Health testing explained

“Fully health tested” is the most common phrase in stud and litter advertising and one of the least informative. There is no universal tick. What testing exists, what the results mean and how long they stay meaningful all vary — by breed, by scheme and by condition. Here is the map.

The two families of test

Almost everything you will be shown falls into one of two groups.

The screening schemes, briefly

Hips are scored 0 to 53 per hip for a total of 0 to 106, lower being better, from a minimum age of one year. Elbows are graded 0 to 3 per elbow, and the higher of the two becomes the dog’s grade. Eyes are examined under the scheme run by the BVA with the Royal Kennel Club and the International Sheep Dog Society, and the result is a word on a date.

All three are worth understanding properly before you read anyone’s certificates — hip and elbow scores explained takes them one at a time.

DNA results: the four words

DNA results use a small vocabulary. These are the four you will nearly always see, and they are the four Breed Right accepts. (The Royal Kennel Club can also give an untested puppy a hereditary carrier or hereditary affected status where its parents’ results fix it — both rare, because they need an affected parent. Breed Right records those as Carrier or Affected, which is what they mean genetically.)

Breed Right stores exactly these four values for a DNA result (Clear, Hereditary Clear, Carrier, Affected) and nothing else, so a certificate cannot be paraphrased into something softer on the way in.

Hereditary Clear is an inference — ask how far back it goes

Hereditary Clear is not a test of the dog: it is inferred because both parents were clear. The Royal Kennel Club announced that it would limit the status to two generations, then paused that change in July 2022 for technical reasons, so today the status can still pass down a pedigree. It strongly recommends retesting breeding dogs every two generations anyway, because an inference handed down a pedigree carries forward any lab, pedigree or parentage error behind it.

So if a stud is described as hereditary clear, the follow-up question is how many generations back does it rest on? — and, if the answer is more than two, whether a fresh test would settle it. Hereditary Clear explained goes through it in full.

A carrier is information, not a verdict

For a simple recessive condition, a carrier mated to a clear dog cannot produce affected puppies for that condition, though on average about half the litter will themselves be carriers. That is arithmetic, not opinion — for simple recessives.

What a carrier result should never be is a secret. Carriers are not defective dogs; they are dogs whose breeding needs one extra piece of planning, and a breed that removed every carrier from its gene pool at once would trade one problem for a worse one.

Panels are breed-specific — dramatically so

There is no such thing as a general dog DNA panel. On Royal Kennel Club records a Labrador Retriever’s DNA panel lists seven conditions — CNM, EIC, HNPK, MCD, prcd-PRA, SD2 and STGD. A Border Terrier’s lists one: SLEM. Both dogs could truthfully be advertised as “DNA tested”, and the phrase would mean two completely different things.

That is why every breed page on Breed Right carries its own panel rather than a site-wide checklist.

What replaced the Assured Breeder Scheme

The Royal Kennel Club’s Assured Breeder Scheme closed at the end of 2024. The framework now cited on Royal Kennel Club records is The Royal Kennel Club Health Standard, which sets out health requirements breed by breed.

This matters when you are reading adverts. An advert claiming “Assured Breeder” today is quoting a scheme that no longer runs. It is not necessarily dishonest — plenty of good breeders were in it and have not updated their wording — but it is out of date, and it should be treated like any other unverified claim rather than as a current credential.

“No record held” does not mean untested

The Royal Kennel Club states on its own records that the information it holds may not include all the health screening a dog’s owners have had done. Results carried out privately, or abroad, or simply never submitted, will not appear.

So an empty panel is an absence of information, not a finding. Breed Right never renders it as a negative: where we hold nothing, the page says “Not recorded on Breed Right” and stops there. Ask the breeder for the certificates — that is the answer, and it is one they should be pleased to give.

Reading a certificate

• The name on it must be the dog’s registered name, not a pet name. A certificate you cannot tie to a specific dog is not evidence about that dog.
• Check the date, and for the screening schemes the dog’s age at the time.
• Check what was tested, against the breed’s panel, not against the length of the folder.
• Ask for the original rather than a photograph of a photograph.

How Breed Right handles all of this

Every health result you see on this site is marked “Verified”: a named member of our team has checked it against the Royal Kennel Club’s public records. A result nobody has checked yet is not shown to visitors at all — the breeder sees it in their own dashboard, marked “Breeder-declared”, until it is. A tick only ever appears next to a checked result.

Results marked Verified were checked by us against the Royal Kennel Club’s public records on the date shown. Results we have not yet checked are not shown to visitors. The Royal Kennel Club’s public records may not include all screening a dog has had.

We publish breed panels one breed at a time, each with a note recording where that panel came from, rather than filling every breed page with plausible guesses. It is slower and it leaves visible gaps. We think a visible gap is better than a confident invention, because breeders act on this.

How verification works explains exactly what our check covers and what it does not.