International Partnership for Dogs Calls for Collective Actions for Health and Welfare of Pedigree Dogs

Press Release:

The International Partnership for Dogs (IPFD) is calling on stakeholder groups – including dog show enthusiasts, kennel and breed clubs, legislators, dog owners, veterinarians, welfare advocates – from all regions and countries to come together to address issues currently impacting the health, welfare, and breeding of dogs.

Our article, Reframing Current Challenges Around Pedigree Dogs: A Call for Respectful Dialogue, Collaboration and Collective Actions (also available in Dutch, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish), responds to a wave of recent legislative actions, especially in Europe. Although primarily focused on brachycephalic (flat-faced) breeds, regulations may eventually impact all pedigree and non-pedigree dogs.

“This is a call for each one of us to examine how our personal attitudes, attachments, and beliefs impact these discussions, says Dr. Brenda Bonnett, CEO, IPFD. “And it is a call to work collectively for what is truly in the best interest of dogs and the people who care for them.”

A key part of IPFD’s mission is to encourage, initiate, and facilitate collaboration among key stakeholders in the dog world to enhance dog health, well-being and welfare, and support human-dog interactions. “IPFD is a multi-stakeholder, international organization,” says Dr. Pekka Olson, IPFD Chair. “And it is perfectly positioned to encourage and facilitate open, respectful dialogue and collective actions in the best interest of both dogs and people.” Many of today’s challenges have been part of discussions at and actions from IPFD’s International Dog Health Workshops. The new IPFD International Working Group on Extreme Conformation in Dogs is one such initiative.

IPFD has compiled extensive resources to advance the conversation called for in this article. Together with collaborators from various sectors, we are creating a roadmap for the future, i.e. to help us to Think Globally, Act Locally.

“While we understand and respect the differences in attitudes and realities in different regions and across stakeholder groups, we also know there is common ground and shared purpose,” Bonnett adds. “Everyone who has any interest in dogs, pedigree dogs, and the world of ‘dogs and people’ is encouraged to become engaged in addressing challenges. This article and accompanying resources will support this process.”

The International Partnership for Dogs (IPFD) is a non-profit organization leading a global, multi-stakeholder effort to address issues affecting dog health, well-being, and welfare. Our main platform is DogWellNet.com. Our people include a Board comprised of individuals with respected international reputations, and a small but committed team of consultants in several countries. Volunteers from our Partners and Collaborator organizations and a network of experts are integral to what we do. 

Our Contributors, Partners, and Sponsors include national kennel clubs, international cynological organizations, groups with breed specific interests, educational/academic and professional organizations, and key players in the pet industry. Together we foster collaborative action to achieve our shared goals, support human-animal interactions, and benefit all dogs worldwide.  

For More Information:

Follow developments and find further resources on DogWellNet.com and learn about the IPFD.

Contact article author, Dr. Brenda N. Bonnett, CEO, IPFD, at Brenda.Bonnett@ipfdogs.com

General enquiries info@ipfdogs.com.

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International Canine Health Awards 2019

The International Canine Health Awards returned for the seventh year to celebrate some of the world’s finest researchers and scientists whose work has had a positive impact on the health and wellbeing of dogs.

The 2019 awards were run by the Kennel Club Charitable Trust and included substantial cash prizes donated by Vernon and Shirley Hill of Metro Bank, to go towards new or continued research.

The awards ceremony took place on Thursday, 30th May in Windsor at the start of the 4th International Dog Health Workshop. Professor Steve Dean, Chairman of the Trustees, was master of ceremonies and offered apologies from Mr & Mrs Hill who were unable to be in Windsor, although they (and their dog Sir Duffield) sent a video message to all the attendees. Mr Hill said “We are proud to support these important awards again, to fund research that may transform canine and human health by encouraging the same visionary thinking and innovation that Metro Bank champions. At Metro Bank, ‘Dogs Rule’”.

The four categories for the International Canine Health Awards were:

• International Prize in Canine Health for outstanding contribution in the field of canine health and welfare with a prize fund of £40,000 for future projects. The award was presented to Dr Danika Bannasch who is Professor of Population Health and Reproduction at the University of California, Davis.
  She has made significant contributions to our understanding of of the genetic basis of many genetic disorders. She has been responsible for the development of DNA tests for 7 canine diseases including hormonal defect hyperadrenocorticism and chondrodystrophy.
  
• Lifetime Achievement Award with a £10,000 prize fund was won by Associate Professor Gary Johnson from the Department of Veterinary Pathology at the University of Missouri. The award citation said that Gary Johnson is proof that it isn’t necessary for a vet to wield a scalpel or dispense a medicine to make a difference to animal health. His work on canine genetic diseases is reckoned to have saved the lives of many more dogs than most practising vets will manage during their careers. His lab was one of the first to adopt whole genome sequencing and, from 153 whole genome sequences, has identified 83 heritable diseases.
  
