The Clumber Spaniel stud list that publishes its carriers
Ten years of Kennel Club registrations for the Clumber Spaniel — 171, 265, 280, 175, 188, 285, 232, 223, 155, 160 — with the two lowest years at the end of the run.
We spent part of this week reading the Working Clumber Spaniel Society's own pages properly, ahead of writing to the Society and to the stud owners listed on them. The reading took most of a morning and the emails will take ten minutes, which is usually a sign that something on the page is worth passing on.
The Society was founded in 1984 to keep the Clumber a natural working gundog rather than only a show one. It carries Kennel Club registered number 672, and HRH The Princess Royal as its President. None of that is what made me stop. What made me stop was the stud dog page.
Two hundred dogs a year
The Society's own puppy page puts the scale plainly: only around two hundred Clumber Spaniels are registered each year in the UK, show and working bred taken together. Litters are often spoken for before they are born, and breeders keep waiting lists rather than advertisements.
The Kennel Club's vulnerable native breeds table gives the harder version of the same fact. The Clumber's registrations for the last decade run 171 in 2016, 265 in 2017, 280 in 2018, 175 in 2019, 188 in 2020, 285 in 2021, 232 in 2022, 223 in 2023, 155 in 2024 and 160 in 2025. The ten-year average is a little over 213, so the Society's round number is honest. What the round number hides is the shape: the two lowest years of the decade are the two most recent, and the breed has spent the whole period well inside the vulnerable line of 300 rather than anywhere near it.
That is a different picture from the Lancashire Heeler's flat decade, and a different one again from the Suffolk Punch's quiet climb. Two years is not a trend, and 2021's 285 shows how much a single good year moves a number this small. But it is not nothing either.
A population that size changes what a breed can afford to hide. When roughly 160 puppies are registered in a year, every stud dog used is a meaningful fraction of the next generation's genetics. There is no anonymous middle of the distribution to disappear into.
What the page actually prints
Each dog on the Society's stud list appears with a photograph, a kennel name, a date of birth, a county — and then the part most breeds keep in a drawer. Hip score, left and right and total. Elbow score. Eye certificate and the date it was issued. EIC status. PDP1 status. Several entries link the dog's full Embark panel as a PDF, and most link the Kennel Club's own profile for the dog so a reader can check the claim against the registry rather than take the owner's word for it. The Society states that the health information on the page is checked against Kennel Club and owners' records before it goes up.
Set that beside how breeding stock is usually presented to a buyer — "fully health tested", "all clear", a phrase in an advert with nothing behind it — and the difference is not one of degree.
Then there is the entry that matters most. One dog on the list is published with hip and eye results, a clear PDP1 result, and the words that he is an EIC carrier. He is not hidden. He is not quietly dropped from the page. He is advertised at public stud with his carrier status printed under his photograph, next to the rest of his numbers, for any breeder considering him to read before they ring.
Why that is the right decision, not the brave one
EIC is exercise-induced collapse. PDP1 is pyruvate dehydrogenase phosphatase 1 deficiency, sometimes called exercise intolerance syndrome, which shows itself in affected dogs at around a year old. Both are recessive: a dog needs two copies to be affected, and a carrier with one copy is a perfectly healthy animal who will never develop the condition. Both are testable for the price of a cheek swab. In Clumbers and Sussex Spaniels, laboratory estimates put the PDP1 carrier rate at roughly one in five of the population.
One in five. In a breed that registered 160 dogs last year.
That is the arithmetic that makes the instinct to remove every carrier from breeding so dangerous, and it is the argument we have made here before about why rare breeds don't breed the carriers out. Excluding a fifth of a small population in one generation does not eliminate a recessive; it eliminates genetic diversity, and it takes with it whatever else those dogs were carrying that the breed needed — temperament, working ability, hips, the unglamorous things no test scores. A carrier bred to a clear dog cannot produce an affected puppy. The mating is safe. The panic is not.
The Society appears to have reached the same conclusion by a more rigorous route than instinct. Its health advisory panel works with the Kennel Club's genetics centre, and it has taken advice on the use of EIC and PDP1 results from the Animal Health Trust, the Kennel Club, the University of Minnesota and Laboklin. Its published position is that breeding non-carriers in a gene pool this small is genuinely difficult, that pairings should be examined carefully rather than reflexively, and that members are — in its own phrase — "advised, not compelled". Its puppy rules do the necessary hard edge separately: any litter from an EIC carrier parent must be DNA tested before the puppies go to their homes.
That combination is what good practice actually looks like. Publish everything. Refuse to panic. Put the one genuinely non-negotiable rule where it protects the buyer.
Why this is our argument too
We are building a marketplace for verified breeding genetics, and the obvious commercial temptation in that sentence is to sell reassurance — to let "health tested" be the badge and leave the numbers off the page. A stud list maintained by volunteers for a breed of a hundred and sixty dogs a year has already declined that temptation, and it has done so without a platform, a verification badge or a business model behind it.
So the standard is not ours to invent. It is to match. A listing on GenoVaq should tell a reader what the Society's stud page tells them: the scores, the dates, the DNA results, the carrier status where there is one, and a route back to the registry to check it. Anything less is decoration. We have written elsewhere about what good health testing actually looks like and how to use a breed society when you're buying; this week the clearest example of both came from a page we found while looking for email addresses.
If you breed Clumbers, sit on the Society's committee, or would rather we heard the current picture of the breed from you than reconstructed it from published pages, the address is info@genovaq.co.uk.
Sources
- Stud Dogs — Working Clumber Spaniel Society
- Puppies and Older Dogs Available — Working Clumber Spaniel Society
- Health & Breeding — Working Clumber Spaniel Society
- Vulnerable native breeds — The Royal Kennel Club
- Pyruvate dehydrogenase phosphatase 1 deficiency (PDP1) — Laboklin
— Rene
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The GenoVaq journal publishes long-form pieces for breeders and buyers — welfare, health-testing, breeding decisions, marketplace mechanics. New writing every week or two.