Making oodles

"Pedigree breeders spread rumours about us, but I know it's jealousy,"says Liz Seear (pictured with husband Larry), who breeds spoodles -spaniels crossed with poodles. Picture: Adam Knott

True economists love nothing more than a bubble. Not for the trouble they cause, obviously, but because there is something beautiful about watching the free market swell, bloom, and then burst, just as it should.

Some say the best example is still the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century, when a single precious bulb, marketed as delicate and rare, could fetch twice the price of a Rembrandt. The dotcom boom of the late ’90s wasn’t bad, either: remember when America Online (AOL) bought Time Warner?

There is another boom under way - actually, there are two, but this one isn’t property. It is dogs. Not any old dogs, mind: it’s the price of mutts that is going through the roof. No, really: over the past 20 years, the price of the classic Australian mongrel - also known as a bitser - has increased at least 30-fold, more even than a place in a childcare centre.

To put it another way, the same dog that in 1990 would have cost 50 bucks from the local pound (if you were lucky, you could get one for free from a neighbour whose dog had got out) will now set you back at least $1500, and probably a whole lot more. How did it happen? It’s actually worth a study, and not only because it’s an economics classic. In a normal boom and bust, some investors get taken down, and some stock gets dumped. What’s at stake here isn’t bricks and mortar, or even silicon chips: it’s man’s best friend.

For nigh on 100 years, the most expensive pet in Australia, besides a pony, was a pedigree dog. In 1990, Alaskan malamute puppies - then the fashionable breed - changed hands for around $800. Pedigree breeders kept prices high using classic levers of economics: supply and quality control. They set the “breed standard” - awarding competition prizes and titles to dogs with specific traits, and limiting entry to those competitions. Only registered breeders could get the paperwork necessary to sell pedigree pups; without papers, dogs couldn’t enter shows, or be sold as the real deal.

There’s no doubt that pedigree breeders looked down on crossbreeds, and that they did so because of snobbery, vanity, politics and price. No crossbreed is recognised by the Australian National Kennel Council as a breed (read, as a proper dog) so there are no competitions for them to enter. The fact that anyone could breed one, or claim to have one, ensured that the price stayed low (and, concomitantly, the price of pedigrees stayed high). Nobody thought the mutt would ever seriously challenge the pedigree in the price stakes, and the first step in the process was in fact taken unwittingly, by a man named Wally Conran.

In 1988, Conran was chief of the puppy breeding program at Royal Guide Dogs in Melbourne. His story is well known: he received a letter from a woman in Hawaii who needed a seeing-eye dog but her husband had allergies. Labradors shed hair like crazy, so wouldn’t be suitable. Conran wondered if a poodle - which has a curly wool coat that does not shed - might work as a guide dog. After 33 immensely frustrating attempts to get one to do as it was told, he declared the mission hopeless.

“But I didn’t give up on our client,” Conran says. “I said to my boss, ‘What about if we breed the poodle with the labrador?’ And he said, ‘OK, go ahead. Do it.’ "

The breeding was a success. Three puppies were born. The next step was to board them out for a year; Conran proceeded to phone the list of people willing to board Guide Dog puppies, but none would take them.

“The reaction I got was, ‘Oh, no, Wally. We don’t want a mutt!’ One person said, ‘They’re mongrels.’ I could not find anyone that would take them. So I went to our PR [public relations] crowd, and I said, ‘Go tell the papers we’ve invented a brand new dog and we’ve called it the labradoodle!’” So they did, and soon the phone was ringing off the hook. “I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Hang on, they’re the same mongrel puppies they were the day before!’” says Conran. “What’s changed?”

What Conran had done - and to this day, he says it’s the greatest regret of his life - was to engage in what economists call “rebranding”. It’s perhaps the most important step a salesman can take when trying to shift an old product. Instead of asking people to take a bunch of mongrel pups, he was now inviting applications for a new breed of “designer dogs” - made to order, just like haute couture. The new name - labradoodle - also appealed to people: had Conran gone with poo-dor, this story probably wouldn’t need to be written.