• Student Inspiration Awards were split into undergraduate and postgraduate, with a prize fund of £10,000 for the post-graduate and £5,000 for the undergraduate winner. The post-grad winner was Adrian Baez-Ortega from Cambridge University who has been working in the field of bioinformatics – the combination of biology and information technology. His recent work has been on the evolution of canine transmissible venereal tumours. The under-grad winner was Nivan Mamak from Edinburgh University. In 2018, her vacation project was an investigation of paroxysmal dyskinesia in a family of Golden Retrievers. These student prizes aid further education costs, the development of these young people’s careers, or support a further project.
  
• Breed Health Coordinator Award – with a £1,000 prize fund, went to Liz Branscombe (Flat-coated Retriever BHC). Liz is a registered veterinary nurse and, as well as acting as BHC, is also one of the KC’s team of BHC Mentors who spends time helping other breeds with their breed health improvement work. As well as working with her breed, Liz says an important part of her role is to pass on information from the breed community to the vet profession, which she has done as an author of articles in the vet press and as a regular public speaker.

After the final award was presented, it was great to see one of last year’s students, Alice Denyer, return to talk about how her prize had helped with her studies and research over the past year. Proof indeed, of the impact these awards can have in the real world!

Steve Dean concluded the presentations with further congratulations to the winners and thanks to the awards judges and KC team who staged the event. He then invited the assembled International Dog Health Workshop attendees to stay for a buffet dinner and celebratory drinks.

Dog theft in the UK – new research published

An Open Access paper has just been published which discusses dog theft trends in the UK. Statistics from Direct Line Insurance also show the most frequently stolen breeds and the regional hotspots for theft.

Dogs are considered property under UK law, while current discourses of pet ownership place canine companions as part of an extended family. This means sentences for those who steal dogs are not reflective of a dogs’ sentience and agency, rather reflecting the same charges for those who steal a laptop or wallet. This is particularly problematic as dog theft is currently on the rise in England and Wales and led to public calls to change the law.

The paper shows the statistics of reported dog thefts from 2015 to 2017 and highlights the reduction in the proportion of cases where someone was charged by the Police.

According to the paper, there were police force inconsistencies in recording dog theft crime which meant some data was unusable or could not be accessed or analysed. The researchers say there is a need for a qualitative study to understand dog theft crime in different areas, and a standardised approach to recording the theft of a dog by all forces across England and Wales.

Allen, D.; Peacock, A.; Arathoon, J. Spatialities of Dog Theft: A Critical Perspective. Preprints2019, 2019030255 (doi: 10.20944/preprints201903.0255.v1). 

Philippa Robinson – a very special lady who will be sorely missed

I am sad to share the news that Dog-ED co-founder Philippa Robinson passed away yesterday. She had bravely fought a battle with cancer for over a year and during that time continued to be an active campaigner for canine health and welfare.

Friends in the world of pedigree dogs will remember her Karlton Index project which she started in 2011 and which led to an awards ceremony sponsored by the Kennel Club in 2013. This recognised the range of fantastic work being done by breed club communities to improve the health of pedigree dogs.

The Karlton Index came about because of her experience of getting the dog of her dreams (Alfie; Kimmax Karlton), only to have it shattered by ill-health, familial disease and heartbreak. That was the motivation behind all of her campaigning. Set-up in Alfie’s memory, the Karlton Index was launched in March 2011 with the hope of bringing something constructive and helpful to the heated debates around dog welfare. Philippa brought tried and tested tools from the world of business, a world in which she had excelled for three decades, and applied them to activities related to dog health.

The ideas behind the KI appealed to me immediately and my first phone conversation confirmed this was a person who shared similar values to me and a common desire to improve the health of pedigree dogs. We struck-up a friendship and that developed into a partnership under the banner of Dog-ED.

Philippa would be the first to admit that her initial views were that the Kennel Club, breed clubs and breeders were just not doing what was needed to address the health issues in pedigree breeds. She certainly ruffled a few feathers in the early days; how dare a mere pet owner and worse, a management consultant, challenge the lack of effort being made to improve breed health! How dare she come out with a scoring system that highlighted dozens of breeds that scored ZERO. However, she was always willing to meet, talk, discuss alternative views and change her opinion accordingly. She became friends with many of the Kennel Club’s Breed Health Coordinators and, before she became ill, served on the KC’s ABS Health Sub-Committee.

There have been some lovely comments from Breed Health Coordinators who met her:

• The dogs have lost a tireless champion
• She looked to find the common ground which is so much rarer than it needs to be
• What a vibrant and dynamic voice for good; a great loss and far too soon

The two of us were invited to speak at various meetings and workshops. She invariably introduced us as “an odd couple” because we were approaching the challenge of breed health improvement from a systems-thinking and change management perspective. This was quite different to the typical veterinary, epidemiology and breed club perspectives that prevailed.

Philippa will be remembered for so much more than the Karlton Index, though. For her, it was always about doing the best for dogs and using her personal talents to bring people together to achieve that aim. She will be sorely missed.

I’m sure all of us whose lives she touched will be thinking of her partner Alex and the rest of her family at this very sad time. RIP Philippa.

[Top photo: courtesy of Bill Lambert]

Trust or trash? Just what can you believe?

