CAVALIER BEST OF BREED WINNER FLOUTS HEALTH BREEDING PROTOCOLS….. AGAIN
Do you have a sense of deja vu? Once again, the crowning of this year’s Cavalier Best of Breed has seen judges award the top honours to a breeder brazenly flouting breeding guidelines.
Pascavale Haiden isn’t yet two years old but already has 13 litters registered with the Kennel Club (KC). Health-breeding guidelines, put in place in an attempt to tackle the hereditary health crisis afflicting this much-loved breed, state that Cavaliers should not be bred before 2.5 years old.
Haiden’s first litters were fathered before he even reached his first birthday. One of the resulting puppies, Pascavale Douglas, took the title of Best Puppy at this year’s show.
Sadly, this is nothing new. In recent years, several Cavalier Best of Breed winners at Crufts have been bred well before guidelines advise. Yet, the Cavalier Club’s own Code of Best Practice states that breeders “Will agree not to breed from a dog or bitch which could be in any way harmful to the dog or to the breed.”
Cavaliers Are Special’s own 2017 research found that in a five-year period over a third of KC-registered litters had one or both parents under the age of 2.5 years. However, for litters bred by breeders holding a position on the Cavalier Club committee or carrying out the role of a puppy coordinator (someone who liaises with members of the public trying to find a Cavalier puppy) the figure was even higher: 39 per cent.
Since the plight of Cavaliers was highlighted in the 2008 BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed, there has been a great deal of lip service paid to health but little change. A screening scheme for the painful neurological condition Syringomyelia (SM) was established but has been boycotted by the majority of breeders. Similarly, an official testing scheme for the heart condition Mitral Valve Disease (MVD) was finally put in place last year (over a decade after it was promised) but the results of tests are not published and the Kennel Club has not produced any figures indicating how widely it is being used.
With life expectancy for Cavaliers continuing to fall, top breeders, judges and the Kennel Club should be leading by example and not encouraging harmful practices, such as underage breeding. What does it say about how much the “influencers” in the dog world care about Cavaliers when Best of Breed at the world’s most prestigious dog show is awarded to those who seem to care little for health protocols?
Campaigners believe the only hope for Cavaliers is for testing to be compulsory and calls for the Kennel Club to reveal how many dogs have been tested voluntarily through the new heart scheme.
Over 54,000 dog lovers have signed our petition calling on the Kennel Club to make testing for SM and MVD mandatory before breeding. Please join them and sign here. Enough is enough. Stop rewarding breeders who play Russian roulette with Cavalier health.