The Kennel Club confirmed this week that it is developing a revolutionary new database that will enable breeders to find a perfect match in their breeding programmes, and which will, says the KC, help to improve the health of future generations within the breed.

The database will enable breeders, vets and others to record information about a dog’s health - including any surgery that it has had - and the results of any health tests, which will greatly increase the Kennel Club’s ability to understand the health issues that affect individual dogs, as well as the extent to which these are inherited within the breed.

From this database the Kennel Club will develop a Mate Select programme which will be accessed via the Kennel Club website and will, in a first of its kind, allow both occasional and regular breeders to assess the impact that a proposed mating will have on the genetic diversity within their breed.

Optimum impact

As new health screening tools are developed, these will also be incorporated into Mate Select so that, in future, breeders will be able to select mating pairs which will maximise the chances of producing healthy puppies whilst having the optimum impact on the breed’s genetic diversity.
These IT developments will greatly expand the Kennel Club’s ability to collect and store health information on registered dogs - information that will allow the development of new health screening tools which will find their way into Mate Select and improve the health of pedigree dogs.

The Kennel Club also says it wants to ensure that puppies go on to loving homes and has launched a new Breed Information Centre on its website. This includes a Health Test Results Finder, which records the health test results for any Kennel Club registered dog; an Accredited Breeder application that gives potential owners a list of responsible breeders in their area; and a Find a Breed application to show which breed’s characteristics would best suit their lifestyle.

Science

Kennel Club Communications Director, Caroline Kisko, said: “People do a lot of thinking about their perfect partner but dogs’ needs are relatively simple - to find a mate that will give them healthy puppies, which will then be matched with loving owners.

‘A lot of science is going into the Kennel Club’s new database, but the end result will be that the computer will be able to help dog breeders find a mate for their dog, which will give them the best possible chance of producing healthy puppies.

‘Not only can we help to match the right dogs with each other, but equally important is matching the right puppy buyers to the right puppy and our newly launched Breed Information Centre will help people to find the right breed and the right breeder.”

Nick Blayney, former President of the BVA, has spoken about the importance of the new database for dog health. He said: ‘The Kennel Club has helped develop many DNA tests and has a number of health screening schemes that are run with the British Veterinary Association and this knowledge should be central to any breeding decision. Sometimes though, there is so much information to compute that breeders don’t know where to start. This database will do the complicated calculations for them, showing them clearly which dogs will make the most suitable match in order to produce healthy puppies.”

Health test results, and details of any surgery or operations that a dog has had, will be entered into the health database by dog owners and vets and will then be verified. Dogs will then enter the ‘dating pool’ and be matched with other dogs, of the same breed within the surrounding area, on the basis of their Estimated Breeding Value (the genetic value of the dog based upon health considerations). For those breeders who already know which dogs they would like to use, the database will show the compatibility in terms of health, of a particular mating. Work is already under way on the database which will be available by the end of the year, and the Mate Select programme within the following twelve months.

Calculations

Professor Jeff Sampson, Kennel Club Chief Scientific Advisor, said: “The Kennel Club has been working with scientists to develop Estimated Breeding Values for many years. These EBVs are based on very complicated calculations such as the prevalence of certain diseases in a particular breed or the size of the gene pool. The database is the first of its kind to be able to compute all of this information and to tell breeders not only which two dogs will produce the healthiest offspring, but which pairings will have the most positive effect on the overall health of that breed.

“The programme will be available for pedigree dogs, because we know their heritage and therefore have more information available for them, but we hope that information about all other dogs will also be fed into this database. At the moment we have frighteningly little information about diseases within crossbred dogs, but this database will help to throw light on this grey area and help us, therefore, to improve the health of pedigrees and crossbreeds alike.”

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