The Breed Standard, Read Five Ways: AKC, UKC, FCI, France & Canada

Spend a winter evening reading the breed standards for the Wirehaired Pointing Griffon and you come away with an odd feeling — like listening to five old men describe the same dog they all loved, each remembering him a little differently. One swears he stood two-and-twenty inches at the shoulder. Another measures him in centimeters and docks half an inch off the top. One will throw a dog out of the ring for a bad hip; another never mentions it. They are all describing the Griffon. They simply do not agree on every line of him.

That is not sloppiness. It is history. The breed was built in one place, refined in another, and adopted by kennel clubs on two continents that each kept their own books. If you want the story of how that happened, read how Korthals made the breed and how France saved and spread it. This article is the companion to those: a clear, side-by-side reading of what the five governing standards actually say — the American Kennel Club, the United Kennel Club, the Fédération Cynologique Internationale, the Club Français du Griffon Korthals, and the Canadian Kennel Club — where they line up, and where a perfectly correct dog under one book would be marked down under another.

Five Documents, One Dog

Before comparing lines, it helps to know who wrote what, and when. France is the breed’s country of origin, so the FCI standard is the parent document — the one all the others descend from. The definitive standard was first adopted on November 15, 1887; the Club Français was founded in 1901 and added “Korthals” to the breed name in 1951. The American and Canadian books came later and drifted, in places, from the original.

Source: standard documents published by the AWPGA, UKC, FCI, Club Français du Griffon Korthals, and the CKC.

Where All Five Agree

Strip away the national accents and a single, unmistakable dog stands underneath. On the things that make a Griffon a Griffon, the five books speak with one voice.

If you only ever read one standard, you would still recognize a correct Griffon in any country on earth. The disagreements are real, but they live at the edges — in the inches, the docking, and the disqualifications. That is where it gets interesting.

The Inches Don’t Line Up

Here is the divergence that catches breeders by surprise. The American standard measures in inches and runs a little taller; the European and Canadian standards measure in centimeters and cap out lower. The gap is small — about a centimeter — but it is real, and it sits right at the top of the range.

Read the top of those ranges carefully. The AKC’s ceiling for a male is 24 inches — 61 cm — which is a full centimeter above the FCI and CKC maximum of 60 cm. Put plainly: a 24-inch male can be a perfectly correct, even prizewinning dog under the AKC, and that same dog would be over-height — outside the standard — in a French confirmation ring. Run the other direction and the UKC’s 21½-inch minimum sits below the AKC’s 22-inch floor, so a small, FCI-legal dog could be marked under-size by the AKC. The breed Korthals built has not changed; the rulers measuring it have.

Source: heights as published by the AWPGA, UKC, FCI No. 107, the Club Français, and the CKC.

The Tail: How Much Comes Off

Tail docking is the next place the books part company — and it tells you something about the cultures behind them. The AKC docks the most aggressively. The European and Canadian standards take far less, and two of them explicitly refuse to penalize a dog wearing the tail it was born with, a nod to the many countries where docking is now banned outright.

The AKC is the outlier, allowing up to half the tail to come off. The other four cluster tightly around one-third, with the European standards permitting as little as a quarter. If you are choosing a docked length for a litter, this is the line to know: a dock that satisfies the AKC could be longer than an FCI judge prefers, and shorter than what a docking-free country would even allow.

The Disqualifications: This Is Where the Books Truly Diverge

A disqualification is the standard’s hard line — the fault that doesn’t cost points but removes the dog from competition entirely. Compare the five DQ lists and you find the widest gap of all. The AKC names just two. The Canadian and French books name many. And the FCI — the parent of them all — names neither black coat nor a bad nose, leaving them excluded only by implication.

Source: disqualification lists from the AWPGA, UKC, FCI, the Club Français, and the CKC (cross-checked against the CKC disqualifications booklet).

The Telling Smaller Differences

A few quieter divergences are worth knowing, because they reveal what each registry chose to emphasize.

“Brown” versus “liver.” The AKC calls the color brown or chestnut; the UKC calls it liver throughout; the FCI and CKC hedge with “brown (liver)”; the French say marron. These are five words for one pigment — a translation difference, not a real one. Don’t let a vocabulary gap convince you the dogs are different.

The gallop. The FCI and French standards explicitly name the gallop as the breed’s primary hunting gait, with a “catlike” stalk as the dog walks up game. The AKC and CKC describe only the trot. The UKC has no gait section at all. It is a small line that captures a real difference in field culture — the continental view of a dog that ranges and gallops, versus the close-working trot emphasized in North American show language.

Webbed feet. Only the AKC explicitly names “tightly closed webbed toes” — a tip of the hat to the breed’s water-retrieving work. The others simply ask for round, tight, well-arched feet. The webbing is there in the dog regardless; the AKC just chose to write it down.

So Which Standard Is “Right”?

None of them, and all of them. The FCI standard is the original and the most recently revised, so it carries the most authority on what Korthals intended. But the AKC standard governs the ring most American owners will ever enter, and the breed it describes is unmistakably the same dog. A serious breeder reads them together — treating the FCI as the constitution and the national standards as the local statutes — and breeds to the dog all five agree on: the steel-grey, brown-nosed, harsh-coated, square-headed, foot-hunter’s gun dog with the beard full of burrs and the heart of a house pet.

If you want to see how those written lines become real decisions — titles, registries, and proof of quality — the rest of the Heritage & Registries series walks every path: which registry to choose, the French cotation system, the national breed community, and the clubs we train with in Montana. And if you would rather know what all of this feels like to live with, read about the Griff life — the same standard, walking around your kitchen.

Five clubs, two continents, a hundred and thirty years — and still, when a good Griffon walks into the room, every one of those books would know him on sight. That is the mark of a breed worth getting right.