Following the
announcement that The Kennel Club will limit the assignment of “hereditary
clear” status of registered dogs to two generations, the organisation has
announced that this change is now set to be implemented as of January 2023.
The decision to
restrict hereditary status was made by The Kennel Club Board in 2018 on the
recommendation of the Dog Health Group, and followed a Kennel Club study,
published in the journal of Canine Genetics and Epidemiology. This change was
put forward to safeguard against the impact that dogs with an incorrect “hereditary clear” status could have on health issues within a breed.
Hereditary clear status is given to dogs that
are determined to be free of specific genetic material linked to a particular
inherited disease. The Kennel Club’s registration system assigns a dog this
status if their parents are known to be clear, either because they have both
been DNA tested as clear, or because they are hereditary clear themselves.
Dogs could be mistakenly given a false
hereditary clear status for a number of reasons; for example if there has been
a failure of laboratory protocols, pedigree errors or incorrectly recorded
parentage. In these instances it is unlikely that the inaccuracies would be
noticed immediately, but rather that several generations later many dogs
throughout the breed descended from the individual with the original incorrect
status will also have erroneous hereditary status, and the well-intended mating
of two such apparently hereditary clear dogs risks producing affected puppies.
The Kennel Club research analysed the risks
faced by a population following the incorrect assignment of hereditary status
and determined that the rate of dogs with false hereditary clear status could
rise considerably over a fairly small number of generations, particularly for
genetic conditions that are more common.
To reduce the knock-on effect of these errors,
and the risk of unintentionally breeding affected puppies, The Kennel Club will
be ensuring that from January 2023, the “hereditary clear status” will be
limited to two generations, unless lineage is verified by DNA parentage
profiling recorded by The Kennel Club. DNA parentage profiling is a separate
procedure to screening DNA for disease causing mutations, but can often be
carried out at the same time by the same laboratory.
Originally
scheduled to come into effect in January 2022, this has now been postponed to
2023 to allow for necessary development work to be completed and in order for “hereditary clear” status to be as effective and reliable as possible.
