Today: made-up dog breeds.
When I got home from work tonight, B asked me if I'd ever heard of a "puggle" (a word with which I just had to fight with my spellcheck to even allow in this post). I immediately started thinking about children's toys from the 1980s. But alas, I was way off base.
A puggle, apparently, is a dog that is part beagle and part pug. While I do admit that this sounds like a pretty cute dog (I've always thought beagles were cute), the "puggle" (c'mon spellcheck, work with me here) label just sounds...dumb.
What happened to the term "mutt"? That's what people used to call dogs like "puggles" or "labradoodles" (another word my spellcheck doesn't like). According to Dictionary.com, the term "mutt" is another word for "mongrel", which is "a dog of mixed or indeterminate breed". We had a dog when I was a kid who was part beagle and part German shepherd. We didn't call him a "beapherd" or a "sheple"---we called him a mutt. That's what he was.
We had another dog who was part chau and part German shepherd. We also called her a mutt, or a chau-shepherd mix. There was no inventing of dog breeds in our house.
I get the impression that people today are breeding dogs simply to come up with fancy-sounding (and to my ear, ridiculous-sounding) names for them. As in, "Oh that's Mitzy, isn't she like the cutest little labradoodle you've ever seen?"
When will it stop? What is acceptable and what isn't? Can we cross a St. Bernard and a husky and call it a brusky? Can we have a chihcsund? Or a dachseranian?
Or how about a shitshepherd?
Seriously, people. Stop the insanity. Call them what they are--mutts.
YES!!!! He's back!!! Making me laugh one blog post at a time.
ReplyDeleteYou could always carry your puggle in a purse. THAT is ridiculous. It's a dog. Not a wallet.
You know I love a good dose of the ridiculous, but I'm gonna have to take issue with this one. Rosie is a Shih-Poo. That's right. Cross of Shih-Tzu and Poodle, very deliberately bred, selectively chosen, and papers to prove it.
ReplyDeleteAND, if the mother and father are both purebreds, the offspring is not a mutt. It is a crossbreed. If Rosie got it on with a puggle, that would produce a mutt.
So. There.
;-)
Esteemed Reader-
DeleteI think you may have misunderstood the target of my derision in the original post. I have no issues at all with crossbred dogs. The two dogs we owned when I was a kid were crossbreeds. They are often quite cute, as is your little Rosie.
My umbrage is with the made up terms themselves, which sound ridiculous (to my ear). After all, we wouldn't call a person of Japanese and Hawaiian a Jawaiian, would we? Or a Hapanese?
And, technically, crossbred dogs ARE mutts. Or, more specifically, mongrels. The dictionary defines a mongrel as "any dog of mixed or indefinite breed". I don't think it matters if the crossbreeding was intentional or not--I'm pretty sure the definition still fits. But "mongrel" has a negative connotation, so I can understand why you wouldn't want to use it.
Your move, Webster.
:)
I certainly won't argue with the dictionary, and if a mongrel is "of mixed or indefinite breed," so be it. The dogs with ridiculous names that are the subject of this conversation, though, are certainly not of indefinite origin, and while mixed, I think there is room to argue that the connotation of "mongrel" or "mixed" is very different for historical reasons than what is produced by the deliberate pairing of two purebreds.
DeleteHowever. I can't deny that the names are somewhat ridiculous. The marketing forces in this country have simply been allowed too much reign. Calling a dog a "labradoodle" is akin to making a packaged meal for kids and calling it a "lunchable."
The compelling and somewhat damning point for me is that nobody in their right mind would pay $600 and up for a mongrel. Now a Shih-Poo, on the other hand . . .
There's a sucker born every minute.
Rosie's awesome.