More information will appear here when available. Here is the summary from the  December 2025, club magazine

BMD Outcrossing Project

A quiet but definite aspect of Kennel Club interest in breeding over the last few years has been connected with lowering the CoEfficient of Inbreeding and many breeds are faced some level of ‘the inbreeding issue’. Inbreeding is thought to be implicated in many of the modern day issues we have in common with many breeds and is particularly mentioned in relation to such problems as increased cancers, infertility, hereditary issues and general poor longevity. These general consequences are widely accepted as they have been known to mankind throughout the centuries and several dog health related presentations I have attended have used examples from human history to illustrate that excessive inbreeding causes such health problems and has been documented as bringing down dynasties!

These health issues do not only manifest as the within breed awareness of specific health problems which we are all aware of, but each breed’s problems become a part of the bigger picture of all breeds that the outside world sees and judges us all on. These problems have then become part of the weight behind other increasing, higher level pressures on the dog world. It seems every few weeks there is another story from one country or another, including the UK, where the authorities at some level, legislative, government or just Kennel Clubs are imposing specific laws or regulations based, sometimes on behavioural, often welfare but also prompted by specific health concerns. Once imposed as laws these changes have to be adhered to, no matter what dogdom thinks of them. Largely, and certainly in the UK, no specific breed concerns for us have been raised from this general direction, our health concerns have been mostly kept within the breed itself but that is not a reason for any complacency as we have several issues that could draw us into more scrutiny, starting with the big ones mentioned above.

One upshot of this changing landscape is that there is increasing onus on owners, breeders and kennel clubs to ‘improve matters’. Things that used to be accepted as just ‘the way things are’ will now be challenged more often and there will more expectation that things will be tackled because there is more expectation that things can be tackled. There is also more interest from higher legislative authorities to get involved and potentially dictate our course of action.

Here in the UK, it was thought by many that the Animal Welfare Act reforms of 2018 would lead to more ‘health based’ court cases as it talks about breeders being responsible for breeding as healthily as possible and reducing hereditary diseases. I warned about this at the time in my report to the club’s AGM but, admittedly speaking only anecdotally, I don’t believe any significant increase in legal cases has really happened, but the framework is definitely there for this to happen. Maybe this is influenced by a lack of resources to pursue cases or maybe the world has had other things on its mind so far during this decade. However, it is safe to say that within the overall ‘health of dogs’ arena, genetic diversity is an increasing player with 1] modern DNA analysis revealing just how few dogs many breeds are originally derived from and 2] this enhanced DNA capability combining with modern medical techniques to reveal just how implicated lack of genetic diversity could be in many problems previously felt to be more ‘random’ in their occurrence.

DNA analysis, particularly a paper I shall refer to in a moment, has established that our breed is amongst a significant number whose origins go back to very, very few dogs. This means that however much we outcross over the breed, using Bernese from different countries or completely different lines, we are ultimately still breeding with dogs with identical origins as our own if you go back far enough, which modern DNA interpretation is now doing relatively easily. Just a few years ago breeding talk using the word ‘outcrossing’ would be taken as meaning breeding to dogs with no direct connection to the dogs on your pedigree, maybe 5 generations back at most, but now people are having to contemplate thinking more broadly. Whilst breeding within your breed but as far away from your own lines as possible still has merit and has to always be better than using closer relatives, we will always be somewhat hamstrung because we are solely working in the long established, but closed and therefore limited, breed genes we have to work with now.

The CoEfficients of Inbreeding that we are familiar with from our modern database systems, the Kennel Club for example, are useful and show a beneficial level of diversity for some litters over others but in reality, whilst a low figure is still beneficial and always better than a high one the figures we are used to using are derived from a limited number of generations, almost always in single figures, Berner Garde’s maximum is 10 generations, which involves computing the effect of over 1,000 dogs and this is why it is important to look at how many full generations are quoted to gauge the efficacy of any figure. However, full laboratory DNA analysis is not hampered by lack of records or difficulty in computing increasing numbers of dogs as the generations expand as you go back through extended pedigrees, modern DNA gives a picture right back into the full history of the animal.

