How do the health, behaviours and dog-owner relationships of purebred Pugs and Pug-crosses compare?
14 September 2026
Brachycephalic dogs such as Pugs remain popular, despite suffering from serious health issues linked to their extreme physical features. To address welfare issues, there is increasing interest in crossbreeding purebred Pugs with non-extreme, non-brachycephalic breeds to create offspring with more moderate body shapes and reduced disease burden. However, there is a lack of evidence on how the comparative health, welfare and behaviour of brachycephalic designer crossbreeds compares to their purebred progenitor breeds.
In the first study to date to address this gap, researchers from the Royal Veterinary College compared the health, behaviour and dog-ownership relationship between purebred Pugs and two popular Pug-crosses: Puggles (Pug × Beagle) and Jugs (Pug × Jack Russell Terrier).1
Owners of Pugs, Jugs and Puggles, recruited through social media and posters in practice waiting rooms, completed a questionnaire to collect information on themselves and objective and subjective reports of their dog’s health and behaviour. Owners reported their dog’s behaviour using the shortened version of the validated canine behavioural assessment and research questionnaire (C-BARQ), and a range of morphological, clinical and cognitive metrics were assessed for all dogs by one of the researchers.
A total of 150 dogs were included: 51 Pugs, 51 Jugs, and 48 Puggles. The findings showed that both crossbreeds had fewer conformational health problems and substantially lower veterinary costs compared with purebred Pugs. Notably, Pugs had a significantly higher prevalence of respiratory, ocular, dermatological and musculoskeletal disorders compared to Jugs and Puggles.
All Jugs and almost all Puggles (98%) were given a respiratory functional grading scheme (RFGS) Grade 0, indicating unaffected breathing. In contrast, no Pugs were given Grade 0, and most were graded Grade 1 (47%) or Grade 2 (45%), showing varying degrees of breathing impairment.
Nostril scores, which indicate the degree of nostril narrowing, varied significantly between the breeds. Most Jugs (92%) and Puggles (88%) had a Grade 1 nostril score, compared to only 10% of Pugs. In contrast, the majority of Pugs (69%) had a Grade 2 score, and one in five Pugs (22%) had severe nostril narrowing (Grades 3-5), which was not seen in any Jugs or Puggles. All Pugs had a nasal fold, compared with only 16% of Jugs and 27% of Puggles.
Scleral scoring, or grading, indicates the amount of visible sclera (white). Around half of Jugs (49%) and Puggles (50%) scored a 0 scleral score, compared to only 4% of Pugs. None of the Jugs or Puggles had a scleral score of 3 or 4, whilst 22% of Pugs did. Pugs were significantly more likely to have entropion (20%) and ectropion (6%), whilst no Jugs or Puggles did.
Jugs and Puggles had a less extreme facial conformation than Pugs, with significantly longer relative muzzle length and less stenotic nostrils. Puggles were overall larger than Pugs and Jugs, with a significantly larger head width, neck length, neck girth, chest girth, body length and body height measurement.
Owner-reported dysfunction scores for heat, eating, sleep, and breathing were significantly worse for Pugs compared to Jugs and Puggles. Owners of Jugs and Puggles were more likely to rate their dog’s quality of life as ‘excellent’ (92% of Jugs, 81% of Puggles) compared to Pug owners (59%).
The owner-completed C-BARQ results showed that Pugs and Jugs displayed more attachment and more attention-seeking behaviour compared with Puggles, and the crossbreeds showed an improvement in trainability compared to Pugs. There were no statistically significant differences between breeds for the remaining four C-BARQ scales (excitability, aggression, fear and anxiety, and separation anxiety).
Overall, these findings show substantially reduced conformation-related disorder burden in designer crossbreed Pugs compared to purebred Pugs, whilst maintaining behavioural characteristics and strong dog-owner bond which are strong motivators for their acquisition.
Limitations of this study include its restriction to Pugs, Jugs, and Puggles in the UK, meaning that the findings should be generalised to other brachycephalic breeds and designer crossbreeds with caution. The RFGS has not been validated for use in crossbreed dogs, and the study relied partly on owner-reported health data.
Take home message
Deliberate crossbreeding between a breed with an extreme brachycephalic conformation (i.e. Pug) and a breed with more natural mesocephalic conformation (i.e. Jack Russell Terrier or Beagle) creates crossbreed that is less physically extreme and has a much lower conformation-related disorder burden than the progenitor breed. Crossbreeding could offer an approach to improving the welfare of brachycephalic dogs, while retaining behavioural characteristics and strong dog-owner bonds that are valued by owners.
Reference
1Youens E, O’Neill DG, Tivers M, Belshaw Z, Neufuss J & Packer RMA (2026) A solution right under our nose? Crossbreeding extreme brachycephalic dogs results in better health outcomes while preserving behavioural profiles and dog-owner relationship quality. Animal Welfare. 35:e41. doi:10.1017/awf.2026.10095