The annual KC Breed Health Coordinator (BHC) Symposium was, for the first time, opened up to people who are not BHCs. As a result, around 200 people attended the event which featured a packed agenda of topics. There has already been an overview of the day published in Our Dogs (13/10/17) but, this month, I want to focus on one of the sessions I found particularly interesting.

“Sniffing out the science – how to interpret information on dog health”, was presented by Dr Zoe Belshaw from the Centre for Evidence Based Veterinary Medicine at Nottingham University. I am an avid searcher for, and reader of, scientific papers and other published information on canine (and human) health and genetics. There are a couple of basic challenges; knowing where to look and knowing what to believe. Remember, we are increasingly living in a world where so-called Fake News pops up, especially via social media. Zoe’s presentation addressed both of the challenges. Let’s start with knowing what to believe.

Almost every day, new scientific papers are published or there’s a blog post (often cross-posted onto Facebook or Twitter) with a mix of data, evidence, insights and opinions. There is ALWAYS a risk of bias in these; every author brings their own agenda. As readers, we also bring our own biases and I’ve written before about Cognitive Dissonance. For example, many people simply look for information that supports their existing opinions and tend to reject anything that goes against that opinion.

Another reality of published information is that there may well be different conclusions drawn about the same issue. That might be a result of bias or it might be related to the methodology used by the author in their study. An obvious example would be the different results published by Dan O’Neill’s VetCompass project compared with results from a Breed Club’s Health Survey. The two sample populations are completely different. VetCompass data comes from first opinion vets using standard VeNom classification codes for different health conditions. Many breed surveys will not use those codes; they may use categories that reflect terms in common use by “ordinary” owners. The population being sampled is also likely to be different; mostly breeders and exhibitors. It might therefore not be surprising for VetCompass to find the most prevalent diagnoses are Otitis, Dental disease, Anal sac impaction and overgrown nails, whereas a breed survey may be more likely to find issues such as PRA, epilepsy or allergies. They are both “right”, based on the methodology and the sample. In my breed, our Health Committee has always taken the view that we need to triangulate in on priority health issues by using a variety of evidence sources. As we find new information from different sources, we can tweak our approach and our priorities. For example, we amended some of the categories and conditions we list in our ongoing health survey as a result of the 2014 KC survey.

The Trust Triangle

Zoe talked about the Trust Triangle which describes the different types of information you might come across and the levels of trust that can be associated with each.

At the bottom of the Trust Triangle are non-experts with opinions. Facebook and social media are awash with these! Journalists and experts with a commercial interest also fall into this category. Next comes expert opinion; these are people who are widely acknowledged to be experts in their field. Many of them will know an awful lot about a very narrow field of science. They too come with their biases and personal agendas but, mostly, they will have years of experience and scientific data to back up their opinions. Moving up the Trust Triangle, we find primary scientific research. This is made public via “papers”, the best of which will be peer-reviewed, rigorous, well-reported and independent. At the pinnacle of trustworthy published scientific research are papers that present systematic reviews of multiple other studies. These publications dissect and critique a set of primary research papers in order to arrive at “the best evidence” to support a particular case (or to disprove it). This is the sort of work that Zoe’s colleagues do at the Nottingham Centre for EBVM and they then publish what can be considered to be best practice for vets and clinicians to adopt. As with all science, “best practice” today could well change if new research evidence emerges. A topical example is vaccination protocols where advice from WSAVA should have moved vets away from “annual boosters” of core vaccines to a less frequent regime (no more frequent than every 3 years, generally) or the use of titre testing to assess levels of immunity.

One potential issue with the Trust Triangle is that, the higher up you go, the less accessible the information becomes and, often, it also becomes more difficult to interpret and understand. At the base of the triangle, keyboard warriors and instant experts often use language pitched at a level that you’d expect to find in the Daily Mail (or Beano). At the top of the triangle, the language is (rightly) riddled with scientific terminology and often supported by statistical analysis that is impenetrable to the ordinary dog owner or breeder. Those of us who are interested in this material may need help from subject matter experts to interpret it and clarify the meaning so we can share it with other owners. The KC’s Health team and other Breed Health Coordinators with science, veterinary or research backgrounds are invaluable in this respect. Most BHCs will also have built a network of trusted specialist advisors to whom they can turn for advice when a new paper is published. We should be hugely grateful that people like Cathryn Mellersh, Dan O’Neill, Clare Rusbridge and Sheila Crispin, to name but a few, are so generous with their time and support to our breeds.

There’s a useful resource which Zoe pointed us at to help decide if we should “Trust it or trash it” (trustortrash.org). This takes you through a series of questions to identify: who said it, when they said it and how they know it. She also gave examples of good ways and places to find the information we need to support the development of breed health improvement strategies. These include Google Scholar, RCVS Knowledge, PubMed, BestBETS for Vets and VetSRev.

As champions of breed health improvement, BHCs can make good use of social media to communicate with owners. It enables them to reach a wide audience, for example through breed-specific Facebook Groups. What they communicate, however, needs to be distilled from evidence sources higher up the Trust Triangle.

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