Designer DogFights Jon Mooallem

In the proud and punctilious history of purebred dog breeding - which has policed the sex lives of dogs with unbending vigilance since the Victorian era - the mongrel has been regarded as, at best, an unfortunate accident and, at worst, a disgrace. Yet one rainy morning last fall, Wallace Havens walked the long aisles of his kennel, introducing me to his newest mutts as though enumerating miracles.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

A puggle puppy, the offspring of a pug and a beagle.

Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

Puggle — Pug + Beagle

Unlatching a cage door, Havens would cradle a puppy against his fuchsia cowboy shirt and announce: "Well, here's a Shih Tzu crossed with a Havanese" or "Here's a silky crossed with a Yorkie." Then he would put the puppy back with its litter mates and mom and, through scattered bursts of barking, move on.

It took awhile. The dim, 4,300-square-foot building housed about 400 dogs, most of them puppies, in 120 elevated cages. It is one of three whelping houses at the Puppy Haven Kennel, the 1,600-dog compound that Havens has built up over the last 30 years in the outlands north of Madison, Wis. Nearby, an affable elderly couple hosed feces from slats below the cages, and their daughter, another of Havens's 14 paid employees, swiftly handled one squeaking pup at a time, issuing dewormer. Here was a "bichon-poo." There was a "schnoodle."

Havens moved on, like some strange Noah touring his ark - in which every tidy two-by-two had been split apart, jumbled and recombined into a single animal: "That's a Chihuahua-bichon . . . here's a half-American Eskimo and half-Lhasa apso" - his voice lifting each time as if to ask, What will they think of next? But he had dreamed up a lot of these things himself.

Havens, a towering man of 70, has spent much of his career breeding cattle and owns a chain of Play Haven day-care centers. He is best known as the originator of the puggle, a pug-beagle cross with an irresistibly wrinkled muzzle, forlorn eyes and suitable dimensions for cramped city apartments. He first marketed puggles 20 years ago, but by late 2005, the dog suddenly had a cadre of celebrity owners, four-figure price tags and a brimming portfolio of magazine write-ups and morning-TV appearances. Puggle-emblazoned messenger bags and ladies' track suits followed. For a time, in New York especially, you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a puggle.

So-called designer dogs became popular a decade ago, beginning with the Labradoodle and other poodle crosses that sought to affix the poodle's relatively nonshedding coat to other breeds. But the puggle, a designer dog with no clear design objective, seems to have set off an almost unintelligible free-for-all. Pugs alone are now being bred to Yorkshire terriers, Shih Tzus, bichon frisés, Pekingese, rat terriers, Boston terriers, dachshunds, Jack Russell terriers and Chihuahuas to create, respectively, Pugshires, Pug-Zus, Pushons, Puginese, Puggats, Pugstons, Daugs, Jugs and Chugs. Beagles mount Bostons. Chihuhuauas do Yorkies. Beagles and basset hounds are making Bagels; bassets and Shar-Peis are making Sharp Assets - "a more laid-back dog that says, ‘If you don't feel like taking me for a walk, no big deal,' " Havens's Web site claims. Poodles are being pushed further into a goofy taxonomy of portmanteau labels: Maltipoos, Eskipoos, Doodleman Pinschers.

Given the roughly 350 inherited disorders littering the dog genome, crossing two purebreds and expanding their gene pools can be "a phenomenally good idea," according to one canine geneticist - if it is done conscientiously. Still, past canine fads, like the run on purebred Dalmatians after the movie "101 Dalmatians," have ramped up production at inhumane, large-scale "puppy mills." And fickle owners often end up abandoning those dogs once the trend passes. Thus, for show breeders who have spent much of their lives studying and refining a single pure breed - like the men and women congregating next week at Madison Square Garden for the 131st annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show - the rise of mutts as commodities has been bewildering and embittering. Many traditionalists see mixing breeds as somehow irresponsible in and of itself. As one pug breeder with a two-time, No. 1 show bitch to her credit told me: "There was only one really perfect thing on the face of this earth, and he was crucified. To us, the pug is pure."

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Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about the science of pigeon control.

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