APGAW IHA

     Dog Breeding project

APGAW believes that every animal should have a life worth living and management of welfare should not be limited to mitigating negative consequences, but also promoting positive experiences and enhancing welfare. APGAW’s view is that there are a significant number of animals bred that can never experience a life worth living because they have been born with physical problems and pain from the very start. This is known as extreme conformation.

APGAW wrote its first report on the issues around dog breeding in 2008 entitled “A Healthier Future for Pedigree Dogs”. The Group picked the issue back up in 2023 after seeing little progress and considering the welfare issues associated with poorly bred dogs to be one of the most significant facing companion animals in the UK. Thousands of dogs are struggling to function normally including being able to breathe with ease, run and play and even sleep and eat owing to extreme features such as flat muzzles, closed nostrils, bulging eyes, short legs, excessive skin folds and many other traits. 

The Innate Health Assessment Tool

During an APGAW meeting, the team, Marisa Heath and Vanessa Barnes, became aware of the concept being used by Professor Dan O’Neill around innate health. Previous work included the CFSG guidance on dog conformation which had been designed around the visual appearance of dogs to help the public understand that extreme conformation was visible and could be understood by all. Professor O’Neill had then expanded this concept through his work at RVC and VetCompass providing a platform for which APGAW could develop the Innate Health Assessment (IHA) tool. We took it through APGAW to build support and utilise the critical eye of APGAW members to amend and improve the tool. The work has been supported by the RSPCA, Dogs Trust, Battersea, Local Government Animal Welfare Group and others. 

 The IHA aims to solve the top conformation issues impacting on dog welfare. The model primarily assists breeders and local authority inspectors to make decisions on licensing for dog breeding by assessing whether dogs submitted as potential breeding animals meet the requirements of Schedule 6 (6)(5) of the LAIA Regs. The IHA is designed to generate an overall score based on the number of ‘pass’ decisions from 10 conformation criteria for each dog. The local authority inspector assesses these criteria visually from a distance or with the assistance of the licence applicant for those criteria that require some handling of the dog. Assessment of each of the 10 criteria leads to a pass/fail decision on each. Summing the number of pass criteria then generates an overall Innate Health Assessment score for that dog.

APGAW has piloted the IHA successfully twice with the use of local authority inspectors, veterinary surgeons and lay people. The results have indicated the simple workability of the tool and that it can be used by breeders and potentially by members of the public who may be considering purchasing a puppy.  

APGAW ;launched the website and tool on the 18th November 2025

www.innatehealthassessment.org 

Frontier Economics, one of the largest economic consultancies in Europe, has undertaken an independent forward-looking economic appraisal of the potential benefits of introducing the IHA into the regulatory landscape for dog breeding in the UK. They have written a full report and concluded that:

 “By helping to shift societal norms towards healthier, ethically bred dogs, the IHA could serve as a low cost but high impact regulatory lever.  The IHA tool addresses a significant market failure in the dog breeding sector by targeting the welfare and health risks caused by extreme conformation – risks that likely impose material and avoidable costs on pet owners, veterinary professionals, and society.”

Read the report: Frontier Economics