Yeah.

Absolutely.

And I think this is where sometimes I'll get personally accused of being a hypocrite because in one word I'm saying, oh, it's not beneficial.

And then the next I'm saying it is.

And that's because crossbreeding is an enormous wide concept.

It depends entirely on which breed you're crossing and why you're crossing them.

So we know some of the challenges with the kind of doodle phenomenon is that a lot of that was very much led by demand, by consumption.

Why is that? How did you, what was the sort of motivator for that?

And so Rowena, can you talk a little bit about how the study uses puppies acquired during the pandemic and what made that time such an important window to study?

Yeah, absolutely.

So back during the very start of the pandemic, where obviously all of our lives became very topsy-turvy, and I was at that point doing some quite clinically based research in a referral hospital at RVC and suddenly had to piv-pivot to becoming desk-based.

I thought, "Right, what are the welfare issues du jour?" Um, and I'm sure across the world, um, we saw a lot of media articles around this sudden boom in people either buying or wanting to buy puppies.

We had headlines in the UK, in like the Financial Times, ar- places that wouldn't usually report on dogs saying, "We have a shortage of puppies," um, alongside with other things like toilet roll in the UK.

This kind of very really encouraging a scarcity mindset of if you want a puppy, you need to go out and get one right now.

You're gonna be battling people to try and get one.

And so that, that question, can you talk a little bit about how you arrived at that question and is it, was that mostly driven by the legal requirement? But, but can you talk a little bit about what maybe even formulated that legal requirement in the past and how you arrived at that, uh, at the importance of mom and puppy being together at that time?

They get very attached to the owner and then they just can't stay in the house on their own kind of thing.

I think there's, this is where we're, from the start we're talking about these trade-offs that when people look at the kind of obvious go-to ways to get dogs or the types of dogs that they could acquire that, you know, the imported rescue, um, area is still huge in the UK.

And where you are, as you said, getting those benefits of being innately healthy.

I live in Hertfordshire.

I know there's a local rescue for them, and I can spot those dogs from a mile off.

I'm like, "You're from Romania." [laughs] You've, there's this quite distinctive look from any of those dogs.

Um, but yeah, the trade-off for the dog is potentially not a positive if that dog and its early life looks very different to what their life will be like in the UK.

What, what, what maybe, you know, what would help? Are there any easy wins?

Um, Rowena, you had some other work that you could add to this?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I think as I say, it was a real positive and it's nice to be the bringer of good news [laughs] rather than bad news working in welfare occasionally, not feeling like the entire fun police.

I think a big caveat to that otherwise really positive story of people preferring moderation was that those moderate versions that we'd generated images of were less likely to be considered purebred by those respondents.

And then in some follow-on work, looking at a more qualitative angle, so exploring what are the reasons why people would or wouldn't buy, for example, a purebred versus a crossbred brachycephalic, there is still some barriers in our way there.

Although lots of the public recognize that crossbreeding can bring benefits potentially to all dogs, we looked at the, at the level of in general, and then for that specific case study of brachycephaly, that people recognize that conformation-related disease could be relieved to a certain extent.

Uh, Rowena?