The breeds with nobody left to write to

There is a task I do at the start of most weeks that I did not expect to become the most instructive part of it. It is entirely unglamorous. I try to find one person, in one breed, who can be written to.

Not a lead. Not a list. A secretary — a named human being with a published address, who holds the paperwork of a breed and would be the correct person to hear from us before any of their members do. On a good morning it takes four minutes. The club has a website, the website has a committee page, the committee page has a role address, and the whole thing is done before the kettle boils.

On other mornings it takes an hour, and the hour tells you something that no registration figure does.

An entry in the public record

Here is one that stopped me this week.

The Lundy Pony Preservation Society, charity number 297119, registered with the Charity Commission on the twenty-ninth of June 1987. Its objects are still there in the register, still in capital letters: to preserve and to improve the standard of breeding of the Braetor Lundy pony for the public benefit.

The activities field reads: Welfare of Lundy ponies. No activities at present.

Then the financial history, five years to March 2011. Total income £260, £261, £266, £267, £267. Total expenditure, every one of those years: nil.

That is not a scandal. It is something quieter and sadder than a scandal. An income of about £265 a year that never moves is not fundraising; it is almost certainly interest accruing on a small deposit that somebody set up in the eighties and nobody has touched since. Nothing was raised. Nothing was spent. Two annual returns went unfiled, and on the ninth of September 2013 the society was removed from the register, reason recorded as: does not operate.

It had become a bank account with a breed's name on it. That is what an institution looks like in its last few years, and it looks like that for a long time before anybody writes it down.

The animals outlive the institution

The part that makes this worth writing about is that the ponies are fine.

There is still a herd on Lundy — small in number, currently running to a single stallion — out on the island as they have been since thirty-four New Forest mares and eight filly foals were landed there in 1928. The island's managers run a sponsorship scheme that pays for winter supplementary feeding, tetanus jabs, hoof trimming and the vet's bills, and sponsors get a newsletter each spring telling them what the herd did last year. It is a genuinely good arrangement and the animals are visibly the better for it.

But a herd with a keeper is not the same thing as a breed with a stud book, and the difference is exactly the thing that is easy to miss from the outside. A keeper looks after the animals that exist now. A society looks after the animals that do not exist yet. It records who was bred to whom and why, it holds the argument about which stallion to use next when the pool is down to a handful, it remembers the mating that was tried in 1994 and quietly not repeated. Sponsorship keeps a pony sound. It does not keep a breed's memory.

When the society goes and the animals stay, everything still looks well for a decade or so. It is the generation after that pays.

What the contact page tells you

Do this exercise across thirty native breeds and a pattern emerges that I now trust more than I trust the numbers.

At one end there are clubs with a proper role address, published plainly, answered within the day by somebody who has clearly been doing it for years. At the other there are pages that list a secretary's name and a mobile number and nothing else; contact forms that relay to an inbox nobody has confirmed is watched; a treasurer's address that is the only route into the entire organisation; a footer recording that the page was last updated a quarter of a century ago; and domains that simply no longer resolve.

I want to be very clear that none of this is a criticism of the volunteers. It is usually the opposite. Behind almost every one of those thin pages is one person, frequently in their seventies, doing the work of a secretariat around a full-time life, for a breed the market has never rewarded them for loving. They are not failing to keep up. They are the only reason there is anything to keep up with.

But the page is still a reading. Registration figures tell you about supply. The contact page tells you about capacity — how many people are left to do the work, and how recently anybody had the time to look at it. A breed producing forty puppies a year with a functioning committee is in a completely different condition from a breed producing forty puppies a year with two exhausted people and a form that goes nowhere. Both look identical in the statistics.

This is the same thought as why we wrote to the societies first, arrived at from the other direction. If the society more or less is the breed, then the state of the society is the state of the breed, and you can read a good deal of it from the outside in about an hour.

What we do when nobody answers

Three rules, and they are not complicated.

We do not construct addresses. If a club publishes only a form, we use the form. If it publishes only a phone number, that is the answer, and we write it down as such rather than guessing at what a secretary's email address probably is. Guessing would work often enough to be tempting, which is precisely why it is a rule and not a preference. A platform that invents contact details for people who did not publish them is not the kind of platform I want to have built.

We do not go around a slow society to reach its members. Slow is not the same as gone. A committee that takes six weeks to reply is a committee that is still there, and the correct response to six weeks is to wait seven.

And when a society has genuinely stopped — the register entry, the dead domain, the twenty-year silence — we build for the breed anyway. Not as a favour, and not as a rescue. It is simply that the breed's need for somewhere honest to be found does not lapse when its committee does. If anything it is sharper, because there is now nobody in the middle to tell a buyer which of the remaining lines is which. That is the case for heritage breeds in its plainest form, and it is why rare breeds cannot simply breed their carriers out the way a numerous breed can. When the pool is small, every decision is permanent, and somebody ought to be keeping the record.

The objects clause

I keep thinking about that line sitting in the register.

To preserve and to improve the standard of breeding of the Braetor Lundy pony for the public benefit. Somebody wrote that into the rules of the society in 1984 and meant it. It stayed on the public record for twenty-six years, describing work that had, for at least the last five of them, cost nobody a single pound because nobody was doing it.

It is still there this morning, which is how I came to read it — while looking for somebody to write to.

If you sit on a committee for a breed we have not reached yet, or you are the last person still holding one together, we would genuinely rather hear from you than find you. The address is info@genovaq.co.uk.

— Rene