While the first installment examined blind spots in the field — limits, inspections, and exports — this second part looks at the other side of the equation:
the clubs, officials, and oversight bodies that are supposed to keep the system intact, yet often create room for circumventing it.
Blind Spot No. 4: Conflicts of Interest Inside Breed Clubs
In smaller breed clubs, it’s not uncommon for a single individual to hold multiple roles at once:
- club official,
- breeder,
- FCI judge,
- breeding advisor,
- show organizer.
Such a concentration of authority creates openings for:
- shaping rules to suit certain breeders,
- skewing the balance between ordinary members and “elite” kennels.
The fact that the owner of Balihara Ranch is an FCI judge and for many years served as a breeding advisor in the Slovak Club of Swiss Mountain Dogs does not violate any formal regulations.
But it is a conflict of interest — one that a transparent system should be equipped to restrain.
Blind Spot No. 5: Exceptions That Don’t Look Accidental
The newest example:
Two breeding advisors have been assigned to the owner of Balihara Ranch for 2025–2026.
Across the entire advisor-to-breeder allocation in the Slovak Club of Swiss Mountain Dogs, this is the only such case.
A club does not make a decision like this without a reason.
It suggests an extraordinary administrative burden — that the standard “one advisor per breeder” model no longer suffices.
It is an exception that:
- confirms the extreme volume of work,
- illustrates that the club already has to “quietly adjust the rules,”
- and exposes a structural weakness in a system unable to absorb high-volume breeding operations through traditional mechanisms.
Exceptions of this kind also show that the traditional governance model can no longer keep pace with kennels whose scale exceeds the normal capacity of breed-club structures.
Blind Spot No. 6: The Role of the Slovak Cynological Union (SKJ)
The Slovak Cynological Union (SKJ) is supposed to serve as the top oversight authority for dog breeding in Slovakia, where Balihara Ranch operates.
In practice, however, it:
- does not monitor the number of dogs in kennels,
- does not address welfare,
- does not impose limits on the number of litters,
- does not carry out unannounced inspections,
- and in exports focuses almost exclusively on paperwork.
The result is an environment in which a single kennel can:
- produce hundreds of puppies a year,
- function simultaneously as an export hub,
- and still operate under the same conditions as a small family breeder.
Yet the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI) holds enough authority to establish frameworks for responsible breeding — recommended litter limits, welfare rules, or independent inspections. Until it does, the system remains open to extremes that its current structure is incapable of absorbing.
These club-level and organizational blind spots complete the picture of a system that cannot cope with high-volume breeding operations.
A Problem That Can Only Be Solved Systemically
The extreme output of a single kennel is not the failure of one person alone.
Cases like the kennel Balihara Ranch illustrate that it is the consequence of a system that:
- has no limits,
- has no oversight,
- has no feedback mechanisms,
- and has no safeguards against conflicts of interest.
Until these blind spots disappear, it will remain possible for one kennel to dominate a breed, saturate its gene pool, strain club infrastructure, and still be classified as “fully compliant.”
This article is therefore an invitation not to search for culprits, but to search for solutions.
Because a system that cannot protect dogs will not protect the people who buy them either.
And only systemic reform can prevent similar situations from recurring in the future.
This article is published in two parts. If you have not read Part I, you can find it here: When the System Stops Protecting Dogs:The Blind Spots in the FCI System and Breed Clubs That Enable Extreme-Scale Breeding (Part I)