Best dog breeds: Mutts

This is a bit of a disclaimer that I had in my previous article about another breed I have experience with.

I know how sensitive people can get about their dog and trust me when I say that I am totally with you. I would quite easily "rage-kill" anyone who harmed my doge, so I understand this notion. When I make this list I want people to understand that I am not a veterinarian nor have I owned a great many dogs in my life (just one at a time.) However, these breeds are the best breeds that I have experienced in my life.

Mixed-breed or "Mutts"

About my 2nd year of college I went down the usual path of doing something incredibly dumb that was also incredibly rewarding: I got a dog despite the fact that I wasn't really even that good at looking after myself. She was a Black Lab mixed with something

source

I have no idea what kind of dog she was mixed with and the vets could only guess without doing an expensive blood test. I wasn't going to bother because this knowledge wouldn't have changed anything.

I acquire "Kya" after observing her living in a pen the size of a bathroom for a year and a half. She never left this pen and the owners would pour dog food into a dispenser and for the most part she drank water out of puddles. She was literally never not in this pen. Rather than call animal services, myself and my military buddies did a "cover opp" one night when we jumped the fence and liberated her from her prison. From that day forward, "Kya" had a very different life.

source

From the very start Kya was a very easy dog to handle and I like to believe that this loyalty was her thanks for me dramatically changing the enjoyment level of her life. She was my shadow. The best thing was that she never really took to chewing up stuff and learned various tricks very quickly. My favorite one involved a beanbag chair that I called her "nest" and anytime she was getting all up in the grill of visitors I would say "Kya! Go to your nest" and without fail, she would comply and then look at me intently, waiting for further instructions.

It isn't possible for some sort of study to show that mixed-breeds are "smarter" than purebred dogs because there are so many varieties. However, we have to consider that most purebreeds were actually mutts themselves at one point in time (that would be an interesting study that probably exists!) However, it has been my experience with my friends that there is a noticeable difference in how much easier mutts are to train than certain purebred dogs that already exist.

My experience with "Kya" was a near effortless one. She simply seemed to "know" what I wanted her to do or not to do. She was never a issue as far as house-training was concerned, but this may have been because she had spent her entire life doing her bathroom business outdoors anyway. Plus the ol' adage of "don't S**T where you eat" literally applied to her for most of her life when she was living in that tiny little fenced-in pen.

tl;dr

This quickly turned into a story about my personal experience and I suppose that was always gonna happen since it is the only information I really have to draw from. One benefit that I didn't mention in the above article is the fact that when you take on a "mutt" (which is short for "muttonhead," by the way) you are doing a great service to the high level of unwanted mixed-breed dogs that exist in the world.

No dog is a walk in the park as far as responsibility is concerned, but it has been my experience that they tend to be easier to train than a great many of the pures that exist out there.