Many people have heard the phrase "Adopt Don't Shop" and know that it refers to adopting dogs from animal shelters rather than going to a pet store and buying a pet from there. And there are a plethora of reasons why adopting is the way to go when it comes to getting a new dog. You'll help reduce overcrowding in shelters, you give a homeless dog a good home, and you help decrease the likelihood of the shelter euthanizing their animals to make more space. But one thing that typically turns people off from adopting a dog at a shelter, is that when you adopt its a lot less likely that you will find a purebred. Many people do their research before going to buy a dog, they look up the different breeds so that they can see which one matches up best with their family and lifestyle. Therefore when it comes time to buy the dog, it's a lot easier to go to a pet store or a backyard breeder to find their desired pure breed, than it is to wander around shelters looking for a specific dog. And you may think there's nothing really wrong with this, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Because there are more downfalls to purebred dogs than you would think.

Health
To start, purebred dogs are full of genetic disease, many purebred dogs will get some form of sickness in their lifetime. And this can be anything, such as joint problems, blindness, kidney disease, liver disease, digestive problems, epilepsy, diabetes, heart disease, blood clots, and the most popular disease of them all; cancer. So why are these problems heavily present in purebred dogs but not in mutts? The answer is inbreeding. In order to achieve those short little legs and long narrow body that today we see and know to be a Dachshund, eugenists would inbreed dogs with their own family members in order to get the desired traits that they needed to create the Daschund. And anyone who has taken a biology class knows why this is an awful thing. Inbreeding decreases the genetic pool and therefore leads to an event known as the genetic bottleneck. What the genetic bottleneck means is, you have bred such a low variety of animals together that something that was once a recessive genetic trait now has a huge chance of becoming a defining characteristic in an animal. For example, if you took a group of dogs where a good portion of them had a genetic disease that made them develop heart failures early on in life and bred them together, soon the offspring will almost all have that genetic coding because the gene pool is so small. And so because of this genetic bottleneck diseases that would normally only be present in a handful of animals, grew rapidly in purebred dogs.