What we check against

A profile is built from official records first and personal accounts second. In practice that means the registers of the Fédération Cynologique Internationale and of the national canine organisation the person belongs to; the registers and breeder lists kept by national kennel clubs and breed clubs; and, where they exist, the words of the breeders and judges themselves — club portraits, show catalogues, their own kennel pages.

Where the record gives a date, a licence scope or an affix, that is what we print. Where it gives nothing, we print nothing.

What we will not publish

A link we have not opened. A working web address is not evidence of anything. Domains lapse, get parked, and end up selling something else entirely; an address that looks right and returns a page can still have nothing to do with the kennel named on it. Every source behind a profile has been opened and read.

A match made on a name alone. Two people share a surname and an initial more often than anyone expects, and a kennel prefix can be held by different people in different countries. Before a person is attached to a kennel, a club role or a licence, something beyond the name has to agree — the registered holder, the town, the breed, the registration code or the scope of the licence.

Private details. Official registers frequently publish home addresses, private telephone numbers and personal e-mail addresses alongside professional facts. Those never travel to a DOGMASH page. What belongs here is the professional record: name, country, licence, breeds, affix, club roles.

Filler. No profile is padded to look substantial. If four sentences are what the sources support, four sentences is what the page carries.

When sources disagree

They disagree often, and usually neither of them is wrong. An international register and a national kennel club can list different groups for the same judge because they describe two different licences — one valid at international shows, the other at home. A register may date a licence to the year it was recognised internationally while the judge dates it to the year of the examination.

In those cases the page carries both readings and names the source of each. We do not quietly pick the tidier one.

Mistakes and corrections

Some of what is on this site was wrong before it was right. A kennel has been listed under the name of its website rather than its registered affix; a prefix has been attached to the person who owned dogs from it rather than the person who bred them; the same judge has appeared twice under two spellings. Each of those was found by checking, and each page was rewritten.

If you know a page here is wrong — or that it is missing something — please tell us. Corrections from the people the records are actually about are the fastest way this gets better, and they are always welcome.

What this is not

These directories are not complete and do not claim to be. They cover what has been checked so far, and they grow week by week. A person or kennel missing from them has not been judged unimportant — they simply have not been reached yet.