Four reasons, none of them accidental
Britain has roughly a tenth of America's dogs and several times its published breed epidemiology. That gap has specific causes.
Nobody built the plumbing
VetCompass works because the Royal Veterinary College spent years building a system to harvest anonymized clinical records from thousands of UK primary-care practices and treat the result as a public good. It now underpins most of the breed research on this site.
No American equivalent was ever built. Roughly 30,000 US practices run on a scatter of different practice-management systems, and there is no widely adopted standard for coding a diagnosis. Even with full cooperation there would be no shared corpus to query.
Almost no American dogs are insured
This is the quiet one. An insurer's book is an accidental national health registry: every claim is a dated, coded record of something that actually happened to a specific breed.
Agria can publish breed-level morbidity across 327 breeds because nearly every Swedish dog is on their books. No American insurer has anything close, and the small insured minority is heavily self-selected: younger owners, urban, higher income, disproportionately expensive breeds. Even that slice would not represent American dogs.
The largest dataset went quiet
Banfield Pet Hospital holds clinical records on more than 13 million dogs, which dwarfs anything in Europe. The major published paper from it reports life expectancy by body size and states plainly that differences between breeds within a size group were not captured.
Banfield is owned by Mars, which also owns VCA, BluePearl, Wisdom Panel and Royal Canin. That data is a commercial asset held by a company that competes on it. There is no obligation to publish, and no particular reason to.
For nine years Banfield did publish. The State of Pet Health Report ran annually from 2011 to 2019, drawing on roughly 2.5 million dogs an edition, and it was the closest thing America had to national companion-animal surveillance. The 2019 edition was the ninth. There has not been a tenth. Source.
Banfield's own State of Pet Health page was last updated in June 2025 and still offers 2019 as the newest report. Seven years have passed. The hospitals kept seeing three million pets a year throughout.
What does still get published shows the shape of what is left. Banfield's 2025 report on antibiotic prescribing analyzed 7.6 million appointments across more than a thousand hospitals. It is careful, useful work. Not one breed appears in it. Source.
That same report states the position plainly, from the company best placed to know: there are currently no national or state-level initiatives to track antibiotic use in veterinary medicine in the United States.
The research money points elsewhere
British and Nordic veterinary epidemiology is largely charity and publicly funded. The lifespan figure on all 100 breed pages here came from work funded by Dogs Trust, a welfare charity, for no commercial return.
American veterinary research money skews heavily toward industry, which buys clinical trials for products rather than population surveillance. Counting how often Golden Retrievers develop cancer serves nobody's commercial interest, so largely nobody counts.
The tell is the Dog Aging Project
It is the best American breed data that exists, and it works by recruiting owners one at a time and asking them to fill in surveys. That is why it covers tens of thousands of dogs where VetCompass covers millions.
You only build a volunteer cohort from scratch when there is no passive source to draw on. Its existence is the clearest evidence of the gap it was created to fill. 26 breeds on this site carry figures from it.
What this means for the numbers you are reading
Every cost on this site is American. Veterinary prices come from a study covering all 50 states, and food, grooming and boarding are computed from US retail rates.
Health research is shown American-first wherever an American study exists. Where it does not, British research appears because it is the best measurement anyone has made, and the page says which population it came from and when it was collected.
We do not convert a British rate into an American one. Breeding lines, veterinary practice and owner behavior differ between countries, and any conversion factor would be invented. A stated British figure is more useful than a fabricated American one.
Across 24 sources on this site, 100 breeds carry at least one British figure and 26 carry American breed-specific research. Every figure states its origin on the row where it appears.
If that changes, this page changes. American breed-level data is slowly improving, and the moment a US study covers a breed properly it will lead on that breed's page. See the full method.