You don’t need to do very much research into Bernese history without becoming aware of the ‘Newfoundland incident’ where an accidental mating took place in 1948 introducing one set of Newfoundland genes into the breed. (The exact circumstances of this incident were queried at the time, and have been since, but they really don’t matter nearly 80 years later – it is documented that it happened). The offspring of this mating were tightly controlled but nevertheless a male from the next generation went on to sire 51 litters which I would have thought would inevitably make these genes pretty widespread across the breed today, even though we are several dozen of generations down the line. Despite this I have not seen his presence mentioned in any DNA reports. [Note to self to ask about this when next with a DNA geneticist].

So from several quarters and primarily driven by health concerns there is a very slowly increasing pressure for breeds to properly outcross to improve their genetic health and therefore improve the overall situation relating to longevity, fertility and cancer resistance. Some owners, breeders and clubs understand these growing pressures and accept this and others are still in denial but breeds are waking up to the pressure for true outcrossing and some are taking action. So now to the reason for all this background, at the Berner International Working Group (BIWG) meeting in Helsinki we were given a presentation, delivered by BMD owner Kjesti Olsen, from a Norwegian group who are undertaking such a project forward for Bernese. The project, which has support from the Norwegian BMD club and their Kennel Club, is called Bernese For the Future (BFF) and they are ‘jumping’ before they are ‘pushed’. This is because in a 2023 Norwegian Supreme Court case concerning another breed, Bernese were raised as an example breed in such a negative way making it very likely that enforcement would be imposed anyway in the near future. Their Kennel Club, NKK, is providing impetus for breeds to embrace this principle and is actually in charge of all breeding programmes.

Kjersti explained that in Norway, and a few other countries, inbreeding has actually been controlled within the breed by regulations for breeders, and consequently lowered for maybe 6 generations or more, but the real problem was the amount of inbreeding done in the past.

Looking more into the full DNA background, not just a limited number of generations, the group utilised ‘Genomic Diversity and Runs of Homozygosity in Bernese Mountain Dogs’ published by Letko, Hedan et al in 2023 and Kjersti reported several statistics from this study, which I have mentioned previously. This paper demonstrated that 33 ‘randomly spread’ Bernese tested from the USA, France, Sweden and Switzerland had a collective ‘real’ CoI of 39.5%. A similar methodology (with a different DNA provider) of 32 dogs in Norway came up with a figure of 31%. Given our common heritages, there is no reason to think that any similar number of Bernese in any country, including here in the UK, analysed in the same way, would give any significantly different results. Combine this with the fact that our breed is showing classic symptoms of ‘Inbreeding Depression’ such as those already mentioned, increased cancers, infertility, lowered life expectancy.

Taking the initiative and thus having more control and a better time frame was the approach favoured by the Norwegians and, from Kjesti’s presentation and what I have taken from conversations since, the project has a good level of support amongst owners and breeders in Norway, although to be honest it didn’t sound like, sooner or later, they would have much option!

Some of our UK readers may be aware of a Leonberger project to undertake an identical process, shared between the UK and Finnish Leonberger clubs, which in 2025 has already produced its first (F1) puppies in the UK, shortly followed by the second litter born in Finland. These two initiatives are in close liaison and are extremely similar in all respects although the BFF project is a little behind in terms of time frame and there are many steps to follow before the project can go forward. Having now seen presentations on both these projects I am impressed by both.

As BMD Breed Health CoOrdinator at the KC BHC meeting in September 25, I was amongst those treated to a very thorough and compelling presentation by Sharon Springel, the long time Leonberger Breed Health CoOrdinator, explaining the LeoGen project and if you want to know more I recommend taking a look at this project and the video of the presentation which has been made available on line via the web site https://www.leogen.org. (Yes, the technical quality could be better but don’t let that put you off – it’s the content that counts). For convenience and reference this will also be mentioned and linked on our club web site as will any updates from the Norwegian project as it develops.

As Sharon clearly explained to us there is a well established and structured approach to this process involving several generations of crossing and not crossing. It is absolutely not, for example, simply a matter of someone deciding to do it, picking a breed to cross with, finding a stud dog, having a litter and sending the subsequent offspring out into the breed to scatter their genes randomly within the breed to see what results and then maybe focus on the ones who look the most ‘Bernesey’. There is a rigid plan for selecting and specifically crossing the hybrid dogs back into the breed in a very specific and controlled way over several generations, working towards the point where the offspring are allowed back onto the main breed register and are free to be used as normal breeding dogs.

