While the very first Labradoodle was a guide dog named Sultan, the title for the very first Australian Labradoodle—with its gentle and loving disposition—belongs to a gorgeous girl named Magdella. Her story, I believe, marks the beginning of the breed.

Let me backtrack for a moment. When I encountered my first Labradoodles in 1989, my feelings about them were far from settled. Some of them were quite handsome looking, in a quirky sort of way.  I have to be honest, however, and say that I noticed more flaws than attributes in those early generations. For one thing, many of them shed, which is not what you’re looking for in an “allergy-friendly” dog, to be sure! For another, the temperament seemed haywire. The dogs I encountered seemed aloof, high-strung and boisterous, and some were even aggressive and domineering, all at the same time. Rather than inheriting the best qualities of the Labrador and the poodle, they seemed to have inherited the worst qualities of both breeds—which is something that still persists today among generic Labrador-Poodle hybrids.

As humans, we all want to achieve the best we can when we set out to do something, and nowhere is this desire to perfect things more of an obsession than in the mind of a dog breeder. I was determined to improve the Labradoodle as it had come to be known, to fix its flaws, and to turn it into the supremely desirable family companion that I just “knew” it could become. To improve things, I looked to other breeds, beyond the parent stock of Labradors and Poodles, in the hopes of finding certain temperament traits that I could “transplant,” if you will, into the dogs I raised. This is a process known as infusion, because you’re simply trying to “infuse” some of the characteristics of the new dogs into the existing lines, rather than radically changing the overall look.

I started studying other breeds as candidates, and quickly defined some parameters. For one thing, the dog had to have a low-shedding “single coat” similar to the Poodle, rather than a more typical “double-coat,” similar to the Labrador, Golden Retriever, German Shepherd, and most other dogs, that sheds. The double-coat tends to be dominant, and I knew that if I crossed a Labradoodle with, say, a Golden Retriever, I could be fairly certain that the resulting puppies would also shed. Beyond this, I wanted to find a smaller breed to infuse in order to scale back the size of the Labradoodle. These early-generation dogs were enormous, weighing in at 80 and even 90 pounds or more, and standing between 24 and 30 inches tall at the shoulder. Hardly a lap dog! Above all, I wanted to find a breed that had a softer and sweeter disposition, to balance the hard edges of the Labradoodle as I knew them. I wanted to create the ideal companion dog, one that was quick-witted and intelligent, and would gaze at you warmly, and be eager to follow you from room to room and spend time in your company. Lofty ideals, of course, but I wanted to shoot for the moon.

Over the course of the next year, I found two different breeds available in Australia that met my criteria, and which I bred with some of the early-generation Labradoodles I had. The progress was astounding, I have to admit, and in a single generation there were so many improvements it was hard to believe. The dogs were smaller and more manageable, their coats were softer and more luxuriant, but best of all, their temperaments improved tremendously. I would breed these hybrids back to my Labradoodles, and there would usually be a pup or two that maintained these improvements in each litter. These are the ones I would hold on to for breeding, and continue from there.

I bred a few litters and kept some of the puppies from each litter to see how they grew, so that I could learn to recognize which traits in a pup would mature into something desirable in an adult, and which would not. I tended to breed each group of pups each to the same male, in order to compare changes, and get a sense of which characteristics and bloodlines worked well with others. I was fortunate to be able to find wonderful homes for those puppies that didn’t possess the characteristics that I was looking for, as well as older dogs that I decided to retire from my breeding program. Very quickly, there were some fantastic improvements in the Labradoodle, as if the genes had suddenly mutated to create more luxurious and predictable shed-free coats, as well better-looking dogs. Even the temperament seemed to improve, although I had to admit it was still far from ideal in terms of a family companion.

One spring morning in 1994, my “Eureka” moment arrived in the long and steady evolution of the Labradoodle. A new litter had been born into my home, and the pups were about six weeks old, and out and racing about the yard. I sat outdoors with a cup of tea as they romped, when one of them—a beautiful chalk-colored girl named Magdella—came to lie down beside me, and draped her head over my foot to gaze at me as her littermates played. Maggie, as I called her, would grow to be my all-time favorite companion, but it was clear in that moment that a new chapter in Labradoodle evolution had begun. By a combination of determination and sheer luck, the dog that I had dreamed of had become a reality, right there beside me. Magdella matured into a lovely 50 pound dog 20 inches tall with the most amazing softly curled silky coat. One day she lay on an Angora hide her coat intertwining through the silky fibers of the Angora fleece and from there came the term Fleece it was not dog hair it truly was a Fiber of exquisite texture.

          Magdella became one of the backbones of the breed as we know it, and things blossomed from there. A half sister of Magdala, named Anna, became a favorite of my Mum’s, and the start of her own Labradoodle breeding efforts at Rutland Manor. When  Anna, delivered her first litter I took two of her pups. The resulting pups, Rutlands Heritage and Rutlands Dynasty, which carried my mother’s kennel name, became the beginnings of one of the major lines with which I continue to breed.

 

--Angela Cunningham

Tegan Park Breeding and Research Centre

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