypoallergenic breed of service dogs. The truth is, from the litter born, only a small amount of puppies will inherit the poodle coat that is considered hypoallergenic. The poodle mix project was started by Wally Conron from the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia in the early eighties. He wanted to create a new breed that was a good guide dog but also allergy-free. He tried multiple times and finally abandoned the project because he could not achieve the consistency that he wanted. Breeding or ‘designing’ a new breed is not as easy as he first thought. This led to many irresponsible breeders creating even more crossbred dogs for profit by crossbreeding poodles with many other breeds, adding to the dog overpopulation.

Shelters are full of crossbred dogs as a result of irresponsible breeding. There are also purebred dogs in shelters waiting for someone to adopt them, but according to HSUS (The Humane Society of the United States), only 25% of the dogs in shelters are purebred and 75% are mixed-breed dogs. This does not mean that we should not adopt dogs from shelters. We need to stop the irresponsible and unnecessary breeding of mixed-breed dogs that is fueled by people wanting to have the next ‘it’ dog.