How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour
Meet the Breeds, the American Kennel Club’s annual showcase of purebred dogs, took place over two eye-wateringly cold days in early February at the Javits Center, in Manhattan. About a hundred and fifty of the two hundred and five varieties recognized as official breeds by the A.K.C., the long-standing authority in the U.S. dog world, were in attendance for the public to ogle, fondle, and coo “So cute!” to, including the basset fauve de Bretagne, a hunting hound from France that’s one of three newly recognized breeds recently allowed into the purebred pantheon. Some of the dogs had competed in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show earlier in the week, and past champions had their ribbons on display.
In spite of the frigid weather, pavilions hosting the more popular breeds—the pug, the Doberman pinscher, the Great Dane, the St. Bernard—were packed. Lesser-known varieties, such as the saluki, the Löwchen, and the Lapponian herder, drew sparser crowds. (The fifty top A.K.C. breeds make up around half of all purebred registrations.) There were exhibition spaces for each breed, and on the back walls were three adjectives supposedly describing that particular type of dog’s temperament. There is, in fact, no evidence that temperament is consistent within a breed, but the idea is deeply rooted in dogdom. I stopped to caress the velvety ear leather of a pharaoh hound (“Friendly, Smart, Noble”), a sprinting breed once used to hunt rabbits in Malta; accept kisses from a Portuguese water dog, bred to assist with retrieving tackle (“Affectionate, Adventurous, Athletic”); and have my photograph taken with a Leonberger, a German breed from the town of Leonberg, in southwest Germany (“Friendly, Gentle, Playful”). No one was supposed to be openly selling dogs, but, if you asked, the breeders would share their information.
Excluding what are known as companion dogs, like the Leonberger, most of the animals at the show were designed for a purpose that is no longer required of them. Dachshunds don’t hunt badgers, for the most part; schnauzers don’t rat. In Great Britain, foxhounds are legally barred from chasing foxes. Herding dogs, lacking flocks to shepherd, nip at kids’ heels in the park. Consider the fate of the otterhound, an ancient variety with a noble heritage which was once used in the U.K. to hunt river otters, which were prized for their thick fur and disliked by wealthy landowners because they ate fish in their stocked ponds. Otterhounds did their jobs well; as a result of hunting and environmental factors, otters were placed on a protected-species list in 1978. Now otterhounds are rarer than giant pandas. An otterhound named Fergus, whom I got down on the floor to hug, is one of only eight hundred left in the world. In this sense, Meet the Breeds was like a career fair for skilled workers whose skills aren’t needed in the modern era. One of the few dogs I met with an actual job was Flecka, a black Lab who is being trained by the N.Y.C. Department of Correction to sniff out contraband, including illicit electronics and narcotics, at juvenile-detention centers.
As a dog-lover, I was delighted to commune with fellow-fanciers in the vast, echoey hall. Inevitably, however, the vibe-killing question would arise—“So what kind of dog do you have?”—and I would be forced to admit (or not) that I have a goldendoodle, a pariah in the purebred world.
Even if you aren’t one of the fifty-six million American households with a dog in the family (ninety-five per cent of dog owners consider their pet to be a family member), you’ve probably seen a doodle. Neither ladies nor tramps, first-generation doodles are intentionally bred crosses between two A.K.C.-recognized breeds, one of which is always a poodle. In the past three decades, Labradoodles (Labrador-poodles), Bernedoodles (Bernese mountain dog-poodles), and, perhaps most common of all, goldendoodles (golden retriever-poodles), among many other variants of so-called “designer dogs,” have taken over public spaces across the country, in red states and blue states, on the coasts and in the heartland.
Collectively, doodles have disrupted a long-standing upstairs-downstairs hierarchy of purebreds and mutts that emerged during the Victorian era and has governed canine culture ever since. Their growing popularity—the doodle industry, which didn’t exist thirty years ago, is now a billion-dollar business, according to Bloomberg Businessweek—tracks closely with the decline of purebred registrations. These fell by sixty-three per cent from their peak, in 1992, to 2010, the last year in which the A.K.C. published detailed data about total annual registrations. Doodles come in different colors and sizes—petite, miniature, medium, and standard—but most have fleecy coats, Teddy-bear faces, and question-mark-shaped tails that seem to pose the doodle’s existential dilemma: Am I an emerging breed, a pricey mutt, or some new category of dog altogether? There are also schnoodles (schnauzer-poodles), whoodles (wheaten terrier-poodles), and Great Danoodles (Great Dane-poodles), not to mention Cavapoos (Cavalier King Charles spaniel-poodles), cockapoos (cocker spaniel-poodles; “cockadoodle” was apparently a bit too on the noodle), Yorkipoos (Yorkshire terrier-poodles), Maltipoos (Maltese-poodles), and Peekapoos (Pekingese-poodles).
