American Spaniel Club Inc. - Home of the Cocker Spaniel

Cocker Spaniel-Comprehensive Breed Health Survey Project
Advancing the Quality of Life for ALL Cocker Spaniels.

The Cocker is a rugged, happy dog who fits well into a variety of human lifestyles. The smallest of the sporting spaniels, today’s Cocker can be a beautiful show dog, hard-working hunting companion, and a devoted housedog.

Despite their general good health, we need to be sure we guard the future of our breed too. To do this we developed our Cocker Spaniel-Comprehensive Breed Health Survey that provides us with a picture of the overall well being of Cockers around the world.

The Survey was redesigned and now allows you to retrieve and update your Cockers’ health records whenever something changes, or you’ve completed a health, screening test.

You enter your Cocker’s individual information once and then you can add new information without redoing the initial part. All of your dogs are linked to your Personal Identification Number (PIN) and your information so you only enter your own information once too.

When you enter your Cocker’s health information, you help us learn what problems affect Cocker Spaniels most often and if there are regions or countries where certain conditions are more common.

The data is entirely confidential. No one sees your dogs’ information except you and our independent data management firm. All identifying information is taken out of summary reports before they are given to our project veterinarian advisor, Dr. Chet Thomas, DVM, an epidemiologist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.

Dr. Thomas receives the health information as a group of numbers that he then analyzes in an annual summary report. Our first report showed us our system to take in the data, store it and move it through to the analysis, worked. Our first Summary Report was presented in January at the ASC Flushing Spaniel Show in Philadelphia, and is available now on this site. The report covers the first eight weeks of the project.

All Cocker owners are encouraged to participate. You don’t have to be a member of the American Spaniel Club. To enter one dog for the first time takes about 20 minutes. If you are an ASC member, you received your PIN in the mail from Larry Hopkins. Store it in a safe place. If you are not a member, you created your PIN yourself, and need to make it unique and store it in a safe place. Our goal is to have 1000 Cockers in the database by April 2005. If your Cocker was alive on, or born after January 2001, take a few minutes and enter them in the Survey.

It is an action you take now, that will help to preserve and safeguard the breed in the future. Click Take the Survey to leave the ASC website and go to the Elements Software Engineering site where you can complete the Online CS-CBHS.