The rarest native gundog has fifteen puppies a year

Fifteen Sussex Spaniel puppies were registered with the Royal Kennel Club in the whole of 2025. Not fifteen litters — fifteen dogs, across the entire country, in twelve months. The year before it was twenty-four. In a breed of any size that would be an odd year. In the Sussex Spaniel it is the continuation of a line on a graph that has been running the same direction, with the odd flat patch, since long before anyone thought to fund a project to do something about it.

Tomorrow, at the Sussex Spaniel Association's Championship Show in Coventry, a research team starts trying to.

A dog built for one county's mud

The Sussex Spaniel is native to exactly what its name says. Augustus Elliott Fuller began breeding them at Rose Hill, near Brightling in East Sussex, from around 1795, working with the Weald's heavy clay, dense undergrowth and thick hedgerows rather than against them: low to the ground, powerfully built, slow and deliberate rather than fast, bred to push through cover a lighter dog would go around. The colour — a distinctive golden liver, gleaming rather than dull — is unique to the breed and was fixed early and deliberately.

The detail that tells you the most about what the breed was actually for is the bark. The Sussex is the only spaniel bred to give tongue: to bay or bark once it strikes a scent, so a hunter working blind through undergrowth too thick to see a dog in knows exactly where the game has gone and where the dog is. Every other spaniel was bred toward silence on the scent. The Sussex was bred against it, on purpose, for a landscape where silence was no use to anyone.

It was exhibited at the Crystal Palace show in 1862, was among the breeds present when the Kennel Club itself was formed in 1873, and was one of the first ten breeds admitted to the American Kennel Club's stud book in 1884. This is not a breed with a thin history. It is one of the oldest identifiable gundog lines in the country. What it does not have, and has not reliably had for most of the last century, is numbers.

Ten dogs, one breeder, and everything since

The Sussex nearly did not survive the Second World War. Breeding was actively discouraged for the duration, feed was scarce, and the breed's numbers, never large, fell close to nothing. What kept it alive was one breeder, Joy Freer, who continued to keep and breed Sussex Spaniels through the war years more or less alone. By 1947 the Kennel Club recorded ten registrations in the entire country. Ten.

Every Sussex Spaniel alive today, by the breed's own account, descends from the dogs Joy Freer kept through that decade. That is not a colourful detail. It is a genetic fact with consequences that are still being measured: a breed of any size, put through a bottleneck of a handful of animals, comes out the other side with a small fraction of the diversity it went in with, and no amount of subsequent population growth gets that diversity back. It can only be managed from where it now stands.

The recovery after 1947 was real but never complete. The Kennel Club designated the Sussex a Vulnerable Native Breed in 2004 — the category for British and Irish breeds registering fewer than 300 puppies a year — by which point that was already an easy bar to clear rather than a warning of one approaching. Fifty-six were registered in 2008. The number a Sussex Spaniel owner would recognise as a good year, in living memory, is still under a hundred. Twenty-four in 2024 and fifteen in 2025 is the breed doing what it has mostly done since 1947: holding on, at a size where every individual dog is a meaningful fraction of the whole.

What a shallow gene pool costs a Sussex

None of this is only a matter of sentiment about a handsome, characterful dog — and the Sussex is both of those things, by every account an easy-going, faintly stubborn, thoroughly likeable family dog as much as a working one, good enough at both to have taken Best in Show at Westminster in 2009 at ten years old, the oldest dog ever to do so. It is also a breed that carries a health picture consistent with a small, closed population: a high rate of hip dysplasia — surveys have placed it among the worst-affected tenth of all breeds tested — a recognised cluster of congenital heart defects, and whelping difficulty common enough that the breed is routinely described as hard to breed, with caesarean delivery frequently needed. None of that is unique to the Sussex. It is what you would predict, and what breeders of it have lived with for decades, in a population this size descended from this few founders.

We have written before about the arithmetic behind that: in what an effective population size actually tells you, the point that a stud book's headline registration figure and its actual genetic breadth are two different numbers, and the second is usually smaller and harder to see. We have also written about the instinct, wrong in a population this size, to simply remove anything a test flags — see why rare breeds don't breed the carriers out — because in a breed this narrow, the thing a test finds and the diversity the breed has left to work with are very often the same limited pool of dogs.

What the Sussex has not had, until now, is a systematic look at how much diversity actually remains and where it sits.

A project built to reach most of a breed in one pass

That is what starts tomorrow. The Royal Kennel Club, the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute and the Sussex Spaniel Association have set out to collect DNA from 125 to 150 Sussex Spaniels — the RKC's own description is "as much of the accessible living registered population as possible" — and set the genetic results against the Club's pedigree records to build what it calls an evidence-based population management strategy. The project has £18,000 in funding through the Roslin Institute's Pump-Priming Scheme, and both partners are explicit that they intend it as a proof of concept: a method that, if it works for a breed this small, could be extended to other breeds with the same problem.

It is worth sitting with what that sampling target actually implies. A project that can plausibly aim to test somewhere close to half of a breed's living registered population, in a single funded push, is only possible because the breed is this small. That is the same fact stated as an opportunity rather than a threat: most rare-breed genetics work has to sample and extrapolate, because reaching the whole population is not realistic. Here, reaching most of it is the plan.

"The project is fantastic news for the preservation of this historic breed," said Ann Moon, chair of the Sussex Spaniel Association, when the project was announced in August. "By joining forces with the Roslin Institute and the RKC, the Sussex Spaniel Association together with the Sussex Spaniel community, are taking a critical step in tackling the genetic and breeding challenges facing the UK's rarest native gundog."

Dr Pau Navarro, the project's lead scientist at Roslin, put the wider ambition plainly: "Our insights will also be valuable in supporting rare breeds across many species of animals." Charlotte McNamara, the RKC's chief canine wellbeing and engagement officer, framed it as building on something the Club has held for a long time without the tools to use fully — "the RKC has a long history of maintaining pedigree records... advances in genetic technology now give us an exciting opportunity to build on this important benefit of RKC registration."

Sampling opens on site at the Sussex Spaniel Association's Championship Show in Coventry tomorrow, 26 September, where owners can have dogs tested and meet the researchers directly. A postal option follows for those who cannot attend.

What this should mean for anyone buying one

For a Sussex Spaniel litter, the practical use of this work is a few years off — it is a research project, not a test any single breeder can order yet. But the direction of travel matters to anyone thinking about the breed now. A population management strategy built from most of the living breed's actual DNA, rather than from pedigree paper alone, is a genuinely different and better basis for deciding which matings help the breed and which quietly narrow it further — the distinction we have tried to draw before between what a pedigree can promise and what a DNA health panel actually tests for. When results start to inform real breeding decisions, a listing worth trusting will be able to say so, specifically, rather than gesturing at a general reputation for care.

In the meantime, the count that matters is the plain one. Fifteen puppies in a year is not a statistic that leaves much room for error. It leaves exactly as much room as a breed this size has always had, which is to say: not much, and worth treating that way.

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Sources

• Saving the Sussex Spaniel: vulnerable breed at the heart of pioneering new genetic diversity project — Royal Kennel Club, 24 August 2026
• Sussex spaniel DNA project aims to save rarest native gundog — ShootingUK, 26 August 2026
• About the breed — Sussex Spaniel Association
• Sussex Spaniel — Wikipedia
• Vulnerable dog breeds of the United Kingdom — Wikipedia

— Rene