The Future of Dog Breeding: Health, Welfare & the Innate Health Assessment with Vanessa Barnes

Okay.

So in simple terms, what is the IHA? Okay.

In simple terms, it is looking at what a dog or specifically a dog at the moment.

We are looking at cats as well, but I'll come on to that.

But looking at the IHA for dogs, it's what a dog needs to have the basic foundations for good health, sort of good innate health.

We're looking at the building blocks.

So what does every dog need to have to be a dog effectively? And that might sound very common sense and very simple, but we're looking at what things does a dog need to be able to do to function fully, have a healthy life, breathe easily, for instance, have a tail they can wag.

flex their spine properly so they can self-groom and turn around, be able to move around and have the right level of mobility so they can have full, happy, functioning lives.

So really it's sort of the building blocks for good innate health is what we mean by innate health.

And the innate health assessment looked at distilling what we saw as being the top 10 criteria By top 10, we mean the fundamental elements of innate health, which cause the most problems for the most numbers of dogs if they don't have it.

And we kind of distilled these, took us a long time, took us about three years to develop it and to really nail down on what these 10 criteria should be and put them into a...

And easy to use assessment tools so that people could do a very quick visual check of a dog.

These are all visual checks as well.

So something that's easy for people to do and really be able to see from the dog that's in front of them and get a picture of what their innate health level is like.

Okay, so it's something that I could do as a dog owner just in my living room, effectively? Yes,

absolutely.

It requires no tests, scans, x-rays, no veterinary involvement.

Very, very simple to do.

It's a yes, no, if you like, tick box answer to each of the questions and you just assess the dog that's in front of you and see whether or not they have the correct criteria for good innate health or if there's any criteria that they're failing on from a conformational point of view.

So what we're looking at is the dog's physical characteristics, so their conformation, and whether or not they have the right building blocks in terms of that conformation to be able to lead a full, healthy and happy life.

What might that be? We talk about conformation.

Are we talking about specific looks of a dog or...

Well, we're certainly talking about specific physical characteristics of a dog.

So, for instance, how long their muzzle might be.

Have they got a very short, flat face or have they got a good, nice, long nose? It's really important for a dog from a perspective of how easily they can breathe, how well they can thermoregulate.