By Charlotte Mackaness
Just over a year ago, Beebee and I appeared live on BBC Radio 4. We were studio guests on You & Yours. Bill Lambert, Health and Breeder Services Manager at the Kennel Club (KC), also appeared. You can hear the podcast following this link.
We’d been invited to talk about my experiences of owning Cavaliers with health problems, Beebee’s struggle with Syringomyelia (SM) and the Cavalier health petition. The prospect of a live interview on national radio was thrilling and petrifying in equal measure.
As for Beebee’s reaction? She fell asleep on air. Perhaps she was thinking “KC, we’ve heard all these excuses for not doing the right thing regarding health testing before. Wake me when you’ve got something new to say”?
The involvement of the BBC was a big deal. The pleas of thousands of pet owners signing the health petition have pretty much fallen on deaf ears at the KC but get the Beeb on the phone and the it pays attention.
While we didn’t expect the KC to turn around and say “You’re quite right; mandatory testing is a no-brainer. We’ve been putting the interests of breeders and the revenues we receive from registrations above Cavalier welfare for too long!” there were some interesting consequences of Beebee’s day at the Beeb.
Not least were some of the extraordinary statements made by the KC about Cavalier health in the wake of media interest after the interview. My personal favourite came from Bill Lambert in Dog World in May that year: “We [the KC] are leading the charge,” he declared. Read the full article here
The Radio 4 interview concluded with Lambert explaining how the KC Charitable Trust had donated £30,000 to cover the costs of grading MRI scans done before the official SM scheme launched. The expense of MRIs is often cited by breeders as a reason for not using the scheme, although breeding scans are a fraction of what most charge for a puppy.
The KC talked of the value of data obtained from potentially 300 older scans but by May 2016 (over a year since the £30,000 was announced) only 20 Cavalier scans had been graded on the back of this funding. Indeed, the total number of Cavalier scans submitted to the scheme full stop was only 331 a few weeks ago. Pretty poor considering it has been running since 2012 and the KC registers many thousands of Cavalier puppies a year.
Another interesting consequence of the radio appearance was a public invitation from the KC to meet with its health team. Off we went to the KC’s swanky London HQ to be told repeatedly that “carrots” are the answer to encouraging breeders to health test. How many decades of snubbed incentives and boycotts will it take for the KC to acknowledge and act on the fact that the majority of Cavalier breeders will not test and make the results public willingly?
Credit must go to the KC, however, for launching a survey of Cavalier breeders to find out why so few of them use the SM scheme. It emailed over 1,300 breeders in November 2015 but the survey had to be extended after the KC, which admitted it was “disappointed”, received only 272 responses. The KC did not publish the final figure. The silence speaks volumes.