“At least you don’t have a sheepadoodle,” a breeder staffing the Old-English-sheepdog pavilion said, when I fessed up.
There was no doodle pavilion at Meet the Breeds. That’s because the A.K.C. doesn’t recognize any of the doodle varieties as breeds. Doodles aren’t permitted to compete in the conformation events—the main contests—at dog shows, such as the Westminster Kennel Club show, that the A.K.C. oversees. They are allowed into agility competitions, but most people only pay attention to the beauty events. Although the A.K.C. doesn’t “comment specifically on ‘doodles,’ ” a spokesperson, Brandi Hunter Munden, said, the organization isn’t “anti-doodle.” She added, “In fact, through our Canine Partners program, mixed-breed dogs, including doodles, are eligible to enroll and participate in almost all A.K.C. sports and events.”
The poodle community is particularly snappish about doodles. Doodle breeders help themselves to the poodle’s brain and its low-shedding, hypoallergenic coat, temper the poodle’s supposedly high-strung personality with a mellower breed, and then sell their hybrids for twice as much as poodles go for. At the Javits Center, there were flyers at the poodle pavilion, printed by the Poodle Club of America, that read “Just Say ‘No’ to Designer Dogs!” Another leaflet showed poodles without fancy show-dog cuts, looking identical to doodles. (“Poodles can have any haircut! No need to buy a Doodle.”)
Cautiously, I struck up a conversation with a poodle owner whose Grand Champion miniature, sporting a “lion cut”—long mane in front, shaved hindquarters—sat on a table between us. When I pulled my phone out of my coat to take a picture of the poodle, I inadvertently caught the end of a roll of dog-poop bags, and the entire thing unravelled as it fell to the floor.
As I knelt to pick up the bags, I strategized about how I would respond to the inevitable question. Should I just say that I have a mutt, which would be technically true? But I slunk away before it came.
From Penny, the Best in Show-winning Doberman at this year’s Westminster dog show, to feral street dogs, all domestic dogs descend from a now extinct subspecies of wolf that, according to one theory, scavenged the refuse around hunter-gatherer encampments and, perhaps as far back as thirty thousand years ago, became the first animal to be domesticated. Over generations, ancient humans and these first dogs developed an increasingly multifaceted partnership, with dogs serving different, mostly work-related functions. “Very early on, we see dogs acting as hunting companions, pulling sleds or travois, acting as herding managers or guards, and keeping us company,” Carly Ameen, an archeological scientist at the University of Exeter, told me in an e-mail. “The Romans write prolifically about the characteristics that make a good dog, distinguishing between guard dogs (which should be black, and always kept hungry), and companion dogs (small, curly haired, and white).” Ancient humans sometimes buried their dogs near family members; this has made it possible to identify prehistoric domesticated canines and to study their intact skulls and skeletons. In a recent paper in Science, Ameen and a group of co-authors concluded, after studying more than six hundred canine remains, that fully half of the total amount of variation seen in modern breeds was already present by the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (roughly 10,000 to 4000 B.C.E.).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, this long, fluid history of selecting dogs for different tasks was fixed and categorized by Victorian-era breeders, many of them landed aristocrats. All purebred golden retrievers, for example, are supposedly descended from a foundational pair of dogs: a yellow retriever named Nous and a Tweed water spaniel named Belle, who were crossbred to create a superior hunting dog by Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, first Baron Tweedmouth, on his estate in the Scottish Highlands, in 1868. Likewise, in the late nineteenth century, Max von Stephanitz, a German cavalry officer, bred Horand von Grafrath, the foundational German-shepherd stud, to create the ultimate dog to herd and guard sheep.
The breeds were eventually divided into categories such as sporting, non-sporting, hound, working, terrier, toy, and herding. Dog shows were designed to attract the best breeding stock; winning dogs were bred to their relatives for “the betterment of breed.” Fanciers formed breed clubs. The Royal Kennel Club, founded in Britain in 1873, and the A.K.C., which began in 1884, are two of the überclubs that oversee the individual-breed groups.
