Check out notable media articles on topics of particular interest to FDC and our audience.
Some of these include coverage of FDC or members of our leadership, other articles are on the landscape of dog breeding.
If you know of an article we should add, please contact us!
Article published: July 25, 2023
In her coverage of the functional breeding movement, reporter Ula Chrobak quotes three FDC Board members, as well as heads of FDCs two Breeding Cooperatives about responsible, ethical and humane approaches to breeding dogs, whether purebred, crossbred or mixed breed.
Article Published May 9, 2024
This essay by researcher and author Horowitz addresses the amount of inbreeding in many dog breeds and related health impacts. FDC’s mission, activities, and resources aim to support people address these issues through better understanding the health of dogs they plan to breed, and supporting outcrossing to address genetic risk.
Author Horowitz is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard.
Article published: April 29. 2022
FDC Founder veterinarian Jessica Perry Hekman, whose PhD is in genetics, is 2nd author on this study published in Science of data studied over 6 years by a team working for and collaborating with the Karlsson vertebrate genomics group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. This Darwin’s Ark project surveyed over 18K dog owners and sequenced the DNA of 2155 dogs.
Hekman has provided a more readable description of the study and important take aways in FDCs Research Explained.
Article published: November 25. 2024
This article addresses the importance of prioritizing breeding for good family dogs, and includes coverage of the FDC and the affiliated Companion Dog Project.
Article published: January 12, 2022
FDC board member Joyce Briggs wrote this piece with journalist Kristi Fender. Briggs brings the voice of someone with decades of focus on the U.S. animal sheltering field who feels that there needs to be much broader support of the system of dog breeding as a dog welfare strategy, and takes issue with tendency of some in the field to demonize nearly all dog breeding. With a population of ~88 million dogs in the U.S. and an average lifespan of 11 years, about 8 million dogs pass away each year at the end of their lifespan. If our dog population stays the same, that means about 8 million new puppies (or imported dogs of all ages) will join us each year. What is the best way for those dogs to be created?
Article published: January 13th, 2025
This editorial piece, published in a peer reviewed journal, is co-authored by a group of international experts on animal welfare and ethics.
The excerpt below from the Abstract reinforces the relevance and values of FDC: The modern idea of purebred dogs has come under increasing critical scrutiny over recent decades. In light of this critical focus and other developments in society, some new trends in how companion dogs are bred and acquired have emerged. ….. The optimal future seems to lie in the middle ground, where the future organised dog world (i.e. kennel and breed clubs or their successor organisations) will need to re-open the breed registries, remove wording from breed standards that currently promotes extreme conformation, support selection against disease-predisposing genotypes and phenotypes and refocus dog showing and breeding to promote health and appropriate behaviour
