The Inventor of the Labradoodle Is Filled With Regret

Humanity has spawned many puzzling creations, like chicken-flavored nail polish and these shoes. Up until this point, I hadn’t considered labradoodles among the weirder things we’ve thought of, or even the weirder dogs we’ve thought of. (That’s pugs.) But the inventor of the Lab-poodle hybrid sorely regrets unleashing his ungodly creation upon humanity. It is, in fact, his life’s regret.

“I realized what I had done within a matter of days,” guide dog breeder Wally Conron said on the ABC podcast Sum Of All Parts. What had started as Conron’s clever solution for a blind woman in need of a guide dog but allergic to Labrador fur quickly spun into a sensation. After Conron offloaded one labradoodle puppy to the woman with the allergy, he found himself with two extras—the problem was, nobody wanted them. That’s when he came up with the term “labradoodle,” a catchy name good for PR that quickly blew out of control.

As a professional, Conron said he’s found that others replicating the labradoodles often cared more about making money than creating healthy puppies. From ABC:

“I realised the reason for these unethical, ruthless people [was] to breed these dogs and sell them for big bucks,” Wally says.

The popularity of the labradoodle was overwhelming and Wally became increasingly concerned about the quality of the breeding process being adopted. Thirty years on it still haunts him.

“I opened a Pandora’s box and released a Frankenstein’s monster,” he says.

Wow, Frankenstein’s monster came out of Pandora’s box, and it was a labradoodle? I don’t know, I worked in an office with one once and he didn’t strike me as the nightmare scourge Conron describes. He mostly looked like a floppy red statement rug who occasionally peed on the floor. I guess I was wrong!