Why we wrote to the societies first

This morning we emailed the secretaries of four breed societies. Not their member breeders — the societies themselves.

That is a slower way to do it, and it is worth explaining why we chose it, because the fast way was sitting right there. The breeders exist. Many of them advertise. A marketing person would tell you to write to all of them this afternoon, and a marketing person would be right about the arithmetic: more emails, more replies, more listings.

But the arithmetic misses what a breed society actually is.

The people who kept the lights on

Take the breeds we wrote about this month — the ones on the Kennel Club's vulnerable native breeds list, the natives on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust watchlist. Every one of them exists today because a small group of people spent decades doing unglamorous committee work while the market looked the other way. Keeping a stud book. Running a judging list. Arguing about registration rules in village halls. Holding the line on health testing when it would have been easier not to.

When a breed drops to a few dozen registrations a year, the society isn't an administrative layer on top of the breed. It more or less is the breed. The institutional memory of which lines carry what, which matings were tried in the 1980s and why they weren't repeated, who actually holds frozen material and on what terms — that knowledge doesn't live in any database we could license. It lives in the secretaries.

So writing around the society to get to its members would not just be impolite. It would be a category error about where the value in a rare breed actually sits.

What we asked for — and what we didn't

The emails we sent this morning asked for almost nothing. Whether the society itself might find the marketplace useful. Whether they'd feel comfortable mentioning it to their members. An offer of a call, with an explicit note that no reply is needed if it's not of interest.

What we didn't ask for: member lists, endorsement, exclusivity, or anyone acting as our gateway. A society's authority with its breeders is earned over decades and spent in minutes; asking a secretary to lend that authority to a commercial platform they heard from on a Monday morning would be asking them to spend what isn't ours.

If a society never replies, we'll still build for their breed. The rare and heritage section we opened this month lists breeds on their merits, and our welfare writing covers them regardless. The door stays open at whatever pace suits them, including never.

The same logic, all the way down

This is the same reasoning that shaped the rest of the marketplace, and it seemed worth stating plainly once.

We verify sellers slowly rather than onboarding them fast, because a marketplace of unverified studs is just a classified-ads site with better typography. We publish welfare writing by practitioners under their own bylines rather than content-marketing under ours, because a marketplace has a commercial reason to want you to buy an animal, and you should discount our enthusiasm accordingly. And we approach the institutions of a breed before its individuals, because institutions are how a breed survives the enthusiasm of any one generation.

None of this is the fast way. A breed that has waited since the 1970s for the market to take it seriously is owed better than urgency.

If you sit on one of those committees

If you're reading this because our email led you here: the piece that best explains what we're building for your breed is Why heritage breeds are worth building for, and the section itself is at Rare & heritage breeds.

And if you sit on a committee we haven't written to yet — we'd genuinely welcome hearing from you first. The address is info@genovaq.co.uk, and the kettle is always on.

— Rene