As any economist knows, in and of itself, rebranding a product isn’t enough. In order for crossbreeders to truly build interest in their dogs, they would have to a) promote those traits considered desirable in a crossbred dog (they live longer; they aren’t as stupid; they don’t have the same genetic problems as pedigrees bred from small pools); and b) emphasise the negatives traditionally associated with pedigree dogs (they run into traffic and dive off balconies because they have no common sense; they have creaky joints, dodgy hips, and hereditary blindness; they slobber everywhere and walk into walls, because genetic faults have been bred into the standard, and because they’ve been bred father-daughter, and brother-sister, for so long.)

To this end, crossbreeders have pounced on “hybrid vigour”. It’s a lively term that conjures up visions of a happy pup with a spring in its gait. It basically means that a dog has a mix of genes in its flesh and bones, and crossbreeders say it guarantees health and happiness. (It can also mean a dog has inherited the genetic flaws of both parents, and is now a compound error, but that doesn’t get much press.) Of all the marketing labels stuck to the new mutts - Rare! Special! Designer! - the most important has surely been the claim that they are “hypoallergenic” because they do not shed. In fact, all dogs shed. They may shed less than labradors, but then, so do poodles.

That said, the success of the campaign can hardly be overstated. When The Weekend Australian Magazine last checked in on crossbred dogs - not just labradoodles, but their happy cousins, the spoodles, cavoodles, moodles, roodles and groodles (see below) - not one of them cost less than $700, and it’s a price that in the past five years has at least doubled.

Of course, with winners come losers: the growth in popularity of designer crossbreeds drains power and prestige from pedigree breeders, who are only now, slowly, coming to understand that spoodle devotees actually don’t care for their ribbons, or their shows, and will happily pay not to have a pure-bred dog. To peruse the various dog sites online is to detect some irritation with the way things have turned out.

“Why is it suddenly politically incorrect to say, ‘I have a crossbreed?’ ” asks one reader of DogzOnline. “My friend has a friend who is telling everyone they’ve got a pure-bred groodle! My friend told them, you’ve just paid $1800 for a mongrel dog!”

The stunned disbelief of pedigree breeders is one thing, but some also take it personally. Cathy Peters is puppy officer of the Poodle Club of Victoria, which is to say she’s of the old-school “dog world”. She doesn’t believe in crossbreeding; in fact, she thinks it’s “morally wrong” and if anybody calls seeking a poodle to put over a labrador, she hangs up on them.

To illustrate her dedication to her pets, Peters explains that her “girls” whelp - give birth - in the walk-in wardrobe of her master bedroom, “so if something goes wrong, they can come to me and say, ‘Mum, Mum, something’s not right’, and I’m there, and I can heat up cloths, and put them on their boobies, and help them get through it.” By contrast, she sees crossbred pups as being “raised by people for profit and when I look at them, with all their faults and flaws, my heart just breaks”.

Jill Poholke of the Labrador Retriever National Breed Council is of the same mind. “We are absolutely, completely anti breeding these ugly dogs,” she says, adding: “There is no such thing as a labradoodle, or spoodle, or any other oodle. None of them exists. Forget what the breeders tell you, they aren’t a new breed of dog. There is no standard. They are crossbred dogs with fancy names that people are paying a ridiculous amount of money for.”

On one level, the rivalry between the groups is amusing, and the rise of the crossbreed especially so, because it irks the clubby, cliquey, pedigree world. But there is another truth to free-market economics that cannot be ignored: the moment supply for something booms, charlatans will arrive to exploit demand.

Pete Higgins is the spokesman for a group known as Dogs NSW. It represents pure-breds. He acknowledges some resentment in the pedigree world at the rise of the crossbred dog, but says: “If there is resentment, it isn’t only about price. It’s also because they are making these dogs out to be something they are not. They are promoting it as a better dog, saying their coat won’t shed, or they won’t have the same genetic problems, none of which is actually true. Pedigree dogs cost money to buy because they cost money to breed. People put a lot of effort into grooming, providing quality dog food, bringing in new bloodlines from overseas.

“The labrador, to use one example, is one of the oldest breeds of dog known to mankind. The line goes back 500 years. Breeders have put a great deal of effort into protecting the breed, and then somebody comes along and crosses it, and says the result is a better dog, and charges more.”

