Hereditary clear limitation postponed to 2023
The decision to limit the status was made to safeguard against the impact of dogs with incorrect status assignments.
The Kennel Club announced in 2018 that it will limit the assignment of 'hereditary clear' status of registered dogs to two generations, and has now announced that this change will be implemented in January 2023.
The initial decision to restrict hereditary status was made in 2018 by The Kennel Club Board after recommendations from the Dog Health Group, and the decision followed a Kennel Club study. The change was then decided to safeguard against the impact of dogs with an incorrect hereditary clear status on health issues within breeds.
Dogs are given hereditary clear status when they are determined to be free of specific genetic material that is linked to a particular inherited disease, and this status is then assigned to dogs whose parents are known to be clear, either because the parents have been DNA tested as clear, or if they are hereditary clear themselves.
Under the current system, there are a number of reasons that dogs could be given a false hereditary clear status accidentally, including laboratory errors, pedigree errors, or incorrectly recorded percentages. In these instances, the inaccuracies would likely not be noticed immediately – instead, several generations later the dogs descended from the one with the incorrect status would produce affected puppies.
The research undertaken by The Kennel Club analysed the risks that face a population following an incorrect hereditary clear status assignment, and the research found that the rate of dogs with a false status could rise a large amount over a small number of generations, especially with common genetic conditions.
In order to reduce the knock-on effect of potential false hereditary clear status assignments, The Kennel Club will limit the hereditary clear status to two generations only from January 2023, unless lineage is verified by DNA parentage profiling recorded by The Kennel Club.
The limitation was originally schedule to come in to effect in January 2022, but due to development work needed, this has now been postponed to 2023, in order to make the hereditary clear status as effective as possible.
With Strangles Awareness Week just around the corner (5-11 May), vets are being encouraged to share a survey about the disease with their horse-owning clients.