For a dog variety to be considered a breed, there must be a published standard: a written document describing in fetishistic detail the ideal dog of that type, whose body, appearance, and temperament are best suited to its traditional role and heritage. The A.K.C.’s official standard for a golden retriever’s ears and nose reads: “Ears rather short with front edge attached well behind and just above the eye and falling close to cheek. When pulled forward, tip of ear should just cover the eye. Low, hound-like ear set to be faulted. Nose black or brownish black, though fading to a lighter shade in cold weather not serious. . . . Pink nose or one seriously lacking in pigmentation to be faulted.” Once the foundational generations were established, a breed’s “stud book” was almost always closed, meaning that, today, only dogs that have ancestral links to the founders can be registered as purebreds. Nineteenth-century notions about good breeding, purity of blood, and “mongrel races,” which were discredited long ago when applied to human racial identity, continue to haunt the dog world; we can’t quite quit them. “Behind casual claims to breed superiority—loyalty, intelligence, trainability, beauty—is the kind of talk that’s illegal in some places if the subjects are human,” Michael Brandow writes in his book “A Matter of Breeding,” from 2015.
Over time, the betterment of the breed has often proved to be detrimental to the health of the dog. Generations of inbreeding—the practice of mating exceptional dogs with close relatives, including parents and siblings, to keep the blood pure and produce prize-winning offspring—has reduced genetic diversity, making purebred dogs vulnerable to inherited disorders. A 2009 study of British dogs found three hundred and ninety-six inherited diseases among the top fifty most popular dog breeds. These include syringomyelia in Cavalier King Charles spaniels, an agonizing neurological disorder that results from breeding dogs whose skulls are too small for their brains. (The spaniels’ brains protrude into their spinal columns, forming fluid-filled cysts.) All French bulldogs—now the most popular breed in the U.S., according to kennel-club registrations—are brachycephalic, or short-headed; they can’t breathe properly because, in breeding for flat, squished faces, the dogs’ soft tissues get pushed into their airways, blocking them. In addition, some suffer from spine and joint problems; have eye, ear, skin, and digestive issues; are prone to heatstroke; and can give birth only via C-sections. Alexander Trees, a veterinary surgeon in the U.K. and a member of the House of Lords, is a co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare. Trees says that, in his country, breeding dogs to meet extreme conformation standards is “arguably the most chronic and prevalent welfare issue in dogs, yet it persists in plain sight in a nation of animal lovers.”
To understand the doodle phenomenon, it helps to know its shaggy-dog origin story. In 1989, Wally Conron, a breeding manager for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia, was asked to train a Seeing Eye dog for a blind woman in Hawaii whose husband was allergic to the fur of golden retrievers and Labs, the breeds most commonly used for such work. In place of fur, poodles have hair, a single layer of wiry fibres that grows continuously, sheds lightly, and produces little dander. (Bichons frisés and Afghan hounds also have hair coats.)
Conron attempted to train thirty-three different poodles, but the breed’s nervy temperament and health issues proved disqualifying. After three years of failure, he bred his boss’s standard poodle with one of the association’s Labradors. He sent hair clippings and saliva from the three puppies in the litter—Sheik, Simon, and Sultan—to the woman in Hawaii; only Sultan’s provoked no allergic reaction in her husband. Sultan was easy to train and became a successful guide dog. The other two puppies were put up for adoption. The organization had a waiting list of people who wanted to adopt purebred puppies that weren’t selected as guide dogs, but no one wanted the two crossbreeds.
“I went to our P.R. team and said, ‘Go to the press and tell them we’ve invented a new dog, the Labradoodle,’ ” Conron told the author and dog expert Stanley Coren in an interview published in Psychology Today. The intriguing-sounding name—was it a dog or a cookie?—and the idea of a “special” hypoallergenic guide-dog breed were irresistible. Suddenly, everyone wanted one, Conron said: “It was a gimmick, and it went worldwide.” During the weeks that followed, he added, the association’s “switchboard was inundated with calls from potential dog-fostering homes, other guide-dog centers, vision-impaired people, and people allergic to dog hair who wanted to know more about this wonder dog.”
In the early nineties, Judy Hahn, a breeder and a 4-H Club leader in Highland, Maryland, heard from a friend who’d read an article about a new type of dog that was all the rage Down Under. She began breeding Labradors and poodles, and also called them Labradoodles. (It was subsequently shown, with DNA testing, that the Australian Labradoodle was part cocker spaniel, too.) Later, the Obamas considered getting one, before settling on a Portuguese water dog.