Higgins says the current fashion for “anything cute and curly, with the hypo-allergenic label and a gimmicky name” has encouraged the growth of “puppy mills” (critics used to call them “puppy farms” but that didn’t sound sufficiently ominous, so it’s recently been changed). Pedigree breeders - and the RSPCA, among other animal rights groups - have lately flooded the internet with photos of abuse in puppy mills, including mutated dogs with oversized heads and tiny feet, jaws that don’t shut properly and teats hanging down to the floor. There are photos, too, of dogs chained in cages, or locked in garages, pumping out four or five litters of puppies a year. There are stories of bitches being shot when they’ve outlived their usefulness, and of unsold puppies being drowned.

There is no doubt that the campaign against puppy mills is part of the push-back against the rise of the mutt - which is not to say that it’s not also true that cranks have entered the crossbreed industry, just as they swarm over popular pedigrees when prices for particular breeds soar. “There is a side of designer [crossbred] dogs that they don’t want you to see,” says Higgins, “and if you want to write about the rise of popularity in these so-called designer dogs, you should make an effort to find out where they come from.”

Classic teddy-bear face
Given the vitriol that is heaped upon crossbreeders, it’s perhaps not surprising that some are wary of the media. “What kind of story do you want to write?” asks Liz Seear of Billabong Creek Farm when I call to say I’m writing about designer dogs. “We don’t much like that label. And we don’t want to attract any trouble. We’ve had enough of that.”

Seear and her husband, Larry, breed spoodles and only spoodles - spaniels crossed with poodles - on a 20ha property at Gippsland in Victoria. They are strictly first-generation breeders, meaning they do not cross spoodles with spoodles, or even with poodles.

“One pure-bred [spaniel] crossed with another pure-bred [poodle], to get the hybrid vigour, that’s what we do,” says Liz Seear. The puppies sell for $1650 and up, and they have about 50 on site at any given time. There is a long waiting list for a Billabong spoodle, particularly if it’s got what has become known as the “classic teddy-bear face” - a black nose, black-rimmed eyes, and curls across the forehead and cheeks.

After some prompting, Seear agrees to be interviewed, with some caveats: “I want you to make clear we do not sell to pet shops,” she says. “We are not a puppy mill.” The couple puts on a spread for our arrival: fresh salad sandwiches, white chocolate Tim Tams, teacups and saucers, some Easter eggs. Their “meet and greet” spoodle, five-year-old Romeo, comes out, tail wagging, and why wouldn’t he? If Billabong Creek Farm is a puppy mill, all pups should be so lucky: it has rolling hills, shade cloths and puppy ponds. There are lowing cows, hungry goats to keep the grass down, and two sleek Burmese cats winding their way through the potted geraniums.

Seear accepts that some people - pedigree breeders, in particular - think that what she does at Billabong isn’t natural. But she says: “The truth is, not everybody wants a pedigree. Not everyone wants a poodle. Poodles can be a bit neurotic. That can be trained into the dog, by people who treat their dogs like children, dress them up in clothes, push them around in prams, not letting it be a dog, but it can be in the genes, too. Not everybody wants a spaniel, either. A spaniel can be a bit scatterbrained. It’s trained for scent. It keeps its nose on the ground. It doesn’t look up to see the car coming. Poodles, they do tend to look up a bit more. So what we do is put them together, and you can get the best of both dogs.”

Larry Seear chips in: “If you’re not going to run down a lion, why would you get a ridgeback? Because that’s what they’re bred for. What we’re breeding is family pets: compact, non-shedding, and happy to be part of a family.” As he talks, his wife scoops up a spoodle puppy and bathes it gently in the kitchen sink. Covered in soap, it looks adorable. She fluffs it up with the hairdryer for the photo shoot, saying: “They come up lovely, don’t they?”

Liz Seear says pedigree dog breeders have made it clear, in emails to her website and in rumours spread online, that crossbreeds are an aberration that won’t ever be tolerated in the pedigree dog world. “They basically tell us we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing. They say, ‘Oh, you’re only doing it for the money,’?” she says. “Like, they are not breeding for money? I get abused, and they spread rumours about us, but I know it’s jealousy because of what they’ve done to their breeds.”

