Wally Conron, now retired at age 81, writes in the Australian edition of Reader's Digest about what happened when he decided to solve a very specific problem for a blind woman in Hawaii, and then found himself tumbling down the slope to creating a contrived breed with a mostly-contrived set of attributes.
While working with the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia as its puppy-breeding manager in the early ’80s, I received a request from Hawaii. A vision-impaired woman there, whose husband was allergic to dog hair, had written to our centre in the hope that we might have an allergy-free guide-dog.
"Piece of cake," I thought. The standard poodle, a trainable working dog, was probably the most suitable breed, with its tightly curled coat. Although our centre bred and used labradors, I didn’t anticipate any difficulties finding a suitable poodle.
It turned out I was wrong: after rejecting countless poodles with various problems, some two years and 33 disappointing trials later, I still hadn’t found an appropriate dog for the job.
In desperation, I decided to cross a standard poodle with one of our best-producing labradors.
The mating was successful, but it produced only three pups. We sent coat and saliva samples of each pup to the Hawaiian couple, and the husband found one sample allergy-free. At last we were getting somewhere, but a big job lay ahead. The pup had to grow up and prove suitable for guiding work; and then it had to be compatible with the visually impaired client. We had a long way to go.
With a three to six-month waiting list for people wishing to foster our pups, I was sure we’d have no problem placing our three new crossbred pups with a family. But again I was wrong: it seemed no-one wanted a crossbred puppy; everyone on the waiting list preferred to wait for a purebred. And time was running out – the pups needed to be placed in homes and socialised; otherwise they would not become guide-dogs.
By eight weeks of age, the puppies still hadn’t found homes. Frustrated and annoyed with the response to the trio of crossbreeds I had carefully reared, I decided to stop mentioning the word crossbreed and introduced the term labradoodle instead to describe my new allergy-free guide-dog pups.
It worked – during the weeks that followed, our switchboard was inundated with calls from other guide-dog centres, vision-impaired people and people allergic to dog hair who wanted to know more about this “wonder dog”.
A simple cross was now a "wonder dog."
Of course, it was all nonsense. The first cross was fine, so far as it went, but the next cross was a great deal less so.... not that the puppy peddlers cared in the slightest:
I quickly realised that I’d opened a Pandora’s box when our next litter of ten labradoodles produced only three allergy-free pups.
I began to worry, too, about backyard breeders producing supposedly "allergy-free" dogs for profit. Already, one man claimed to be the first to breed a poodle-Rottweiler cross!
Nothing, however, could stop the mania that followed. New breeds began to flood the market: groodles, spoodles, caboodles and snoodles. Were breeders bothering to check their sires and bitches for heredity faults, or were they simply caught up in delivering to hungry customers the next status symbol? We’ll never know for sure.
Today, some strains of "Labradoodle" breed more-or-less true, but fly-by night crosses are as common as rainwater and ALL of the "hypoallergenic" claims are simply untrue. Yes, some people are less reactive to some dogs which may shed less, or even have less hair, but ALL dogs shed, and ALL dogs have hair or fur. Bottom line: If you are truly and seriously allergic to dog hair, then do not get a dog of any kind!
And what about Wally Conron? Today he says:
''All these backyard breeders have jumped on the bandwagon and they're crossing any kind of dog with a poodle. They're selling them for more than a pure-bred is worth and they're not going into the backgrounds of the parents of the dogs. There are so many poodle crosses having fits, problems with their eyes, hips and elbows; a lot have epilepsy. There are a few ethical breeders but very, very few.''
Conron says that despite the fact the dogs have helped so many blind people, he regrets creating the first cross-breed. "I released a Frankenstein.... People say 'aren't you proud of yourself?' and I say, 'not in the slightest. I've done so much harm to pure breeding.'"
Of course, Conron did not really harm pure breeding at all, did he? Nope, not in the slightest. Purebred poodles are as common as rainwater, and some lines have a mess of health problems due to inbreeding.
But the notion that outcrossing is a surefire gateway to health?
Nope that's simply not true. If you are outcrossing to stock you do not know and have not bothered to investigate you may be buying into, or creating, problems.
So where did it really go wrong?
Where it went wrong is that Conron coined a name for this cross-breed and imbued it with miraculous powers that the dogs never had.
What happened next was that other people took his myth and his marketing and paired it with greed.
But isn't that what's happening with every breed all the time?
Yes, the world is full of "-oodle" crosses that do not breed true and have health problems, but health problems are legion in almost every "pure" Kennel Club breed, and most folks are not interested in breeding dogs to a standard, so how much new harm has been done?
No, Conron's cross did not change the world of dog breeding, but that was not his goal, was it? Did he forget what he set out to do? It wasn't to change the world of dogs; it was to find one specific dog for one specific customer. Did he do that? He did. His mistake was not in doing a cross for a purpose; it was engaging in a little dog dealing in order to get rid of his overage. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice he discovered he was working with a force -- dog dealers -- that he could not control. But did Conron invent dog dealers? He did not. They have always been with us.
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