The American Kennel Club (AKC®) continues to expand the educational content available to breeders via our online learning platform, AKC Canine College.
The most recent course additions to Canine College round out content provided by famed dog author and breeding expert Claudia Waller Orlandi, Ph.D. Breeders will now have access to detailed courses on anatomy, kennel blindness, and genetic defects.
- The ABC’s of Dog Breeding – Anatomy, Part 1 provides breeders with knowledge of the anatomy of the standing dog. The course covers overall structural balance and correctness, but also breaks down the evaluation of a dog’s correctness into smaller, more tangible anatomical parts. These features include size, substance, stance, and key proportions. This approach helps create templates that can be applied to numerous breeds.
- The ABC’s of Dog Breeding – Anatomy, Part 2 focuses on the anatomy of the dog in motion.The course’s approach to evaluating movement is similar to learning the individual parts of the standing dog because there are also tangible, measurable features that can be used as templates to evaluate good, as well as faulty, movement.
- The phenomenon known as kennel blindness, which is a breeder’s inability or unwillingness to admit to the failings or faults in his or her own dogs, is discussed in The ABC’s of Dog Breeding – Kennel Blindness. Because serious faults can be fixed in a couple of generations unless they are not quickly diagnosed and treated, kennel blindness is powerful enough to destroy the success of a breeding program.
- For breeder insight into techniques that can be used to assess the risk of producing genetic disease when planning a mating, check out The ABC’s of Dog Breeding – Genetic Defects. The elimination of genetic defects from a breeding program should be the highest priority and requires doing a lot of homework on the ancestors in pedigrees.
Canine College is a great way for AKC Bred with H.E.A.R.T. members to meet the annual education requirement. These educational courses are available to breeders at no cost. Breeders may opt to be tested on the material and receive a certificate upon passing the examinations for a nominal fee.
With the support of Royal Canin U.S.A., Inc. as the sponsor of breeder education, the AKC continues its long-standing commitment to advance the health and welfare of all dogs by creating one of the world’s foremost online breeder education libraries.
To see what the AKC Canine College has to offer, visit https://caninecollege.akc.org.