Goals written before you had any results were, by necessity, assumptions — and the point of following a generation through to adulthood is to find out which of those assumptions survived contact with real dogs.
The most important first
- Separate the two questions before you start: was the goal wrong, or was the method wrong? They call for opposite responses.
- Most traits worth having as goals move over generations, not over litters, so a revision driven by one disappointing litter is usually noise.
- A goal you can no longer state as something measurable has already stopped working, whatever it says on the page.
- Dropping a goal you have invested years in is the hardest and often the most useful revision available to you.
- A revision belongs back in the original document, not in a separate note — see Setting breeding goals and the Breeding goals worksheet.
What a revision is for
Revising goals is not an admission that the first version was careless. It is the only mechanism by which a breeding program learns anything, and the structures built at breed level work the same way. The Kennel Club’s breed health and conservation plans aim to help identify and prioritize each breed’s health-related breeding goals, and are designed to include monitoring and review so that ongoing health needs can be accommodated. The Finnish Kennel Club’s system places the same function in each breed’s own written strategy, which records what the breed is monitoring, from longevity to litter size; the Finnish Kennel Club’s general breeding strategy (2013–2016) states its own validity period.
Your own goals need the same treatment for the same reason. A goal is a hypothesis about what matters in your dogs and what you can move; the generation you have just followed is the test. The difference between a program and a sequence of litters is whether that test is ever read.
A revision is therefore a scheduled piece of work with an output, not a mood. It asks four questions in order: what did I set out to do, what happened, what explains the gap, and what changes — the goal, the method, or neither.
Goals and methods are not the same problem
Almost every unproductive revision comes from confusing these two. A goal states what you are breeding for: sound hips, a stable dog that recovers from a fright, a bitch who whelps without assistance, working ability that holds up in the field. A method is how you pursue it: which dogs you use, which tests you require, how you socialize, which lines you combine, how many litters you take from a bitch.
When the results disappoint, the method is the more likely culprit, and it is the cheaper thing to change. If you wanted calm dogs and got reactive ones, the question is first whether your selection criteria for temperament were specific enough, whether you assessed the parents or only liked them, and whether the homes received dogs they could manage. Only when several plausible methods have been tried does the goal come under suspicion.
The reverse error is also common: keeping a goal nominally while quietly abandoning the method that served it, so that the document still says longevity and the breeding decisions no longer involve any information about age at death. That is not a program with a longevity goal. It is a program with a sentence about longevity.
Reading your results against what you set out to do
The comparison has to be made against the original wording, which is why it needs to have been written down. Vague goals cannot be assessed, and a goal that was never measurable cannot have failed — it simply never did any work. Where your goals were specific, the evaluation is mostly arithmetic: you said you wanted hip scores below the breed average and you have five scored offspring, four of which are.
Where they were not specific, the revision’s real product is a better-written goal rather than a different one. “Improve temperament” becomes “produce dogs that settle in a public place by eighteen months, assessed by the owner and by me”. That is not a softer goal; it is one you can be wrong about, which is the only kind that can be revised on evidence.
Be careful about the direction of the inference. A small number of offspring, assessed in homes you do not control, with the responding owners self-selected, will tell you about the clearest effects and nothing about the subtle ones. Record-keeping and documentation for breeders is where that material begins; the work of following up is to make it a little less biased, not to make it sufficient.
When the goal itself was wrong
Some goals turn out to be wrong rather than unmet. A trait proves to have very little heritable component in your breed, so selection moves it slowly or not at all. A trait proves to conflict with another you value more, and the conflict was not visible until you had dogs embodying both. Or it turns out to have been a proxy for something that can be selected for directly.
There is also the goal that was borrowed. Breeders inherit priorities from the breed’s show culture, from a mentor, or from the dogs they first admired, and some of those priorities do not survive examination against the breed’s actual function or the lives the dogs lead. Abandoning one of these is uncomfortable in proportion to how long it has been held, which is a poor guide to whether it was right. The AVMA’s position on inherited disorders encourages veterinarians, breeders and breed associations to consider the health and welfare implications of breed standards and breeding decisions, and discourages breeding animals with deleterious characteristics that require surgical correction or lifelong management — a reminder that a long-held aesthetic goal is not exempt from that examination.
Reordering priorities without destabilizing the program
Most revisions are changes of rank rather than additions or deletions, and rank is where goals bite. Everyone’s list contains health, temperament, type and function; the program is defined by which of them yields when they conflict.
Moving something up the order has consequences you should name before you commit. Promoting hip health above a conformation detail means you will decline some matings you would previously have made, and your dogs may become less competitive in a ring that rewards the detail. That is a real cost, and deciding to bear it deliberately is different from being surprised by it in two years.