Like all crossbreeding fans, Seear cites evidence from the BBC program Pedigree Dogs Exposed, which aired on ABC1 last year, showing how certain deformities are bred into pedigrees as “desirable” traits. “That program let the cat out of the bag,” she says. “But anybody who has been in the dog world knows what mean things they do to get the dogs they want. The culling and the overbreeding of pedigrees, it’s horrible.”

Billabong Creek Farm has a peerless reputation for quality pups. Some of their dogs now work with Victoria Police as companion animals. Others are in TV commercials. Things aren’t quite as schmick across the mountain range, though, at Valley View Dog Breeders. The internet is alive with rumours about Valley View - some come right out and say it’s a puppy mill; it’s certainly true that the owners, Helen and Fred Freeman, are breeding puppies en masse, for profit, but there is nothing illegal about that.

They’ve got a different set-up from Billabong Creek entirely. We run late - three hours late - for our appointment there, because the sat-nav in the dinky little hire car decides to take the “shortest route” from Billabong Creek to Valley View, through the logging trails, over the mountain, on Gippsland’s unsealed roads. By the time we get to the property it’s dusk, and at first we think nobody is home. There is one house on the property - a cement sheet, fibro and weatherboard ensemble - sitting low and dark in the dust.

We knock on the door, and what sounds like a pack of dogs inside goes wild. The noise alerts Fred Freeman, who comes around the corner of the building, resting heavily on a cane. He looks like both of the car accidents in which he’s been involved: a scar runs from the base of his skull down his spine, where he was stapled back together after his back was torn apart. His jaw or maybe his teeth aren’t right, so he speaks with a lisp. He doesn’t walk so much as lurch.

There are six or seven beat-up old Fords (enough, he says, to make one working model) with grass growing up through the floor, and a ute with empty cans and deflated sacks of dog food in the back. There’s a sheep carcass on a mound near the kennels. “Watch there,” says Freeman, pointing with his cane, as we walk out. “That’s a liver.” And so it is: a sheep’s liver, left out for the pups to chew.

He lurches down a dusty path to the front door of the house, and opens it. I’m right behind him, peering over his shoulder. There are at least 50 dogs in the hallway, peering right back at us. It’s hard to tell what kind of dogs they are, but all are small and fluffy and pretty dirty. Some have swollen teats. One is lame.

“They want to come out,” says Freeman, and he opens the door, and out they come, one after the other, in a mad, yapping scramble down the dirt driveway, towards the back paddocks, thrilled to be free. On their way, they pass Helen Freeman, coming up the path. She has a long, straight ponytail down her back, and she’s wearing a dusty windcheater, boots and jeans.

“So you’re here!” she says. “We’d given up.” She says it’s probably best not to go inside the house - “too many dogs” - but if we’re still hungry she’ll go inside and fetch some jam tarts, which she does. They aren’t easy to eat in the open air, with the dog smell all around. Meanwhile, Fred uses his cane to point out the dogs that sleep on the bed. He stops at six.

Helen makes it clear on the website that her bitches give birth inside her home, and the puppies - up to 30 at any given time - stay inside for four to six weeks. Is it loud? Sure it is. Does it smell like a wet dog? Indeed. Are there cans of food and dog poo and yapping pups everywhere? There certainly are. There’s also no limit on what they’ll breed at Valley View: there are roodles, schnoodles, cavoodles and moodles, but she’s also got second-generation pups (spoodles, bred with poodles) and third-generation pups (“double doodles”).

“Anything cute and white and fluffy will sell,” she says. “If you get a good mix, why wouldn’t you keep going? And I worry about people who don’t breed second generation. What do they do if the puppies don’t sell? I’ll tell you. They shoot them.”

I say: “They don’t.”

Helen says: “They do! Of course they do! What do you think, when you go to a place that isn’t like this, with dogs everywhere, they’ve taken out the ones they don’t want, and they’ve had them shot. They keep them for four or five years, pumping out litter after litter, until they haven’t got a uterus left, then they shoot them.”

What does she do with her bitches? “I desex them, I retire them, and they live here with me,” she says, and if the number of mature dogs here – scrappy dogs, yappy dogs, nippy dogs – is anything to go by, she’s telling the truth.

