Naming BEB and other Patch beagles

 

• BEB's Naming Conventions - LEHNER'S and BEBPATCH in dog or puppy names • AKC Kennel-name issues concerning the word "Patch" in a dog's name

BEB's Naming Conventions

LEHNER'S = Our own dogs
For the puppies that we register and train ourselves, whether they've been whelped here or obtained as new puppies from other breeders, our practice is to put John's surname in front of the dog's name, as in the example LEHNER'S BUSTERPATCH (with an apostrophe).  These are our own dogs, although some do get sold at various stages of adulthood.  If you see a dog with LEHNER'S in its name, you know that BEB was its first owner, and we kept it at least long enough to register its name and give it its initial training in our puppy-starting rabbit habitat.  If you wish to know when we sold the dog, you can always find that information here at the website, on the page Previous BEB Dogs.

BEBPATCH = Puppies we've bred
If you purchase a puppy from Bald Eagle Beagles and wish to make its BEB origin clear in its name, we encourage you to put the word BEBPATCH as the first or second word in the dog's full name, as it is registered with the American Kennel Club.  BEBPATCH stands for Bald Eagle Beagles PATCH.

Example: if your name is Smith and you buy one of our pups, and you wish to indicate your ownership, the dog's origin as a BEB Patch, and its given name of Tootsie, then we'd suggest that you register its name with the AKC as SMITH'S BEBPATCH TOOTSIE.  This meets our requirement for the first incentive below, while satisfying the AKC's restrictions on naming a Patch dog (see below for more about this).

The decision to use or not use BEBPATCH in your dog's name is entirely up to you, but we offer two incentives for doing so:

After inquiring to the AKC, here is what we know about this.  This is a general policy affecting all AKC-registered kennel names and all breeds of dogs, although the example below is specific to Patches.

When registering the name of a dog with the American Kennel Club, you cannot use any of the following four words as separate words in your dog's name, unless your pup has come from the registered owner for the kennel name 'Patch', with that kennel's written permission:

The AKC began strictly enforcing this policy in mid-2001, so if you have a Patch hound whose registration is older than that, you are likely to see the separate word PATCH in its AKC-registered name, despite the rule.  Most Patch pedigrees are full of names where PATCH is a separate word, because in the years up to 2001, it was not primarily used to refer to a specific breeder or kennel.

There are, however, some alternatives for naming your Patch dog.  We are not suggesting these as a means of finagling someone else's kennel name - we wouldn't want our name to be usurped, even though we don't qualify to register it because we aren't large enough.  This is not a way to pass dogs off as if they were bred by someone else, which is something we'd never condone.  We encourage Patch owners to specify their own and their breeder's names (or kennel names) in the registered names of their dogs.  That way the path of the bloodline is clear no matter how far back in a pedigree the dog is found.

But we also feel that it's important for all Patch dogs' pedigrees to indicate their Patch blood.  In our opinion, if a breeder has known Patch blood as the basis of his breeding program (clearly seen by the earlier generations in his set of pedigrees), and if he's breeding to continue the recognized Patch traits as laid down by Willet Randall, then in that case the word PATCH has useful meaning beyond just indicating the kennel of the dog's origin.  The AKC's enforcement policy means that there's now a way to tell between a Patch hound that came from the Patch/Capozzi kennel (this dog's name has the separate word PATCH after mid-2001), and one that is a Patch by blood but comes from elsewhere.  This seems like a workable, if somewhat jury-rigged, system to us.  The alternatives are:

Option 1.  You can use the letters P-A-T-C-H as part of another word in your dog's name, as long as those five letters aren't separated at either end by spaces or hyphens as the full word is.  So if your dog would have been called SMITH'S FIDO PATCH, you can register him as SMITH'S FIDOPATCH or SMITH'S PATCHFIDO or even SMITHSPATCH FIDO.  Our BEBPATCH naming incentive described above falls into this category.

Option 2.  You can get creative with the spelling of the word PATCH - as in PATCHE, PACHE, PATCHESS, PATCHIE, or any other variation of that sort (presuming those names aren't registered as well).  In this case you may separate the word with spaces.  You can see numerous variations of this in Patch pedigrees, as it's a common practice that has been in use for a good while.

Option 3.  You can leave out the word PATCH altogether.  In this case it won't be obvious from your dog's name that it is a Patch.  You can usually tell from the ancestors in a dog's pedigree how much Patch blood is in it - however, if everyone followed this practice, eventually the pedigrees would lose their visible documentation of Patch blood, because none of the newer names would show it once the older ones moved farther back and then off of most printed pedigrees.  In our opinion this would be an unfortunate loss of important information, which would be difficult and time-consuming to retrieve later through pedigree research.

We recommend option #1 and discourage option #3.

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