True story.

We’ll call her “Jane.”

Jane, who’d been “in” her breed for over thirty years, was whelping a litter sired by a dog whose lines she knew going back decades, and the same was true of the dam.  Understandably, then, Jane was puzzled when a puppy was born that she first thought was a sock (the things we think when we’re sleep deprived).  It had to be a sock because only a sock could be the color this “sock” was. Sire and dam were black. Every dog on both sides of the parents was black. Jane knew this because Jane did her homework. She studied pedigrees, attended specialties, kept notes and took pictures. Ultimately, however, this wasn’t a sock, it was a white puppy born from two lines in which every dog had been black. It wasn’t that white wasn’t an acceptable color in the breed, it was, but it was the last thing Jane had expected in this line-breeding.

Being a student of the breed, Jane wasn’t going to rest until she got to the bottom of this unexpected color in her litter. She consulted the breed stud book, and there it was. A dog going back many, many, many generations whose name, when translated from the native tongue, meant “Snow White.”

Jane surmised that through a roll of the genetic dice, she had doubled up on a gene not expressed for many generations, and she would never have known (this was before DNA swabs) had she not consulted the stud book.

Newbies to the dog fancy are aware that stud books exist, but don’t alway know what they are, or why they’re important. In the case of Jane, the breed stud book helped her solve a mystery. Because an AKC stud book is the recorded ancestry of every AKC registered dog and bitch, it’s almost a “dictionary” for a breed.

A stud book remains “open” on a breed once it has become fully recognized for a minimum of three years.  Closing a stud book doesn’t mean that it’s closing the door to imports, it imply means closing it to imported dogs that don’t have a three generation pedigree from a registry that’s not approved by the AKC,FCI or CKC.

There’s debate over “open” and “closed” stud books, and what either means to the genetic vitality of a breed over time; we leave that debate to the breeders of their breed. For now, we wanted to show (via Jane) how a stud book can be used, and why it’s important. For more on how an AKC stud book is determined to be left open or closed, read this.

Studbooks aren’t just for dogs, by the way. The thoroughbred horse world pretty much set the template for how studbooks were assembled. Zoos also rely on studbook. A large portion of conservation work involves captive animal populations that are important for saving a species. A registry of the captive individuals helps assist in population management. In the zoo world, a studbook tracks births, deaths, parentage, individuals acquired from the wild, their location, and any transfers of individuals.

Image of an American Kennel Club Stud-Book – Vol VI – from 1964 found on Ebay