In the mid-nineties, Hahn asked one of her 4-H Club protégés, Amy Lane, to help market a litter of golden-retriever-poodle crosses; following the labradoodles’ naming pattern, they should have been called “goldenoodles,” but the moniker wasn’t sticking. “We had to give them a name when asked about them,” Lane recalled when I visited her breeding business, Fox Creek Farm, in West Virginia. “I scrambled and blurted out, ‘They’re goldendoodles!’ ” In 2001, Lane bred a goldendoodle and a miniature poodle, creating a litter of mini doodles, a more manageable version than the standard size. Miniature goldendoodles are now the best-selling variety of goldendoodle.
The first dog in my life was Tash, my father’s standard poodle. Then came Tamerlane the Earthshaker, the first of several Dalmatians we’d own; all of them had hearing problems, a common defect believed to be related to breeding for the dogs’ piebald coloration. (The genetics are linked to deafness.) The next dog, a mutt called Willie P. Wilmington, took to killing lambs on a neighbor’s farm; after he killed a calf, the neighbor killed him.
The following Christmas, Santa brought Nicky, a miniature poodle with wicked smarts. Poor Nicky, my beloved friend, died horribly when his snout was crushed under the wheel of a horse-drawn carriage my father was driving, his teeth scattered over the asphalt road. Then came another mutt, Mach, who ran away, followed by our genial golden retriever, Kubla (embarrassingly named by me), who had hip dysplasia, a developmental disease some have linked to breeding dogs for conformation standards.
In 2006, my wife, Lisa, and I adopted Foxy from an organization in Larchmont that rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in the South and brings them north. Thanks to a dog-DNA test, a novelty back then, when asked about Foxy’s heritage, I could say she was a bulldog-Pomeranian-Labrador-Mexican-hairless cross. A rare breed, indeed. She was the family dog for sixteen years, until her liver failed and we had her euthanized at home in Vermont, in August, 2022. A long dogless period followed that dreadful day. I missed having a buddy, but Lisa wasn’t ready.
Then one day, in the summer of 2024, as Lisa was browsing the classifieds in the Vermont Standard, she said, “There’s an ad here for goldendoodle puppies.” I looked at her. Had the mourning period finally ended?
The ad gave a phone number for the breeder, who was in Bethel, twenty minutes away. “No harm in looking,” I said, disingenuously. “We could take the kids and make a family outing of it.”
The puppies were first-generation crosses between the breeder’s own dogs—a golden retriever named Amy and a standard poodle named Bumper. First-generation, or F1, doodles combine equal parts of their parents’ DNA in a random combination. Some get the low-shedding genes; some don’t. Second-generation (F2) doodles, which are doodle-to-doodle crosses, are even more of a crapshoot: some littermates may have poodle coats, others retriever coats. Many breeders backcross their F1 doodles with an unrelated poodle or a “multi-gen” doodle, to get puppies with the preferred doodle coat. Some now use DNA testing to select for the favored coat traits. Eventually, through selective breeding, you get multi-gen-doodle-to-multi-gen-doodle crosses that result in relatively predictable-looking offspring.
Our decision, if there ever was one, was made the moment we saw the litter. The goldendoodle puppy has been designed for maximum cuteness. No standard-English word comes close to encapsulating the feeling of seeing one; thankfully, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “gigil” (pronounced “ghee-gill”) last year. In Philippine English, “gigil” signifies “a feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable,” according to an O.E.D. bulletin.
I picked up a puppy with slightly redder fur than the others, and tightened my grip a bit. Lisa captured the moment with her phone; the photo is now her lock screen. She says it’s the happiest she’s ever seen me.