Like many crossbreeders, Helen Freeman started in the pedigree dog world but was defeated by the politics. “It’s hostile,” she says. “Now the labrador people are all upset with the designer dogs, but the fact is, the male labrador is the biggest biter,” she says. “You check the records for dog bites, you’ll see, they bite more than any other dog. It’s also a pig. It lives for its stomach. It’s not a pretty animal. I should know. I’ve had 18 of them.”

At a cattle show one day, a friend asked Helen if she could put her poodle with one of her labradors “and I thought it might improve the breed, which it did. But the first ones, they were just too big. They were like massive curly ponies. So we put a miniature poodle with [the offspring] to get the second generation. That halved the size, which was good, because people don’t want big dogs. It’s a much better dog. It doesn’t wreck the laundry. It’s not big. It’s not biting. It’s not aggressive.”

When Helen first started selling crossbreeds “there was a bit of crap. Yeah. People said bad things. Worst was with the roodle. The rottweiler, crossed with poodle, is a much better dog than a rottweiler. It looks after kids instead of eating them. But the rottweiler breeders, they slandered us. They vandalised our website. We had to shut things down, let them cool off. They were, ‘How could you do that?’ But it’s brilliant. The pups are ¬better than both parents.”

They are not cheap, either: a roodle or a moodle from Valley View can cost $1600, which can only be because of the way they’re being marketed. Puppies on the Valley View website, photographed in clover, are sweet, and clean, and appealing. The puppies running around in the dust on the property look like mutts (and 15 years ago, that’s what we would have called them). To see a pair of them tearing at a fly-blown liver on a cold night with a storm on the hill is not to think: that’s two grand’s worth of dog.

Genie out of the bottle
It has been 22 years since Wally Conran coined the term “labradoodle” and 16 years since he retired from Guide Dogs. Now 81, he has a pure white, goatee beard, eyes like Santa Claus, and he lives in a two-room unit behind some horse stables near Geelong. Conran comes to the door with a cane. A sticky fly-strip, fully emblazoned with dead insects, dangles down from the ceiling near his head. There are three cans of fly spray on the bench. “I go through three a week,” he says. “It’s the horses.”

The place is comfortable enough, but as he says himself: “If I’d stayed in the game, I wouldn’t be living here. I’d be rich, wouldn’t I? But my principles wouldn’t allow me to do it.” Conran says breeding the first labradoodle was “the worst thing I ever did”. Despite claims at the time that it was a big success, just one of that first litter of pups went on to become a guide dog, and almost all of the litters that followed had dogs that shed hair, so they weren’t hypoallergenic at all.

“What I learnt was, you put two dogs together, you can get a hell of a lot of problems,” he says. “Most of them were crazy. The people breeding them now, they’ll tell you they’ve got the ‘hybrid vigour’, but to me that means they are basically uncontrollable. They certainly weren’t any good for what they were supposed to do. And it caused real problems for me. I had calls from people threatening to take me to court. People were going to bash me for mixing the breeds. The lady who gave the first poodle to my boss, who gave it to me, she said she was going to sue me in the courts for using her dog.”

It was an anxious time for Conran but, he says, it’s what he’s seen since that leaves him gloomy. “People now, they just do it for the money. They don’t give a damn. You’ve got somebody who’s got a labrador and somebody else who has got a poodle, and they say, ‘Let’s put them together - we’ll make a fortune!’ And what is it, at the end of the day? It’s a crossbreed with a fancy name and it’s got all kinds of problems and it’s half crazy and untrainable. So when people ask me, did you breed the first labradoodle, I say: ‘It’s true, I did, but it’s not exactly something I’m proud of doing.’”

As breeding manager for Guide Dogs, Conran had hundreds of dogs pass through his home over the years. These days, he has space enough for the one that’s roaming his unit, with its fat tail wagging, and a stuffed toy in its mouth. To the untrained eye, Rocky looks like a black labrador. “Sit still and he’ll rest his head on your knee,” says Conran, so I do, and he does indeed rest a heavy, glossy head on my knee. Is he a pedigree? Conran looks at me like I might be daft, shakes his head and says: “What a question!”

Reference: www.theaustralian.com.au

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