A health result that exists only in your own records changes nothing for the breed — and in most breeds the gap between what breeders privately know and what the registers can show is wide enough to hide a trend entirely.
The most important first
- Registers differ in what they publish automatically: normal results are often public by default, while abnormal results may be published only if the owner agrees.
- A certification status tells you which tests were carried out and published, not that the results were good.
- The fear that one reported diagnosis will damage a kennel is real, but undisclosed results are the mechanism by which a breed deteriorates without anyone being able to show it.
- Data about a dog you no longer own involves another person’s information, and the rules for that differ between countries — see Dog breeding laws and regulations.
- Nothing can be reported that was not first written down; your own records are the raw material. See Record-keeping and documentation for breeders.
Why withheld results are a mechanism, not just a gap
Selection against a disorder depends on knowing which dogs are affected and which dogs are related to them. A breeder who knows privately that a combination produced an affected puppy can avoid repeating it, but nobody else can, and that dog’s half-siblings, offspring and future mates are chosen by other people working from a record which does not contain the information. The same combination is made again elsewhere, and the breed learns nothing from a case that was in fact known.
This is not only a moral argument. Researchers who built breeding values for hip dysplasia found that because submission is voluntary, and owners tend to send in the films they are happy with, the resulting estimates drift toward looking better than reality. Their recommendation was that breed societies build a culture of submitting every result. Withholding a poor result does not just hide one dog; it shifts the numbers every breeder in the breed relies on.
The FCI’s international breeding strategies put this plainly in recommending that screening results should be available in open registries, on the reasoning that results are only useful if they can inform the selection and pairing of breeding dogs. That is a statement about infrastructure rather than about morality. A register holding only the favorable half of the results cannot support a breeding decision, because every dog in it looks much the same.
It is also why the objection that your own numbers are too small to matter misses the point. A single kennel’s results are too few to demonstrate anything alone, which is precisely the reason they belong in a shared dataset rather than a private notebook. Health databases and interpreting results covers how those datasets are read once they exist.
What registers publish, and what they leave to you
The practical fact to grasp is that publication is often not automatic. The Orthopedic Foundation for Animals states that normal results from submitted data are included in the public domain automatically, while for abnormal results the owner is given the choice of whether the information is reported publicly. For preliminary hip and elbow evaluations, results are posted only where the owner initialed the authorization to release all results, abnormal ones included. The OFA recommends full disclosure, but the default behavior of the system is that the uncomfortable result is the one which quietly does not appear.
Other arrangements work differently. The CHIC program requires that a dog be screened for every disease the breed’s parent club recommends and that all results be released into the public domain, and it is explicit that a CHIC number does not imply normal results — only that the required tests were done and made public. The Royal Kennel Club’s Health Test Results Finder makes available the DNA test results and screening scheme grades which the club records for a registered dog. Outside the UK and US the rules differ again: in Dogs Australia’s hip and elbow scheme the radiologist enters results directly into the national database, and the Finnish Kennel Club’s breeding strategy (2013–2016) lets owners decide whether a dog’s data is public or used for statistics only.
The lesson is that you cannot assume your register behaves like someone else’s. Before submitting anything, establish whether publication is the default, whether consent is required, and whether that consent is given once or result by result — and expect the answer to differ by country, by register and sometimes by individual test.
The decision you actually have to make
Because abnormal results are frequently opt-in, reporting one is an act rather than an omission. Somebody has to tick a box, sign a release or send a form, and the person who does it is usually the person with least to gain from it in the short term. This is where most data is lost, and it is worth being honest about why.
The fear is specific and not irrational: a published diagnosis is searchable, permanent and attached to a kennel name, while breeders who report nothing look cleaner by comparison. The corollary is less comfortable. The apparent cleanliness of a kennel’s public record is partly a measure of how much it has chosen not to publish, and buyers and breed health coordinators who know the material increasingly read it that way. A record showing a reported problem alongside what was done about it reads as a record that is being kept.
It helps to separate the result from the judgment. A screening grade or a diagnosis is a fact about one dog at one point in time; what it means for a program is a different question, taken up in Evaluating breeding stock. Reporting the fact does not commit you to anybody else’s conclusion about it.
Where results go besides the official register
The official register is not the only destination, and in many breeds it is not the most informative one. Breed clubs run health surveys, breed health coordinators collect case reports, and research groups recruit affected and unaffected dogs for the studies which eventually produce the test your breed does not yet have. Several of these routes accept information that no formal scheme covers: a condition with no screening program, an age at death, a cause of death, a problem diagnosed clinically rather than graded.
When a dog is diagnosed with something that has no screening scheme, ask the diagnosing vet to put the diagnosis in writing, including how it was confirmed. A breed club survey or health database can only use a report it can trust, and “the vet thought it might be” is hard to count. Regular breed health surveys and open registries such as CHIC are where these reports do the most good.