The “creature,” as we sometimes refer to him, joined our family in the fall of 2024, as a nine-week-old puppy. After much debate, we named him Herman (as in Munster, not Melville). He quickly grew much larger than either of his parents, topping out at seventy-five pounds. He looks like a retriever and a poodle were disassembled and put back together carelessly. His coat, made of soft, wavy curls, is like a poodle cake with retriever frosting. He has retriever ears and a poodle’s pointy occiput, topped by a mushroom cap of blond curls with a reddish tinge that jiggle daftly when he moves. His sinewy poodle legs end in retriever’s feet, with webbed toes, and his beaky poodle snout is partly hidden by his splendid “furnishings”: the eyebrow-mustache-and-beard combo that signals that a doodle carries at least one copy of the RSPO2 gene, which results in reduced shedding. Herman has proved to be remarkably “biddable”—that is, keen to take instruction, and almost always eager to please—but with a mysterious aloofness and a dignified reserve. From an early age, he developed extraordinary social skills with other dogs, and he is unfailingly gentle with people of all ages. I have learned his vocabulary of whines, yawns, growls, barks. Because he comes from highly active dogs on both sides, Herman (“Proud, Goofy, Too Smart by Half”) requires three hours of exercise a day, or else he gets bored, and you don’t want that. His strong food drive, combined with his size and his intelligence, makes him a hazard in the kitchen. If counter surfing were a sport, he’d be an Olympian. He once ate seven enchiladas that had been left out on the kitchen counter, without disturbing the Pyrex casserole dish they were in; we thought our son had wolfed them all until we found a pinto bean on Herman’s elbow.
Dogs have always served as a sort of emotional prosthetic for me, allowing me to voice feelings to them that I am too shy or embarrassed to say to people. But with Herman I went deep: I fell in love with our doodle. He felt like the answer to a personal ad I hadn’t known I’d placed. Me: a sixty-seven-year-old man facing an empty nest, working from home, needing to get his ten thousand steps a day, living part time in Brooklyn and part time in Vermont, with a five-hour drive in between, looking for a companion. You: a dog that would be as happy running through deep snow in the woods as he would be socializing with a hundred other dogs in the city, tolerates long car rides, will keep my feet warm during Zoom calls. Us: mutual joy.
The morning after my visit to Meet the Breeds, I took Herman to Fort Greene Park, in Brooklyn, where dogs can run off leash until 9 A.M. The disconnect between traditional dogdom, as represented by Meet the Breeds, and the everyday world of dogs was striking. Meet the Crossbreeds would be the more appropriate rubric for parks and sidewalks across the U.S. In Fort Greene, there are roughly ten doodles for every poodle, which was once the most popular breed in America, as measured by A.K.C. registrations; poodles ruled for more than two decades, beginning in 1960, just a few years after teens were wearing poodle skirts to sock hops. Now there are so many poodle-ized versions of heritage breeds in the park that it’s a surprise to occasionally see the real thing.
Trendiness alone can’t explain the doodle phenomenon. Labradoodles and goldendoodles have been around for more than thirty years, well beyond a fad’s shelf life; Cavapoos were first bred as early as the fifties. And it’s not as if the purebred world is immune to fashion. Films such as “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” “Lady and the Tramp,” and “Marley & Me” caused registrations of Dalmatians, cocker spaniels, and Labradors, respectively, to spike. In any case, no major Hollywood film has ever starred a doodle. Their medium is social media, where their adorable features are the canine equivalent of Instagram face. Just as Rin Tin Tin, the German-shepherd silent-film star, symbolized perseverance and grit in the face of war and the Great Depression, and Lassie, the heroic collie, featured in books, films, and the eponymous nineteen-fifties TV series, stood for Eisenhower-era optimism and the safety of the herd, doodles represent the curation of personal identity through consumerism and the rejection of traditional gatekeepers.
Because many doodles are first- or second-generation, each one looks a little different. That’s part of their appeal for me, at least, but it’s also why an F1 or F2 doodle could probably never be an A.K.C. breed. The essence of a breed is conforming to a standard, and early-generation doodles are genetically nonconformist, allowing their owners to feel nonconformist, too, while also having a dog that comes from fancy bloodlines on both sides. Instead of an F1 breed standard, there is a TikTok algorithm that connects doodle people with videos of doodles that share strikingly similar behavioral quirks: the spread-eagle sleeping style, the Velcro-like attachment to their people, the creepily human side-eye looks.
Status-wise, doodles are a mixed bag. The rescue movement—which gained momentum in the eighties in Northern California and soon swept through dog culture, borne on the wings of “Angels,” the Sarah McLachlan song that accompanied heartrending A.S.P.C.A. commercials about dogs in need of homes—has scrambled the social order of purebreds and mutts. The highest status in dog parks these days belongs, rightfully, to the people who foster dogs rescued from kill shelters or abusive situations—middle-aged pit bulls, retired greyhounds, dogs with three legs. (There’s a hilarious Amy Schumer sketch, titled “Doggy Daycare,” in which conspicuously conscientious dog folks attempt to one-up each other in bragging about the defects of their rescued dogs; the winner’s pet is actually dead.) After fosterers come people who adopt from shelters rather than purchasing from breeders. Then come the purebred owners.
