How the scores work

TheBreedList covers 45 dog breeds across 8 breed groups, with 26 head-to-head matchups and 204 screened health conditions recorded between them. Breed research tends to fail in two directions at once. The official breed pages describe every dog as devoted and eager to please, which is true and useless. The owner threads describe every dog as either perfect or a catastrophe, which is also true and also useless. Neither format tells you that a breed needs 150 minutes of hard exercise a day and will dismantle your house on the day it gets forty.

10 traits on one scale

Each breed carries 10 scores from 1 to 5 — energy, trainability, shedding, grooming load, barking, tolerance of children, of other dogs and of cats, suitability for an apartment, and how forgiving the breed is for somebody's first dog. They are compiled from published kennel-club breed standards and national breed-club documentation and then normalised against each other, which is the part that matters: a 4 for shedding has to mean the same on a Husky page as on a Corgi page or the column is decoration. Exercise is recorded in minutes rather than adjectives, from 30 to 150 a day across the catalogue, because “needs vigorous daily exercise” appears on the breed standard for dogs two hours apart in reality. Where no published standard states a figure — and lifespan ranges and adult weights for the rarer breeds are where this bites — the field is left empty rather than borrowed from a breed of roughly similar size.

A score describes a population, not the dog in front of you

This is the limit worth stating plainly. Breeding lines pull hard in opposite directions — a working-line Shepherd and a show-line Shepherd are close to different animals with the same name, and the gap between a field Labrador and a bench Labrador is larger than the gap between some breeds. Every breed also produces individuals who ignore the average entirely. A score here is a starting bracket for a conversation with a breeder or a rescue, not a prediction about a specific puppy, and no number on this site can substitute for meeting the parents.

The health lists are a set of questions

The health entries are conditions a breed is disposed to and that careful breeders screen for. They are not a forecast that your dog will develop them, and nothing here is veterinary advice. The useful way to read that list is as the test results to ask a breeder to put in front of you — hip and elbow scores, an eye certificate, a cardiac clearance — and as the reason a breeder who cannot produce them is cheaper. Puppy prices are typical asking ranges from breeders who do that testing, which is why they sit well above the figure a breed-specific rescue asks for a dog of the same breed.

Where the owner complaints come from

There is no kennel here, and nobody on this site has raised 45 breeds. The pros and cons on each page are summarised from public owner discussion — breed-specific owner communities, long-term write-ups, and the “is this breed right for me” threads that breed clubs and rescues answer over and over — and are labelled as owner sentiment. Something earns a bullet when hundreds of owners raise it independently: the same 5am zoomies, the same destroyed baseboards in month four, the same bill for the same surgery at the same age. 45 breeds also carry the specific questions prospective owners keep asking about them.

What is deliberately absent

No puppies are sold here, no breeders are listed, and no kennel, rescue or brand pays for a position in any ranking or matchup — there is nothing on this site that money can move. Breeds are also not ranked against each other overall, because “best breed” is not a real question. The matchups pick a winner only for a described owner in described circumstances, and a fair number of them conclude that both dogs are wrong if you are out of the house eleven hours a day.

Who maintains it

Two people, working on it around other jobs. There is no office and nobody on a payroll. The catalogue spans breeds ranked 1 to 97 in national registrations, so it is a selection rather than a registry — a breed missing from here is missing because nobody has written it up yet, not because it was judged unworthy.

When this was last reviewed

The breed data was last reviewed on August 24, 2026. Registration rankings move every year, price brackets drift, and screening recommendations change as breed clubs update them. A trait score that does not match what owners of that breed consistently report is worth telling us about — it is a defect in this data, not a position being defended.