What it takes to be licensed to breed, in three countries

Ask a breeder in three different countries what it took to get their dog "approved to breed," and the honest answers will not just differ in detail — they will describe three genuinely different systems, built on three different premises about what proof ought to exist before an animal contributes to the next generation.

Germany's hunting-dog clubs: prove the dog can work, then prove it is sound

For the versatile hunting breeds registered under the JGHV (the Jagdgebrauchshundverband, Germany's umbrella body for gundog testing), breeding certification runs through a ladder of field tests before it runs through a vet.

The first rung, the VJP (Verbands-Jugend-Prüfung), is sat at around a year old and assesses natural ability — tracking, nose work, search pattern, pointing, cooperation with the handler. Buried inside it is a specific, non-negotiable threshold: a dog must score at least "sufficient" for tracking, and the VJP is the only test in the entire ladder where that particular mark can be earned. Fail it, and no later test in the dog's career can retroactively supply it.

Passing the VJP is necessary but not sufficient. A dog also needs HD (hip) and HN (elbow) certification, plus a conformation evaluation at a breed show confirming it meets the standard, before it can actually be certified to breed. The result is a system that treats working ability, physical soundness and type as three separate hurdles, cleared in sequence, with no route round any of them — a stallion who tracks brilliantly but fails his hips is not a breeding stallion, whatever his lineage.

The Netherlands: a health certificate with an expiry date measured in days

Raad van Beheer, the Dutch kennel club, works from the opposite direction. Rather than testing what the dog can do, its foknormen (breeding norms) specify what must already be documented about the dog's body: hip and elbow scores, patellar luxation, an ECVO eye examination, a hearing test for congenital deafness — the exact list set breed by breed, since what matters for a Cavalier is not what matters for a Bull Terrier.

The detail that makes the Dutch system unusually strict is timing. Both parents must meet the relevant standard "op de dekdatum" — on the date of mating itself, not at some earlier point in their lives when they happened to be tested. A dog whose hip score has since been superseded by a breed's tightened threshold, or whose eye certificate has lapsed, does not qualify on the day it matters, however clean its paperwork looked a year before. Puppies from a mating that did not meet the standard on that date simply are not issued a pedigree. Active enforcement of this begins on 1 October 2026 — a matter of days from when this is written — giving breeders a defined runway to get their paperwork in order before the rule has teeth.

Britain: a form, and an incentive that arrived after the requirement didn't

The Royal Kennel Club's current approach is, by comparison, close to the opposite of both. There is no mandatory health test standing between a litter and its registration. What exists instead is a voluntary tiered structure — "good practice" and "best practice" standards, set breed by breed by that breed's own Health Coordinators — that a breeder can meet, partly meet, or ignore.

The incentive for meeting it is visibility, not eligibility: breeders who test to best-practice standard are placed first in the Kennel Club's Find a Puppy search tool, good-practice breeders next, and everyone else — tested or not — still appears, just further down the list. This replaced the Assured Breeder Scheme, which closed at the end of 2024 and had been the flagship compliance badge for two decades; its closure was explicitly framed as a move toward broader encouragement rather than gatekeeping, on the reasoning that most people registering a litter with the Kennel Club do so once, for one litter, and a hard gate would simply push them outside the registration system altogether rather than toward better practice inside it.

Three premises, not three levels of a single scale

It would be easy to read these as simply strict, stricter, strictest, but they are not measuring the same thing in different amounts. Germany is certifying a working animal, and treats soundness as a precondition for the certification a hunter actually needs. The Netherlands is protecting a pedigree registry, and treats the mating date as the only moment that counts. Britain is trying to keep as many breeders as possible inside a voluntary system at all, on the theory that visibility pressure reaches more litters than a registration gate that people can simply route around.

None of the three tells a buyer, on its own, whether a specific dog in front of them is a good breeding prospect — a JGHV certificate says a dog is sound and biddable in the field, not that it is free of every hereditary condition its breed carries; a Dutch pedigree says the parents cleared that breed's specific list on the day it mattered, not that the list is exhaustive; a Kennel Club "best practice" badge says a breeder tested to their breed coordinators' current recommendation, which is a different claim from a legal requirement. What each system does tell you, reliably, is which question that country's regulator decided was worth asking before an animal bred — and that it is worth knowing which question you are actually looking at an answer to.

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Sources

• VDD-GNA — About the JGHV Testing Programs
• Raad van Beheer / Houden van Honden — Foknormen
• Royal Kennel Club — Responsible breeding bolstered by new registrations structure, January 2025
• Royal Kennel Club — The Kennel Club Health Standard

— Rene