The Curly Coated Retriever had one good year

Most of what we write about rare breeds is a slow story told in single digits — a breeding mare here, an effective population size there, numbers that move by twos and threes across a decade. The Curly Coated Retriever gave the Kennel Club a headline instead.

The year the numbers moved

In August 2023 the Kennel Club announced that Curly Coated Retriever registrations had risen roughly fivefold against the year before — forty-five puppies registered by that point in the year, against seventy-three for the whole of 2022, and against a low of fifty-three back in 2017. Bill Lambert, speaking for the Kennel Club at the time, put it plainly: fashion and visibility shape which dogs get bred, as much for the Curly as for anything else, and the breed had simply fallen out of both — a "forgotten breed" standing next to a Labrador that everyone already knows.

The Curly is on the Kennel Club's Vulnerable Native Breed list for exactly this reason: any breed averaging three hundred or fewer puppy registrations a year in the UK qualifies, and the Curly has never been close to that number in the two decades of records we can find. Seventy-nine in 2002. Eighty-two in 2005. Sixty-two in 2011, then seventy-one, then a rise to a hundred and eighteen by 2013. It is a breed that moves in small, uneven steps, which is exactly why 2023's jump stood out — and exactly why a single good year is a fact worth being honest about rather than a trend worth declaring.

The first retriever

The Curly's own claim, and it's a reasonable one, is to be the oldest of the retriever breeds — first recorded in England in the early 1800s, recognised alongside the Wavy-Coated Retriever (now the Flat-Coat) as one of the first two retriever breeds the Kennel Club acknowledged, with a breed club founded in 1896 and a standard set in 1913. The distinctive coat, a thick mass of small tight curls without an undercoat, is generally attributed to English Water Spaniel ancestry crossed with early Labrador-type retrievers, with a dash of Poodle further back for tightness of curl and the waterproofing that mattered to a gamekeeper's dog working a cold retrieve. It was built to be a working dog first, in other words, long before anyone thought about registering it as anything else — the same order of priorities we keep coming back to in why heritage breeds are worth building for.

What one good year doesn't prove

We'd like to write that the Curly's story has a clean shape — decline, headline, recovery — but the honest version is messier. A single year of forty-five-plus registrations, reported partway through 2023, doesn't tell us whether the breed has found a new, higher floor or simply had one unusually good litter season on top of a small base where a handful of extra litters shows up as a dramatic percentage. We don't have the figures to say which, and we'd rather say that plainly than borrow a three-year-old headline as if it settles the question. What we can say is that the breed remains on the Vulnerable list in 2025, alongside thirty-eight others, which means whatever 2023 was, it wasn't yet enough to move the number that actually matters.

Where we've started

We wrote to the Curly Coated Retriever Club this week — the same light-touch introduction we send to any breed club: no ask for a members' list, no obligation, and if a breeder would rather not be listed, one email takes it down. It's a genuinely small breed with a genuinely small number of people keeping it going, which is exactly the situation where a bit of extra visibility for the right buyers can matter more than it would for a breed that doesn't need the help.

We're at the start of that conversation, not the end of it. But a breed whose own registration numbers can jump fivefold in a year, for reasons that are more about public attention than about the dogs themselves, seemed worth a proper look before we count on it happening again.

If you breed Curlies, or you sit on the Club's committee and would rather we heard it from you than found it ourselves, the address is info@genovaq.co.uk.

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Sources

• Bill Lambert, quoted in "The Curly-Coated Retriever comeback: Adorable dog breed on the verge of EXTINCTION is making a return to Britain", Daily Mail, August 2023
• Vulnerable British and Irish native breeds competition returns in 2025, The Kennel Club
• Vulnerable dog breeds of the United Kingdom — historical registration tables, Wikipedia, citing Kennel Club breed statistics
• History of the Curly Coated Retriever, Curly Coated Retriever Club

— Rene