What travels when the dog doesn't

There is a kind of mating in which nobody meets anybody. A breeder in Cumbria chooses a dog in Alberta, or a mare owner in Ontario chooses a stallion in Normandy, and no animal moves in either direction. What moves is a small insulated box with a courier's label on it.

I have been writing to breeders who work this way for a few weeks now, and the thing that strikes me every time is how little of the transaction is the animal and how much of it is the file. When the dog does not travel, the documentation is not a supporting document. It is the entire object being sold.

Three temperatures

The Kennel Club's own summary is the clearest short version I know of, and it comes down to three states.

Fresh semen is used when the two animals are close enough that the collection and the insemination happen in the same short window. It is the most forgiving material and the least useful for anything at distance.

Chilled extends the window. It buys you a day or two and a courier, which in practice means a country, or a neighbouring one.

Frozen, usually in liquid nitrogen, buys you decades and an ocean. The cost is that freezing and thawing damage some proportion of the sperm, and the survivors are viable for a shorter time once thawed. That is why frozen work is timed so much more aggressively than a natural mating, and why progesterone testing stops being optional.

Each temperature is a different bargain between reach and margin for error. A breeder who offers all three is not offering three versions of the same thing.

What the rules now permit

There is a version of the UK rules that a lot of people still repeat, and it is out of date in almost every particular. It is worth setting the record straight, because the outdated version makes AI sound far more exceptional than it now is.

You do not need advance permission from the Kennel Club to register a litter produced by artificial insemination. The AI has to be declared — Form 2, submitted alongside the litter registration — but the approval step people remember is gone.

A maiden bitch may be mated by AI. There is no requirement that she has produced a natural litter first.

A stud dog that has never produced a litter naturally may be used, and the resulting litter will be registered.

The sire may be alive and living in the UK. Natural matings are still stated as the preference, but an AI litter from a live domestic sire will be registered.

And there is no longer a waiting period before semen from a deceased donor may be used.

One piece of administration does still catch people out. The regulations require the registered owner of the donor dog to sign the litter registration form. If you have bought the semen outright, you can sign it yourself — but only if you hold written confirmation from the donor's owner that you are its legal owner. That is a document worth having before the bitch is in season rather than after.

What was taken away

The direction of travel has not been uniformly permissive, and the two restrictions that did land are the ones that matter most for welfare.

Surgical insemination has been banned in the UK since 2019 by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and the Kennel Club does not accept litter applications for puppies conceived that way. That is a hard line, and a good one.

Then, from July 2023, the RCVS confirmed that even trans-vaginal insemination — the least invasive technique, the one that had been done by experienced lay breeders for years — must be carried out by a veterinary professional, because the exemption for suitably qualified lay people never arrived from Defra. Transcervical insemination was already veterinary-only.

So the paradox of the last few years is that the registry relaxed almost everything about who may be bred and tightened who may do the breeding. Whatever you think of that, it is the opposite of the story most people tell about it.

I would add that the Kennel Club's own list of cautions is franker than an organisation with a registration income has any obligation to be. It names overuse of a popular sire and the consequent spread of unseen faults, the risk of importing a hereditary disease from a population that has never been screened for it, and the circular problem of using AI to breed from animals that cannot mate naturally because of their conformation — which reinforces the very thing that made them unable to. All three are real, and all three get worse, not better, as shipping gets easier.

The border is the hard part

The technical side of shipping semen is largely solved. The regulatory side is not, and since 2021 it has been the genuinely difficult part of an international mating.

A UK reproduction practice that does this work routinely currently lists canine semen exports into Europe as available to Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, France, Norway, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland — and notes that the remaining European countries require health certification that is simply not available from Defra and APHA at present. Not difficult to obtain. Not available.

Imports run the other way under a general licence, with conditions that apply to every consignment regardless of origin, EU included, and EU shipments must be pre-notified through IPAFFS before they arrive. Shipments to Australia are commonly consolidated into a shared shipment every few months; New Zealand shipments run roughly twice a year unless there is a reason to go alone.

I set all this out because it explains something about the people we have been writing to. A breeder who has an established AI programme is not simply a breeder with a freezer. They have learned a customs regime, they plan matings around a shipping window that opens quarterly, and they have almost certainly had a consignment held up. That is a different sort of operator, and their records tend to reflect it.

The details above change, sometimes at short notice. Anyone actually shipping should confirm the current position with APHA and with the destination authority rather than with an article, this one included.

The part nobody writes down

Here is the problem I keep coming back to, and it is not a regulatory one.

In a domestic stud arrangement, the paperwork is a supplement to a relationship. You have met, you have seen the dog move, you know somebody who used him last year, and the certificates confirm what you already believe. If a health test result had gone missing, you would still have a reasonable basis for the decision.

In a shipped mating there is nothing underneath. You have not seen the animal and you never will. The hip score, the eye certificate, the DNA panel, the semen analysis, the progeny record, the honest note about the one litter that did not go well — that is not evidence supporting the decision. That is the decision. Remove the file and there is no transaction left, only a courier's tracking number.

Which makes it strange that the file has nowhere sensible to live. In practice it lives in a stud owner's email outbox, sent as attachments, one enquirer at a time, in a format the recipient cannot verify and cannot easily compare against the two other stallions or the two other dogs they are weighing. Everybody involved is doing something reasonable, and the result is that the most consequential part of the transaction is the least legible part of it.

That is the gap we are building into. Not a marketplace in the sense of a shop window — a place where documentation about an animal can sit in one location, in one shape, so that a stranger in another country can evaluate it without having to take anybody's word for anything.

Where we actually are

I should be plain about the state of it, because overselling this is the fastest way to lose the people I most want to talk to.

GenoVaq is UK-based and UK-first. The verification work, the vet directory, the health record — all of it was built around UK animals and UK bodies, and it shows. International listing is early for us. When I write to a stud in Wisconsin or a stallion station in the Netherlands, I am not describing a mature international platform, and I say so in the letter.

Waiting is a perfectly reasonable answer, and I say that in the letter too. A breeder with a twenty-year frozen programme and a filing system that works has very little to gain from being early to somebody else's platform, and I would rather they told me to come back in a year than agreed out of politeness.

Either way, the underlying fact is not really about us. When the dog does not travel, the paperwork is the animal. It deserves better than an attachment.

— Rene