CLAIMS by US websites about a supposed rare Malaysian canine breed, known as the Telomian, are a fallacy designed simply to boost profits of the breeders, the Malaysian Kennel Association (MKA) has said.

“The Telomian Malaysian dog is a myth by some Americans after profit. There is no such breed, it is just a pariah dog,” MKA president Gopi Krishnan told The Malaysian Insight.

According to dog-learn.com, the supposed purebred was discovered in 1963 near the Telom River in Pahang and brought to the United States.

The website states that it is the only Malaysian breed of dog to be bred outside of Malaysia. This claim was supported by other websites making similar assertions.

Gopi however, shot down their arguments, saying that a proper purebred dog needed to be verified by the Federation Cynologique Internationale (FCI) and in this case, the American Kennel Club (AKC).

The FCI is the world’s authority on dogs, and includes 80 members and contract partners that each issue their own pedigrees and train their own judges. The FCI makes sure that the pedigrees and judges are mutually recognised by all members.

“It is not an AKC recognised breed, it is just for profit sold to people who want something exotic,” said Gopi.

“Under FCI rules, any breed of dog to be recognised and classed as a pedigree must have at least 10 to 15 generations of consistent and documented breeding.

“DNA and blood tests are needed to prove that there is a strong commonality between each generation, from the first to the last.

“Appearance wise, the breed in question must also have common identical traits, which have to be verified by outside parties authorised by the FCI.

Gopi said there also had to be a written breed standard that describes every physical detail of the dog.

According to the MKA records, there are 260,963 registered purebred dogs in Malaysia in 2016, verified by the FCI.

“With the spate of designer dogs sold as exotic pets and people wanting something out of the ordinary, I guess anything is possible,” he said in reference to creating a non-existent purebred.

“If it was local, surely we Malaysians would have seen and known about it,” he said.

Malaysian National Animal Welfare Foundation (MNAWF) spokesperson Shrilan Siva said that more research on dogs in Malaysia was needed to prevent further misinformation from spreading.

“There are some statistics on the number of dogs, but I don’t think there are any on breeds,” he said.

“It is tough to determine whether it (the Telomian) is endangered, because there have been no formalised studies on dog populations.”

Shrilan said rare breeds in Malaysia can only be sold or kept as pets with the appropriate licence.

“If it was true (about the purebred status), we should be proudly promoting our local dog, but it looks like all the other strays out there,” he said. – July 28, 2017.