That matters because the conditions worth worrying about in a breed are often the ones with no official test. Reporting an unscreenable case to the breed club is sometimes the only way it enters the breed’s evidence base at all, and it is the kind of accumulation which eventually justifies a research project or a new scheme. Health screening schemes for dogs describes how a scheme comes to exist in the first place.
Dogs that live with other people
Most of the health data a breeder can report concerns dogs belonging to somebody else. That changes what you are able to do. The result is about the dog, but the record usually involves the owner, and in many jurisdictions the owner’s information is subject to data protection rules as well as to whatever you agreed with them. The requirements differ substantially between countries and are not something to work out from a template — see Dog breeding laws and regulations for where to look and whom to ask.
What works in practice is settling it early rather than at the moment you need it. If you tell buyers at handover that you will ask about health across the dog’s life, and that results may be reported to the breed club or a register, and you have their agreement in writing, you are not negotiating permission years later while a family is dealing with a sick dog. Where an owner would rather not be identified, most registers and surveys can accept a result attached to the dog rather than a narrative attached to the household.
What you may say about another breeder’s dog
Reporting your own dog’s result and publishing somebody else’s are different acts, and confusing the two has done more damage in breed communities than silence has. An affected puppy implicates both parents and therefore another breeder’s dog, and the sound route is through the register, the health scheme or the breed health coordinator — the mechanisms which exist to aggregate exactly this kind of information — rather than through public discussion of a named dog you do not own.
Telling the owner of the other parent directly, early and privately is part of it. They have a decision to make about their own dog and cannot make it on information they do not have. That conversation is easier when your own record is open, which is one of the less obvious returns on reporting your own results first.
Making it a routine rather than a repeated decision
A reporting decision taken case by case, under pressure, with the result in front of you, will tend toward non-disclosure. A decision taken once, in advance, as a standing rule about what your kennel publishes, does not have to be taken again. Writing that rule down — which results go where, within what period, and who sends them — turns a recurring moral question into an administrative step.
The rule only works if the underlying records support it, which is why reporting belongs in the same system as the rest of your documentation rather than in a separate effort of will. Dates, diagnoses, who confirmed them and which dog they belong to all have to be retrievable years later. Population genetics for breeders sets out what the aggregated version of all this eventually makes possible.
In practice
A breeder in a numerically small breed receives a message from the owner of a five-year-old bitch describing a diagnosis for which the breed has no screening scheme. The breeder records the diagnosis, the age at onset and the confirming clinic in the dog’s record, reports it to the breed health coordinator with the owner’s written agreement, and contacts the owner of the sire privately the same week. Two years later three further cases have been reported from other litters, two of them sharing an ancestor four generations back, and the breed club has enough to approach a research group. Nothing in the breeder’s own material was sufficient to show anything on its own; the reporting was what made the pattern visible.
(Illustrative, composite scenario.)
Work on it
A few minutes here will teach you more than re-reading the article.
Ask yourself
- Is there a health result in my own records from the last five years which has never been reported anywhere, and what stopped me?
- Does my register publish abnormal results by default, or only with my explicit consent?
- If a buyer rang tomorrow with a diagnosis, would I know who to report it to and what I had agreed with that buyer about doing so?
Find out & check
- Look up two of your own dogs in whichever public register your breed uses, and compare what is shown there with what is in your own records.
Do one thing
- Write one standing rule for your kennel stating what you report, to whom, and within what period, and keep it where your records are kept.
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Sources & further reading
- Orthopedic Foundation for Animals — OFA Policies. ofa.org
- Orthopedic Foundation for Animals — CHIC Program. ofa.org
- Fédération Cynologique Internationale — FCI International Breeding Strategies. fci.be
- Royal Kennel Club — Health Test Results Finder. royalkennelclub.com
- Wilson et al. (2013), PLOS ONE — Estimated Breeding Values for Canine Hip Dysplasia Radiographic Traits in a Cohort of Australian German Shepherd Dogs. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Jerold S. Bell, DVM (Tufts, via VIN) — Small Population Breeds and Issues of Genetic Diversity. vin.com
- The Finnish Kennel Club — Breeding Strategy. kennelliitto.fi (2013–2016 strategy)
- Dogs Australia — CHEDS (Canine Hip and Elbow Dysplasia Scheme). dogsaustralia.org.au
Where evidence is limited, recommendations rest on established practice and expert judgment, and may be updated as knowledge develops. Register policies on publication and consent are revised from time to time and differ between countries, schemes and individual tests, so confirm the current terms with the register itself rather than relying on what is described here.
Next steps
- Read next: Health databases and interpreting results.
- Related: Dog breeding laws and regulations.
- Return to the area hub: Closing the loop: follow-up and the next generation.