The doodle people generally make up the lowest rung, although it depends on where the dogs come from: a growing number are from shelters. A lot of the people who got a doodle during the pandemic were first-time dog owners. On finding that keeping their doodle amused and groomed was a major and expensive commitment, they “surrendered” the dog. This has created another set of issues. Doodles usually get adopted first, so other dogs stay in shelters for longer, Tori Fugate, of the organization Shelter Animals Count, told me. To underscore this problem, the Animal Care Centers of N.Y.C. posted a video last year in which rescues, such as Miss Buttercup, a pit bull that had languished in the shelter for four months, wore doodle wigs. Miss Buttercup was adopted three days later.
Embark is a DNA-testing service for dogs co-founded by Adam Boyko, a canine geneticist at Cornell. I swabbed Herman and, when the results came back, Boyko and I went over them together. He noted that Herman tested clear for two hundred and seventy-one possible health risks, and carries a nondominant gene for three others (copper toxicosis, which can affect the liver; ichthyosis, a skin disorder; and low alanine-aminotransferase activity, which can lead to misinterpretations of test results), all of which would be a concern only if we bred him. (He is, in fact, neutered. Sorry, pal.)
Herman also has a one-per-cent coefficient of inbreeding, or C.O.I., a formula for measuring how inbred a dog is; purebred poodles and golden retrievers both have, on average, a twenty-per-cent C.O.I. Boyko explained to me that the higher the C.O.I., the greater “the probability that a dog that has a harmful mutation in its genome will inherit two copies of that mutation, leading to expression of the harmful effect.” In classic Mendelian theory, first-generation crosses of genetically distinct parent lines should exhibit “hybrid vigor,” as measured by increased fertility, body mass, and disease resistance, when compared with both parents. But, in reality, hybrid vigor isn’t guaranteed. Nationwide, one of the largest pet-insurance providers in the U.S., studied cancer claims from the owners of more than a million and a half dogs over a six-year period, 2015 to 2021, and found that owners of golden retrievers and of standard poodles were nearly four times more likely to file cancer claims than owners of goldendoodles were. However, a 2024 research paper, “The Doodle Dilemma”—which studied Cavapoos, cockapoos, and Labradoodles in the U.K. and compared them with their purebred progenitors—found “limited differences in overall health status . . . challenging widespread beliefs in positive hybrid vigour effects for health in this emerging designer-crossbreed demographic.” Doodles, after all, still come from two inbred lines.
Herman’s bestie, Beanie, is an unfurnished goldendoodle—she doesn’t have the eyebrow-mustache-beard combination, and didn’t inherit the low-shedding gene. Moose, another friend of Herman’s, in Brooklyn, is referred to by his owner as a “Nordstrom Rack” Labradoodle because he got him from a shelter for a fraction of the price one from a breeder costs. Then he found out why: Moose was nuts. “He would chew the walls when we were gone,” his owner said. Two years and fifteen thousand dollars of therapy and daytime boarding later, Moose is a great dog, as long as he takes his Prozac. He’s not the only dog in the park on antidepressants.
Dan O’Neill, a vet and a professor at Britain’s Royal Veterinary College, suggested to me that, instead of thinking of dogs as breeds and then categorizing them as purebreds, crossbreeds, or mutts, we could think of a dog breed as something defined by our human emotion. “Say, for example, I’ve got a rescue dog,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. ‘Rescue’ is my breed. In the U.K., we get a lot of dogs brought in from Romania. Romanian rescues have now become ‘Rommies,’ and that’s a new breed, because the breed is defined by emotion. You could argue that Labradoodles, cockapoos, and Cavapoos are part of that human emotional process, too. They’ve not been inbred for long enough to have a guarantee that they’ll look alike. When someone buys one of these newly invented breeds, they’re buying into an ethos, a culture of freedom, of crossing, of naturalness.”
