Who is responsible for this
The Breed Report is published by a small independent team in Virginia. We are not veterinarians and we do not present ourselves as any. What we do is find the veterinary research that already exists, extract the figures accurately, state the population each was measured in, and refuse to publish a number we cannot source. Every figure is re-verified against a committed copy of its source by a script that fails the build if anything disagrees.
Editorial responsibility sits with us as the publisher, and one address reaches us for everything: Ruff@thebreedreport.com, or the contact form. Corrections get answered.
What we publish
Lifetime cost estimates for 64 dog breeds, built from measured lifespan data, published disorder rates, and US veterinary prices. Every figure carries a confidence grade and a citation.
Where the numbers come from
Lifespan for all 64 breeds comes from a study of 584,734 UK dogs, including 284,734 deceased. Disorder rates come from VetCompass at the Royal Veterinary College, which analyses primary-care clinical records rather than surveys or referral hospitals. 63 breeds also have breed-specific research extracted; the rest use rates measured across the whole dog population, clearly labelled as such.
The UK and US question
There is no US dataset comparable to VetCompass for breed health. So health data here is British and cost data is American, and we say so wherever it matters. The defence is anatomical: a French Bulldog's airway is shaped the same in Ohio as in Oxfordshire. Where breeding lines genuinely differ between countries, such as cancer rates and orthopedic outcomes, we say that too.
How figures are graded
A is a peer-reviewed prevalence figure from a large primary-care population. B needs a conversion or comes from a single market. C is a referral population, breed club survey, or claims data. D is an estimate, is never presented as fact, and is labelled wherever it appears. Our cost figures are currently the weakest part of the site and we say so rather than dressing them up.
What we refuse to do
We do not publish a number we cannot source. A condition with no published rate contributes nothing to a total rather than contributing a guess, which is why some pages show less than others. We do not present odds ratios as percentages. We publish what a breed is protected against alongside what it is prone to. And we publish the insurance break-even even when it says coverage is not worth buying.
How we make money
Some links are paid and are labelled at the point of the link. An advertiser cannot buy a change to a figure, removal of a health finding, placement in a cost table, or a different breed ranking. See our disclosure.
Corrections
If you have a source that contradicts something here, send it to our contact page or Ruff@thebreedreport.com. We check it against our own sources, and if you are right the figure changes, an audit re-verifies everything that depended on it, and the correction is noted on the page. We would rather be corrected than be wrong.