I’ve been reading a lot about international dog shows and registries and clubs the last few days and oh boy, I think my head is getting ready to explode with all the confusing information!
I do, however, think I have it all straight. I thought I’d post about it to help me remember when I forget in a couple of days. It’s good information and maybe it’ll help out someone else as well sometime.
As ya’ll know I have a Danish Swedish Farmdog and they are are a very rare breed in the USA. They are not an AKC (American Kennel Club) registered breed. The AKC is the largest pure-bred dog registry here in the United States. I’m not saying they are the best… I’m on the fence about the AKC. I wish they would enforce the integrity and ethics of their breeders more, but they don’t, and therefore they will register litters of puppies that may even come from puppy mills. And we all know how terrible puppy mills are and we want them all gone off the face of the planet.
So if you are a person, or a dog, floating around the world and you want to know which registry has the most… well, punch I guess you could say, in the world, which one would you guess? Well, it’s no US registry that’s a fact. And not surprising since the USA has a horrible dog overpopulation problem and needs serious reform… that’s coming from me from the rescue view of the USA though… and I’ve seen too much rescue in my life.
Anyway so what’s the club? Well, it’s the FCI. What does FCI stand for? I’m gonna have to copy and paste because I can’t pronounce it or spell it: Fédération Cynologique Internationale
The FCI doesn’t register dogs. They register Breed Clubs around the world. One breed club per country. The USA does not have a FCI member breed club. Not the AKC or the UKC or ARBA or any other clubs. The AKC has a reciprocal agreement with the FCI though so pedigrees from AKC registered dogs can be exported overseas to other countries and it keeps the validity of their pedigrees so they can be bred in other countries and recognized there as pure breds.
Each country (other than the USA) has a breed club that is a member of the FCI. From what I could tell, that breed club writes the Standard for the breed, and the breed club and the FCI work out all the details about the standard so the breed is the same all over the world. Since there is no FCI approved registry in the USA, quite often the US breeds become isolated and only breed with other USA dogs and, therefore, can become quite different from dogs of the same breed in other parts of the world.
All this is pretty interesting isn’t it? LOL well maybe if you have a rare breed dog which is not AKC recognized, which I do.
So anyway, what do you do if you have a rare breed in the USA that was imported to the US from another country, such as, say, Finland, just to grab a country out of the air? What if this breed is not AKC recognized? What if you breed this dog in the USA… can you ever register the puppies anywhere and sell them as pure-bred dogs or export them to other countries? Well… you can, but there’s a catch. 
If the breed is not FCI recognized, and they are not an AKC breed (either regular AKC registration or AKC-FSS (Foundation Stock Service which is where the breeds go first before they are fully AKC recognized), you are pretty much out of luck. If the breed is AKC recognized you can get an Export Pedigree and that is recognized by the FCI. Even though AKC is not a member of the FCI, the reciprocal agreement the AKC and the FCI have means that the AKC dogs can be exported and bred and recognized as pure breds in other FCI countries. None of the other USA registries such as the UKC (United Kennel Club) or ARBA (American Rare Breed Association) are FCI members. Nor do they even work with the FCI in any way. In the USA only the AKC works with the FCI, and even then it’s not a full membership.
However, if your breed is FCI recognized then you are in luck. There is a place you can register your dog in North America that is FCI recognized. The Canófila Federation of Puerto Rico, will register your pure bred dog if you have a pedigree from a FCI member club. So… since Jet was born in Sweden, and he has a pedigree from the Swedish Kennel Club, I can send his pedigree to the CFPR and get him a registration that will be valid for breeding him in the USA (however, in Jet’s case, his SKK pedigree is good for that, I’m just talking generically here, but I don’t know if his puppies could be registered in other countries without the registration from an FCI member club). If I breed him here (to a bitch also registered with an FCI member club) and register the litter of puppies with the CFPR, then they should, I assume, be FCI recognized because both the sire and the dam are registered with an FCI member club. So the puppies could then be sold to homes all over the world, and the kennel clubs in other countries would recognize the puppies as pure-bred Danish Swedish Farmdogs.
Kinda cool huh? 
I have heard that some breed clubs might have agreements with the kennel clubs of other individual countries and that, if the breed is not an AKC recognized breed, the countries still might recognize the US born dogs and allow the puppies to be imported into those countries with an ARBA pedigree, or perhaps some other pedigree from another USA registry which has been negotiated by those particular clubs. Which is all fine and good but then your options are limited to those specific countries. FCI has over 80 member countries and that allows for a much more diverse gene pool instead of being limited to just one or two other countries.
So that, in a very big nutshell, is what I understand of the FCI and breeding and moving dogs from country to country. Maybe Google will index this page and it’ll be able to help some people (and their dogs). Oh, I got some of this information from this Falcao Podengo Pequenos website that is all about the FCI and other dog breed registries. Those dogs look like a really cute breed too! But I do like the short hair of the Farmdogs.
