A new future for dog breeding

Abstract

The modern idea of purebred dogs has come under increasing critical scrutiny over recent decades. In light of this critical focus and other developments in society, some new trends in how companion dogs are bred and acquired have emerged. This means a diminishing influence from traditional kennel clubs with more dogs being sold without a pedigree, stricter legal restrictions on dog breeding, growing popularity of deliberate crosses of established breeds (i.e. so-called designer breeds) and growing hype around the benefits of mixed-breed dogs. We give an overview of these trends and discuss to what extent they will serve to promote dogs that are innately healthy, have good welfare and function well in their various roles in today's world. We argue that newly invented designer breeds and mixed breeds also have worrying health and behavioural problems, and that the predictability of purebred dogs with respect to body size, basic behaviours, known need for grooming, disorder profiles and other attributes may well offer some benefits for a satisfying human-dog relationship seen from both sides. The optimal future seems to lie in the middle ground, where the future organised dog world (i.e. kennel and breed clubs or their successor organisations) will need to re-open the breed registries, remove wording from breed standards that currently promotes extreme conformation, support selection against disease-predisposing genotypes and phenotypes and refocus dog showing and breeding to promote health and appropriate behaviour.

Keywords: Animal welfare; designer breed; extreme conformation; healthy breeding; mixed breed; purebred dog.

Figure 1.

Registration figures from the Danish Dog Registry from 1994–2023. The dark blue, solid line represents the registration figures from the Danish Kennel Club (DKC), the light blue, dotted line represents the number of dogs entering the Danish Dog Registry without a pedigree including mixed breeds (non-DKC). The DKC proportion of all dogs has decreased from 63.5% in 1994 to 31.8% in 2023.

Figure 2.

The percentage of dogs from different breeds entering the Danish Dog Registry in 2023 who had a pedigree from the Danish Kennel Club. Utility breeds originally designed for hunting and sporting show high proportional kennel club registration while many breeds that were originally popularised as companion animals show low levels of kennel club registration.