Online, doodles stir darker emotions. “I love all dogs and own the best dog in the world. But my god I hate those fuckers,” one Reddit commenter said of doodles. “We have one in my close family and I’ve never met a more neurotic dog.” Many object to the prices that doodles command; Much Ado About Doodles, for example, a Virginia-based breeding business, sells pretrained goldendoodle puppies for some fifteen thousand dollars each. “Family member spent a stupid amount of money for a mini bernadoodle,” another Reddit commenter noted. “My AKC registered dog was way cheaper and came from champion bloodlines.” Vets cite skin diseases, digestive issues, and separation anxiety as common problems they see in goldendoodles. Groomers complain about owners who, instead of troubling themselves with the daily brushing and regular cuts that low-shedding coats require, allow their dog’s coat to develop painful mats that have to be shaved off, then yell at the groomer for denuding their fur baby. A common clarification in anti-doodle discourse is “It’s not the doodles I hate, it’s the people who own them.”
Wally Conron, the doodle dogfather, has apologized for his creation. “I opened a Pandora’s box, that’s what I did,” he said in his interview with Stanley Coren. “I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy.” He added, “I’ve done so much harm to pure breeding and made many charlatans quite rich. I wonder, in my retirement, whether we bred a designer dog—or a disaster!” In 2019, in “Sum of All Parts,” an Australian podcast, he called the Labradoodle his life’s regret. (Conron, now in his mid-nineties, couldn’t be reached for comment.)
The marketing of Labradoodles and goldendoodles as low-maintenance family pets is misleading, but, when given sufficient love and attention, they do live up to their reputation as calm, intelligent, light-shedding super-dogs, with temperaments that balance the best qualities of the original breeds. They make great therapy animals. Victor McShan, a goldendoodle breeder in Louisiana and a U.S. Army veteran, told me about how his doodles work with veterans suffering from P.T.S.D. “If they have trouble going into a dark house, they can train the dog to go in and turn the lights on,” he said. “You can say, ‘Clear the house.’ If you’re walking or running, you can train the dog to go ahead and sniff out debris on your path so that you don’t think that it’s an I.E.D. It can be trained to wake you up if you’re having a nightmare.”
The emergence of doodles also showed that it was possible to breed and sell expensive pups without participating in the institutional framework of the purebred-dog world, with its breed clubs and old-world manners and the cheesy formality of the dog shows. Traditional purebred breeders are more likely than doodle breeders to sell by word of mouth, and to have no online presence at all. Gina Bryson, a twenty-six-year-old researcher with the Royal Veterinary College, told me that the doodle phenomenon was related to the ease with which they can be purchased online: “Especially for my generation, if we want it, we kind of want it now. Rather than, say, there’s an Irish-wolfhound breeder who lives within a hundred miles, and maybe they’ll have a litter next year, you can go online and there’s lots of doodle litters in a lot of locations.” On Gumtree, the U.K. equivalent of Craigslist, “you can be scrolling, and next to someone selling their used dumbbells you have someone selling a litter of cockapoo puppies,” she said.
A well-bred and health-tested doodle puppy can cost around thirty-five hundred dollars; nonetheless, there are numerous dodgy breeders who cut corners and sell for less. In the U.S., anyone can breed dogs. The kennel clubs try to police themselves and provide a gatekeeping function that attempts to screen out unscrupulous breeders. There are few such gatekeepers in the doodle world; it’s the Wild West. So-called puppy mills mass-produce doodles and purebred dogs. Breeding females are stacked in cramped, dirty cages, sitting in their own waste, and are bred with no recovery time between litters. Puppy mills and brokers exploit the anonymity of online transactions, creating charming websites full of beguiling, instantly available young doodles; potential buyers are never invited to visit the breeder and see the puppies’ parents, as we did when we got Herman. In 2023, in a facility in Iowa which went by the name Paris Puppies Paradise, an animal-rescue group found about a hundred goldendoodles “living in their own feces and urine, including some pregnant mamas and newborn puppies.” A recent British documentary, “Dogspiracy,” follows the “puppy pipeline” to Amish puppy mills in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which turn out dogs by the thousands for pet stores and online sales. Many are licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2025, the U.S.D.A. documented more than six hundred and eighty animal-welfare violations among licensed dog breeders, but in all cases took no punitive action, according to the A.S.P.C.A. New York is one of several states, including California, that have banned the sale of commercially bred puppies (and kittens and rabbits) in pet stores, in an effort to break up the puppy pipeline.
In late February, the annual conference of the Goldendoodle Association of North America (GANA) took place on the seventh floor of the Hyatt House, in Charlotte, North Carolina. At Meet the Breeds, I felt like a heretic at a papal conclave, but at Doodle Con, as I thought of it, I wallowed in O.D.D.—obsessive doodle disorder—with other doodle-lovers, like Joe and Beth Robles, a pair of breeders who own Beechwood Goldendoodles, in Culpeper, Virginia. “Look at him—he’s adorable!” Beth exclaimed as I showed her a few of my phone’s hundreds of pictures of Herman, his hopeful brown eyes staring out from his furnishings.