Equally, a program whose priorities are reshuffled every year has no priorities. Health improvement programs operate on long timescales: an analysis of hip and elbow screening in six UK pedigree breeds found measurable decline in hip scores across roughly a quarter of a century, with hip breeding values improving in all six breeds (and elbow values in all but the Newfoundland), and the largest gains in hip scores in the Newfoundland, the breed that started worst. A US analysis of screening data from 60 breeds over more than four decades points the same way: patient selection on screening results works, but slowly, and at a different pace in each breed. If that is the scale over which a population-level trait moves, a goal in your own program deserves several generations before you conclude it has failed.
How often, and on what trigger
Two rhythms work together. One is scheduled: a full review at roughly the length of a generation in your breed rather than once a calendar year, with a lighter annual pass to check that the document still matches what you are doing. Breed-level strategies are often written with an explicit validity period for the same reason — the Finnish Kennel Club’s general breeding strategy states its own — and your own version benefits from a date on it.
The other rhythm is triggered. A diagnosis in your own breeding, a new screening scheme or DNA test in the breed, a change in the breed’s population structure, a bitch you planned a decade around turning out not to breed — each is a reason to open the document early. Triggered revisions are riskier because they happen under emotion, which is an argument for making them in two stages: record the event and your immediate reading of it, then revise a month later.
When the trigger is a health event in one of your dogs, such as a diagnosis or a bitch who needed help whelping twice, start with your veterinarian’s assessment of that dog. Whether she should be bred again is a veterinary question first. A history of difficult births is one of the situations in which vets plan an elective cesarean or advise retirement from breeding. Only once you have that answer can you decide what it means for the goals.
A newly launched DNA test can feel like a reason to rewrite everything. Before it moves a goal, check that the test has been validated in your breed. Veterinary geneticists stress that a variant can cause disease in one breed and not in another.
Writing the new version and leaving the old one visible
Keep the previous version. A revision history is the only way to see the shape of your own thinking, and it protects you from the quiet drift in which goals are gradually rewritten to match whatever the dogs happened to do. Date each version, and write a line or two about what changed and why; in ten years that line will be more useful than the goal itself.
Then take the revised version where planning happens. Goals that live in a separate reflective document do not influence matings; goals that sit at the front of the breeding plan do. A long-term breeding program covers how the two documents relate, and Setting breeding goals is where the next version gets written — this time with a generation of your own data behind it rather than assumption.
In practice
A breeder reviews a goal set eight years earlier: a specific head expression admired in the breed. Across three litters it was achieved in most offspring, and in the same period two dogs were diagnosed with a condition for which the breed has no screening scheme and one bitch needed assistance whelping twice. The breeder keeps the head goal but moves it below whelping ability and the new condition, writes both of the latter as measurable criteria, records that the head goal now yields when it conflicts, and dates the revision. No goal was deleted; the order changed, and so did the matings that followed.
(Illustrative, composite scenario.)
Work on it
A few minutes here will teach you more than re-reading the article.
Ask yourself
- For each goal on my list, can I name a mating in the last four years that it decided? If not, is it a goal or a sentiment?
- Where my results disappointed me, is the likelier explanation the goal or the method I used to pursue it?
- Which goal would I find hardest to drop, and how much of that difficulty is about the dogs rather than about me?
Find out & check
- Find your breed’s current breed-specific strategy or health plan and check whether its stated priorities have changed since you last wrote your own.
Do one thing
- Open your goals document, add today’s date as a new version, and rewrite the vaguest goal on the list as something that could be shown to be wrong.
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Sources & further reading
- The Kennel Club — Kennel Club launching Breed Health and Conservation Plans. royalkennelclub.com
- Wiles, B. M., Llewellyn-Zaidi, A. M., Evans, K. M., O’Neill, D. G. and Lewis, T. W. (2017), Canine Genetics and Epidemiology 4:8 — Large-scale survey to estimate the prevalence of disorders for 192 Kennel Club registered breeds. doi.org
- The Finnish Kennel Club — Breeding Strategy. kennelliitto.fi (2013–2016 strategy)
- James, H. K., McDonnell, F. and Lewis, T. W. — Effectiveness of Canine Hip Dysplasia and Elbow Dysplasia Improvement Programs in Six UK Pedigree Breeds. frontiersin.org
- Oberbauer, A. M., Keller, G. G. and Famula, T. R. (2017), PLOS ONE — Long-term genetic selection reduced prevalence of hip and elbow dysplasia in 60 dog breeds. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- American Veterinary Medical Association — Inherited disorders in responsible breeding of companion animals. avma.org
- WSAVA Hereditary Disease Committee — The Role of Health-Conscious Breeding and Genetic Testing. wsava.org
- Cornell Richard P. Riney Canine Health Center — Dystocia in dogs: understanding difficult births. vet.cornell.edu
Where evidence is limited, recommendations rest on established practice and expert judgment, and may be updated as knowledge develops. There is no research establishing how often a breeder should revise their goals; the intervals suggested here follow from generation length and from the way breed-level strategies and health plans are reviewed, and the structures themselves differ between countries and kennel clubs.
Next steps
- Read next: Setting breeding goals.
- Related: A long-term breeding program · Making the next generation’s breeding decisions.
- Return to the area hub: Closing the loop: follow-up and the next generation.