Spanish Mastiff Registration Process in the US

I just wanted to touch briefly on this subject because there appears to be much confusion about registering the Spanish Mastiff (Mastin Espanol) here in the US. To date, there hasn't been a uniform method of dealing with registrations here and we are working on changing that. Some have registered their dogs FCPR (myself included), a few have been registered with the UKC, and my best guess is that many imports have not been registered at all.

What I have discovered over the years is that when a buyer imports a dogs from EU, they will receive an Export Pedigree or application issued by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (which is the World Canine Organisation). FCI includes 86 members and contract partners (one member per country) that each issue their own pedigrees and train their own judges. When new owners get these papers, many believe that the pups are in fact 'registered' and don't realize that those papers are not actually valid here in the US until a few more steps are taken since the United States is not a member country of the Fédération Cynologique Internationale.

When I registered my litters, I sent in the litter registration to the correct federated member of FCI (Federación Canófila de Puerto Rico), they return the individual registration applications for each pup for me to fill out, sign, and forward to the new puppy owners who, in turn, must sign it themselves and return it to FCPR. There is no other way to do this because the new owner is required to fill out certain fields on the application! Otherwise the animal ends up registered to me...

If breeding, the sire of the litter must first be registered with FCPR and then accepted into the FCPR stud book. I learned this by trial and error last year! Luckily when we repeated a successful breeding, all of this was already done so registering our latest litter was almost effortless!

We have already begun the breed recognition process with the AKC and they have now been accepted into the FSS (Foundation Stock Service) so Spanish Mastiff's may now be registered AKC too. I'll write more on this when I have successfully registered mine there as well.

If anyone has any questions about this, feel free to contact me and I will be more than happy to walk you through it.

Lois Jordan
http://www.fallcreekfarm.net