Fox Creek Farm’s Amy Lane was a driving force behind the founding of GANA. She wanted to save the breed from puppy mills and quick-buck operators by creating ethical standards for breeders. But she also wanted to differentiate the organization from the A.K.C. by requiring its member-breeders—there are some hundred and fifty of them now, representing a tiny fraction of the industry—to comply with a strict regime of health and genetic testing. Breeders also sign an ethics code, pledging to not use any relatives closer than third cousins.
In the dog-show world of purebreds, “You can breed a father to a daughter or a mother to a son,” Lane told me when I met her in West Virginia last fall. (The A.K.C., for its part, discourages mating with parents and siblings, but the offspring of such unions can still be registered and compete in shows.) “None of that matters to them, because that particular look won in the show ring.” She added, “One of my original goals with GANA was that we needed to have a pedigree service to track these dogs and their lineage to make sure we weren’t breeding related dogs.”
All the breeders I met at Doodle Con were selling multi-gen goldendoodles. Clients prefer the certainty that the dogs will have the furnishing genes and will closely resemble the parents, like purebred dogs. The days of dogs like Herman, Beanie, and Moose, all totally unique in their doodleness, could fade away; the most popular doodle types may become as standardized as any other breed.
I thought of something that Dan O’Neill, of the Royal Veterinary College, had told me: “The dog world is just a cycle. And what we’re going through now with these newly invented breeds arriving is just what happened in the late eighteen-hundreds. In Victorian England, rich people had their kennels. Now there’s a new phase of breeding with the Labradoodles and cockapoos. In the future, new cycles of breed invention will happen.” Human nature being what it is, O’Neill continued, “it is inevitable that people will want to say, ‘I have a purebred goldendoodle.’ Because, remember, this is always about people.”
In Australia, Conron’s original Labradoodles have been crossed again, with Irish soft-coated wheaten terriers (and a few other breeds, too), and rebranded as Australian cobberdogs. (“Cobber” is Aussie slang for “friend.”) In 2012, the cobberdog was accepted as a “pure breed in development” by Master Dog Breeders and Associates, a lesser-known international purebred registry.
But Amy Lane told me that she has no interest in goldendoodles becoming an A.K.C.-recognized breed. “As long as I have any say or pull with goldendoodles, it’ll be over my dead body,” she said.
The purebred world doesn’t like to acknowledge the business side of breeding, but at Doodle Con marketing was front and center. I learned about branding strategies, what website colors and fonts are most appealing to buyers, and the edict “We don’t sell puppies, we sell the life style they provide.” The idea that Herman, completely original and impossible to duplicate, was just a marketing category I fit into stung a little, I’ll admit.
After the presentations ended, there was a chance to socialize. I sat with a goldendoodle breeder and GANA stalwart named Cindy Niske, who wrote the goldendoodle standard that’s published on the GANA website. As with the A.K.C.’s golden-retriever standard, hound ears are frowned upon. “Low set or low hanging ears, as in that of the Hound set, are not desirable,” the GANA standard reads. But when it comes to noses, anything goes: “All colors and combinations are acceptable.”
Niske explained that she and her husband had spent more than twenty years breeding a line of A.K.C.-registered Great Danes that won top prizes at the big shows. But she kept losing dogs she bred to spondylosis of the spine, a disorder that can be heritable. Finally, when she had to put down Strom, her A.K.C. Grand Champion Great Dane, at seven years old, “I lay there on the floor next to him, and said to my husband, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ ” she told me. After learning about GANA, she added, “I just about jumped out of my skin when I saw they require genetic-health testing!”
The Niskes started Seventh Heaven Goldendoodles in 2017. The couple had been popular in the purebred world, but, “when the word got out on social media that we had gotten into goldendoodles, I was called every name in the book,” Niske said. “To my face. I was told I was probably going to burn in Hell.”
Before I left, Niske gave me a Seventh Heaven Goldendoodles puppy calendar, which had the words “Live. Laugh. Bark.” printed on the front. Looking at the puppy pictures inside, I felt a twinge of gigil. Uh-oh. Were we ready for a double-doodle life? ♦