Apparently the, (understandable), first question almost everyone asks is “what breeds will we be using?” and like the Leonbergers have already planned out, BFF plan to use 3 breeds but had not yet discussed what these will be as there is much work to do and questions to answer before any commitment can be made.

However, before you can even start to think about dogs to use you have to get the relevant expertise and experience into your thinking processes and you need to know you can take a collaborative approach across the breed. You need to have a very clear evidenced idea of your own issues you need to make lots of decisions about what you are looking for and just as importantly what you absolutely don‘t want to bring in. Breeds you consider need to be looked at carefully and ALL their own issues and how they might combine with yours evaluated and then the individual dogs you use within those breeds subjected to the same level of scrutiny. You need to get your Kennel Club involved as the puppies will need to be registered in some way and our RKC have started the Development Register to assist breeds taking this direction. You also need a DNA analysis company’s support for regular status checking.

The overall aim is to get the resulting dogs, with the much better genetic background, back into the overall gene pool and producing dogs for the breed register. Once the basic decisions have been considered you then need to engage with the breeders and owners and hopefully get a big majority of them in support, informed, consulted and positively engaged with the process before you can even start to take it forward.

I will just mention a few more of Sharon’s points which will totally apply to our breed’s project. One was about the purpose of such a project for the breed. It is not to change the breed but to preserve it and make it healthier and longer living, when the project is completed, over several generations, the resulting dogs should not look any different to the existing dogs but have a much better genetic status. In other words, and this is possibly the most important thing to understand, the aim is to improve the Genotype, not change the Phenotype. In other words when the project’s activities are complete the breed will look, sound and act the same but generally be more healthy with ‘hybrid vigour’ due to having a much more diverse set of genes.

On the same point in Helsinki, Kjersti quoted Carol Beuchat, PhD:

“Crossbreeding does not threaten breed preservation. In fact, crossbreeding is one of the most powerful tools available to protect a breed’s genetic health and long-term viability.”

Sharon also said that some people within the breed find it difficult to accept the prospect of any change and ran through a list of objections they had been forced to confront. One of which was the sentiment that the Leonberger should be left how nature intended them to be. Part of the response was this slide!

The slide also makes a broader point by reminding us that all dog breeds are entirely manufactured by man’s interventions from the original specification. So surely it is also the case that when the unforeseen long term effects of that intervention are found to be causing gradually intensifying problems we have to accept the responsibility to change things and improve the problems we are causing, even if the best way to address them might be considered quite radical by traditional thinkers.

In discussion following the presentation it was clarified that the LeoGen project will take at least ten years before the results can be properly assessed, maybe 20 years for a full assessment, which is another good reason why a good development team is needed in charge of the project and it cannot just be left to individuals. People will come and go over these long periods so there has to be a clear long term plan in place along with the ongoing support and understanding and control to follow it.

The Norwegian BFF project is obviously of major interest to our breed and I will report further on it as and when I can. I have been in touch for updates since the presentation in Finland. However, it will also be of great interest and educational to watch how LeoGen develops as a pretty close guide to how our breed’s project will most likely go and to get answers to some of the questions our breed haven’t got to the point of asking yet.

Having listened to both presentations and the ensuing discussions, my thoughts are that it seems we have no logical choice as a breed other than to embrace this principle and hope, in time, it invigorates our breed. On reflection I think it was perhaps a sign of the times that despite there being many breeders in the rooms for the discussion on both presentations I cannot remember one voice of dissent or question of the validity of or need for these projects.

I won’t be around to see the eventual results but I really think we have a responsibility to invest in the future by being in favour of this initiative for the Bernese Mountain Dog. The people undertaking this seem really well informed, motivated, sensible and above all passionate about making our breed’s long term future outlook better and I don’t think anyone can seriously argue that it would not do our breed a great service to ‘improve the Genotype, without changing the Phenotype’.

Definitely a ‘Watch this space” situation which I, and no doubt my successors, will be reporting on more in the coming years with an important, if not absolutely vital, part to play in our breed’s future.