What doesn't travel when the breeder is three thousand miles away
The same outreach email went out this week to a stud farm in the Welsh Marches and to a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel breeder outside Chicago, word for word identical but for the kennel's name.
Most mornings this autumn start the same way, wherever in the world the names on that day's list happen to be from. A spreadsheet gets built from a breed society's own directory, each entry checked against our sent folder so nobody is written to twice, and then the emails go out. The UK pipeline, worked for the better part of a year now, has reached most of the native and rare breed societies worth reaching, so increasingly the names come from further afield — a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel breeder outside Chicago this week, a stud farm in the Marches last month, a kennel club referral contact in Ontario the week before that.
Why we didn't write a different email for America
The obvious move, expanding into a new country, is to localise everything: different letterhead, different reassurances, a line about understanding how things are done over there. We decided against it, for a reason that only became clear once we tried the alternative — we don't actually know yet what's different, and guessing would be worse than saying nothing.
What a breeder outside Chicago wants to know before listing a litter is, as far as fifty-odd replies have told us so far, exactly what a breeder in Powys wants to know: who is asking, what it costs, what they are agreeing to, and whether they can take it down again with one email. So the template stays the same, with a single line personalised to the kennel and the breed, because the question underneath it hasn't moved an inch.
What does change
The directories do. A British breed society tends to run one list, centrally, and expects you to find it. American breeders are more often reachable through their breed's AKC parent club — there is one for nearly every recognised breed, and many run a full referral directory with published contacts rather than a gatekeeper you have to write to first. Canada, Australia and New Zealand each have their own version of the same structure, run by their national kennel bodies rather than the AKC's. None of it is harder to find than the UK equivalent. It is simply a different shape, and learning that shape, breed by breed and country by country, is most of what "going worldwide" has actually meant in practice.
The other thing that changes is patience with the obvious. We open nearly every email to an American breeder assuming nothing about how their side of this works, because assuming is exactly the habit that produces the embarrassing mistake — writing to the wrong person, at the wrong address, about the wrong kennel, because a row in a spreadsheet got out of step with the one above it. It happened to us this week, on a morning when we were moving faster than we should have been, and the breeder who actually owned that kennel had to be written to a second time, properly, once we noticed. The fix wasn't a new process. It was slowing down enough to check each line against the one it came from before it went out.
Why the standard can't bend by postcode
A verified listing on GenoVaq means a specific, narrow set of things: the person is who they say they are, the address checks out, a vet confirms the relationship, the breeding is registered within the structures of the breed. None of those facts gets softer because the breeder is further from our office. If anything the opposite is true — a buyer in Ohio looking at a kennel in Yorkshire, or a buyer in Yorkshire looking at a kennel in Ohio, has fewer ways of their own to sanity-check what they're being told than someone who could simply drive over and see the place. The further the listing travels, the more weight the verification has to carry on its own, not less.
That is the argument against ever building a lighter-touch version of the badge for breeders overseas, which is a shortcut we have been offered, informally, more than once as a way to grow the international pipeline faster. We've said no each time. A verified listing that means one thing in Yorkshire and a slightly looser thing in Ohio isn't a standard — it's a disclosure nobody reads.
What we're still finding out
Some of this will keep changing as the list grows. We don't yet know which countries' health-testing schemes map cleanly onto the fields we ask every listing to fill in, and which will need a genuinely new field rather than a translated label on an old one. We don't know whether the breeders who reply fastest from a new country are representative of that country's breeders generally, or just the ones most comfortable with an unfamiliar email landing in their inbox. Both of those are questions we'll only be able to answer with more replies, from more places, which is most of why the list keeps growing rather than settling on a country and stopping.
What doesn't need finding out, because we decided it before any of this started, is what the badge promises. That part travels unchanged, to Illinois, to Ontario, to wherever the next list comes from.
Sources
Related: what verified breeder actually means, why we wrote to the societies first
— Rene
Pieces along the same line
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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.