Who is responsible for this
The Breed Report is published by a small independent team. We are not veterinarians and we do not present ourselves as any. What we do is find the veterinary research that already exists, extract the figures accurately, state the population each was measured in, and refuse to publish a number we cannot source. Every figure is re-verified against a committed copy of its source by a script that fails the build if anything disagrees.
Editorial responsibility sits with us as the publisher, and one address reaches us for everything: the contact form. Corrections get answered.
What we publish
What it costs to own each of 100 dog breeds, across a measured lifespan, plus the health risks documented for that breed. Every figure carries a confidence grade and a citation, and the two are reported separately rather than added together.
Where the numbers come from
Lifespan for all 100 breeds comes from peer-reviewed research measuring age at death across hundreds of thousands of dogs, not from breed-standard ranges. Health figures come from published veterinary studies, screening registries and large owner surveys. 66 of 100 breeds have research measured in that breed specifically, 31 of them from clinical records or a large US study; the remaining 34 carry rates measured across the whole dog population, labeled as such on the row. Costs come from a study of veterinary pricing covering every US state.
What each figure can and cannot tell you
Different studies measure different things, and they are not interchangeable. A screening registry reports the dogs breeders chose to submit. An owner survey reports what owners noticed. Clinical records report what a vet actually treated. We store which kind each figure is and show it beside the number, rather than converting them all into one tidy statistic. Every figure also states the population it came from, so you can judge how far it travels.
How figures are graded
A is a peer-reviewed prevalence figure from a large primary-care population. B needs a conversion or comes from a single market. C is a referral population, breed club survey, or claims data. D is an estimate, is never presented as fact, and is labeled wherever it appears. Veterinary prices come from a commissioned study of every US state. The weakest inputs are now the purchase price and the retail assumptions for supplies and boarding, and each breed page states what share of its total rests on those rather than on measured prices.
What we refuse to do
We do not publish a number we cannot source. A condition with no published rate contributes nothing to a total rather than contributing a guess, which is why some pages show less than others. We do not present odds ratios as percentages. We publish what a breed is protected against alongside what it is prone to. And we do not publish an insurance break-even, because working one out would need the expected-health-cost model we withdrew.
How this is paid for
Some links are paid and are labeled at the point of the link. An advertiser cannot buy a change to a figure, removal of a health finding, placement in a cost table, or a different breed ranking. See our disclosure.
We are not making money here, and that is not modesty. Any revenue goes straight back into the site: research access, hosting, image licensing, the time it takes to extract figures from papers properly. On the balance of it we spend more than comes in. That is a choice, and it is worth stating because it explains why nothing here is arranged to move you toward a purchase.
Corrections
If you have a source that contradicts something here, send it through our contact page. We check it against our own sources, and if you are right the figure changes, an audit re-verifies everything that depended on it, and the correction is noted on the page. We would rather be corrected than be wrong.