Caroline Kisko on Pedigree Health, Exaggeration, and How to Buy a Dog Properly

Based on an original BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour discussion between Caroline Kisko and the vet and author Emma Milne.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrif1RptsFQ

Few subjects in the dog world generate more heat, and less light, than the health of pedigree breeds. The argument tends to collapse into two camps. One side says the pedigree breeding industry is producing sick dogs and should be dismantled. The other side says the critics misunderstand what breed standards are for and dismisses the criticism as ignorance. Neither of those positions is correct, and neither helps the dogs.

What follows is a fuller version of the case Caroline Kisko has made on this subject across her career, including in a memorable Woman's Hour discussion with the vet and author Emma Milne. The piece is written in her voice.

The Criticism Is Not Wrong

Let me start with the part that many people in the breeding world have historically been reluctant to say out loud. The criticism is not wrong.

Some pedigree breeds have, over generations of selective breeding, drifted toward exaggerations that harm the dogs. Backs that are too long over legs that are too short, and the spinal disease that follows. Faces flattened to the point of respiratory difficulty. Skulls bred so small that the brain no longer fits the space provided for it. Ears so long they court chronic infection. Eyes so prominent they injure easily.

These are not invented problems. A vet seeing patients every week sees them. The owners of those patients live with them. To deny the pattern is to defend the indefensible, and worse, to lose the trust of the public whose support pedigree breeding actually needs.

So the starting point of any honest conversation about pedigree health is this. Yes, there is a problem. No, it is not every breed and not every dog. And yes, it is serious enough to warrant real change rather than reassurance.

What the Problem Is, And What It Is Not

The problem is not that breeders are villains. In my experience, no breeder breeds from a dog specifically in order to cause health problems. The conscientious end of the breeding world is full of people who care deeply about their dogs, use the health schemes available to them, and are often producing healthier stock than anything a buyer will find on a free-ads site.

The problem is that breed type and breed health drifted apart over decades, and the mechanisms that should have pulled them back together moved too slowly. Judges in the show ring rewarded the most pronounced version of a breed's defining features. Breeders, sensibly enough, produced more dogs with those features. Buyers, drawn to the look they had seen in magazines and on television, sought them out.

The whole system pointed in one direction, and the dogs paid for it.

Fixing that is not a matter of banning anything. It is a matter of changing what wins, what sells and what the public asks for. All three of those levers move slowly, and all three of them have to move together.

The Accreditation Question

The standard answer offered to worried puppy buyers has long been some version of "go to an accredited breeder." The Kennel Club's Accredited Breeder Scheme was built on that premise. The idea was that buyers should not go to just any breeder. They should go to one who had agreed to use the relevant health schemes for the breed.

I will be honest about a fair criticism of that approach. For years, accreditation required breeders to use the schemes but did not, in every case, require them to pass them. The signal of quality was therefore softer than the public assumed it was. A scheme that signals quality has to actually require quality, or the signal erodes. That bar needed to be higher, and over time it has been raised. It needs to keep rising.

The wider point is that no scheme of this kind will ever do the work on its own. Accreditation can narrow the field. It cannot substitute for a buyer who has done their homework.

Crufts and the Argument About Showing

A separate criticism, often bundled in with the health debate, is that dog shows themselves are bad for dogs. The argument goes that showing offers no benefit to the animal, that the social contact at shows is abnormal because dogs are on leads and cannot interact freely, and that some dogs are visibly stressed by the handling.

I have never accepted that framing, and I want to explain why.

What is abnormal in the life of a modern dog is not the show ring. It is the rest of the week. Many dogs are left at home for most of the day. They are out only for a brief walk. They are no longer welcome in shops or restaurants in most of the country, even where there is no legal bar. They are not socialised with the variety of people, dogs, sounds and surfaces that earlier generations of dogs took for granted. Against that baseline, a well-run show is one of the few places a dog encounters a wide and varied world in a structured way.

There is also a practical reality that critics tend to overlook. No experienced exhibitor wants to show a dog that does not enjoy it. A dog that is anxious or unhappy loses its sparkle in the ring, and a dog without sparkle does not win. The incentive structure of showing, on this narrow point, favours dogs that are genuinely game for the day out.

None of this is a blanket defence of every dog at every show. It is a defence of the premise that showing, properly done, is not the cruelty it is sometimes portrayed as. The more interesting and more useful conversation is about what gets rewarded in the ring, not whether the ring should exist.

What Judges Reward Changes What Gets Bred

The single most powerful lever in pedigree health is, in my view, the judging. Breeders breed toward what wins. If judges consistently reward dogs that are sound in body, free of exaggeration, able to move without wheezing or stumbling, then breeders will produce more of those dogs. If judges reward the opposite, breeders will produce the opposite.

This is why work on judges' training and on breed standards matters so much, even though it sounds bureaucratic from the outside. It is where the change actually compounds. A revised breed standard that quietly removes a reference to "as short a muzzle as possible" or "the more pronounced the better" changes, over a generation, what the breed looks like. Done across many breeds at once, it changes the picture of pedigree breeding as a whole.

How to Buy a Dog Properly

If you are thinking about getting a dog, particularly a pedigree, the single most useful thing I can tell you is this. Find out everything you can about the breed before you go anywhere near a breeder.

That means learning the specific health conditions associated with the breed, by name, and learning how common they are. It means understanding which tests exist for those conditions, and what the results actually mean. It means knowing what the dog was originally bred to do, because the conformation that

suited that purpose is usually the conformation that keeps the dog sound.

When you go to the breeder, go armed with the facts. Ask to see the health test results for both parents. Ask how many litters the dam has had, and how recently. Ask to see the dogs moving, not just standing. Ask the breeder what they would change about the breed if they could, and listen carefully to the answer. A breeder who cannot name a single thing they would improve is a breeder who has stopped thinking about the dogs.

If the breeder cannot answer those questions, or does not want to, that is the answer. Walk away.

The reason this advice works is that it shifts the centre of gravity in the transaction. It puts the buyer in charge. A buyer who knows what hip dysplasia means in a Labrador, what syringomyelia means in a

Cavalier, what brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome means in a Bulldog, is a buyer who cannot be fobbed off with reassurance. A market full of those buyers does more to change breeding practice than any number of well-intentioned schemes.

A Final Thought

The pedigree health debate is often presented as a choice between defending pedigree breeding or condemning it. That framing is wrong. The honest position is that pedigree breeding has produced both wonderful dogs and serious problems, that the problems are concentrated in identifiable exaggerations, and that the route out is the patient and unglamorous work of changing what wins, what sells and what buyers ask for.

The vets who have raised these concerns over the years have generally been right to raise them. The breeders who have quietly improved their stock have generally been right to keep going. The two groups have more in common than the loudest moments of the debate suggest. The dogs benefit when they recognise it.

This post is based on an original BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour discussion between Caroline Kisko, then of the Kennel Club, and the vet and author Emma Milne.