Dog Family Tree
Help build your dogs family tree.
All dogs in the EU by law have to have a microchip assigned to them with a unique number. This number is used to help find owners if your pet has been lost. Another advantage of this chip however is that if you know the microchip number of the partents you can start to link them together and you can build a family tree.
But why would I want to know my dogs family tree? Firstly its a bit of fun, oftentimes dogs can come from
places you don't expect, either from just around the corner or far reaching places or somewhere in between.
Keeping track of this info can help you see the connections between different dogs, their histories and how
they ended up in your possion.
Secondly, responsible breeding. Having bred dogs in the past one big hurdle I came up against was ensuring
the bloodlines are complatable (.ie that they are not too closely related). In Ireland the population size
of certain breeds is quite small and the gene pool can be surprisingly shallow and there isn't a great way
to quickly identify if two dogs are related without doing some digging with the current owners. The hope of
this system is that you can simply put in the mirochip number of either dog and quickly see if they are
related. If you don't know the microchip number of a parent you can tick the "unknown" box and the dog will
be added without a parent-child link, this will impact the acuracy of the family tree.
But wait what about pedigry and the Irish Kennel club, doesn't that do the same thing? Yes and no, the IKC is a great organisation and can tell you if two dogs are closely related, the problem with it though is that it is quite exclusive, both parents of the dog must be members for a dog to be able to join (not 1 parent, both), in reality there are a lot of dogs in Ireland that don't meet this criteria but are still healthy well bred dogs. This system is meant to bridge that issue by allowing all dogs to be registered.
The email address provided must be acurate as it will be used to contact you about the status of your submission and whether there are any issues with the information provided. Failing to provide a valid email address may result in your dog not being added to the database.
The key info that is needed is the microchip number of the dog, even if you don't know the microchip
number of the parents you can still input some of the dogs details and if your dog has puppies or if
another relative is registered they could always be linked in the future.
There is some other information that is useful to know that is captured such as the date of birth,
colour, coat pattern, location of birth, breeder, etc. This is meant to help identify interesting aspects
of the dogs history without being intrusive. The more information the better but some may not want to
provide all of the details and that is okay.
Bonus fun info, you can add two picture of your dog, we've set it up so you can add a puppy photo and a
fully grown photo but thats up to you. If your dog is still a pup not to worry you can contact us in the
future and we'll add it. Why take photos? becuase its fun and they they look cute!
Lastly and importantly the goal of this was to setup a system that is free and where you don't need to register/create an account, everyone has enough accounts and passwords to manage these days. The work around however is that I need a valid email address to contact you about the dog in case there is an issue and to inform you about the status of your submission. I will have to review each submission and so if I don't have a valid email address that may result in your dog not being added to the database.
If you've made it this far thank you and I hope you'll be able to use and maybe even contribute to the project!