Rules and Guidelines

General

TBA is intended for real animals and not fictitious ones, or future litters. The information on any particular animal must be correct and relevant to that particular animal. It is not permitted to include advertisements or litter announcements of any kind.

It is not possible to pre-screen all the user-contributed content. Please let us know if you come across material that you feel is inappropriate under these guidelines or breaches our terms of use. Use the "Report issue" links to do so.

We cannot take responsibility for the content that our users share via The Breed Archive. However, we do reserve the right to remove any postings that disregard these guidelines or breach our Terms of use. We reserve the right to ban users who commit serious violations or offences.

Important note: Any information you provide on animals and persons is public and can be modified and distributed by others. By submitting or posting content in our community, you expressly grant The Breeds Archive the rights laid down in the Terms of use.

These guidelines may be subject to modification. Please check for updates on a regular basis.

Animal entries

The Breed Archive for Belgian Shepherds is exclusively for provably pure-bred dogs registered with internationally recognised registries of purebred Belgian Shepherds. To keep our archive clear and reliable we cannot allow dogs without papers or mixes (except for ancient ancestors of the breed).

For most of the world this means that the dogs must be registered with their national registry, ie with participating members of the FCI (Fédération Cynologique Internationale). Exceptions to this are the United Kingdom and its territories, the United States of America, and Canada. In the UK, the Kennel Club (KC) is the only acceptable registry for purebred dogs. Dogs bred in the Republic of Ireland, and several of the Channel Islands may be registered with the authorities in those locations that are linked by agreement with either the Kennel Club or the FCI. Canadian dogs must be registered with the Canadian Kennel Club (CKC).

Some countries employ a different approach, breeders not being required to register the full litter or each individual dog. In accordance with the American Kennel Club’s 'eligible for registration' requirement, we take the position that if any one dog in a litter is registerable, every dog in the litter is registerable. Even if a breeder, or the new owner choose not to register a particular dog, the dog in question remains a purebred Belgian Shepherd and is therefore eligible for inclusion on the Breed Archive.

Images

Images uploaded to TBA must not be protected by any third party copyright and must not include identifiable people (other than yourself)!

If you have images that you would like to upload to TBA, you must check that you have permission to publish them in this way. If you are not the rights owner and you do not know for certain that the photographer has been dead for 70 years, then you will need explicit permission to publish.

If you find an image on a website, please check with the site owner first before uploading the image. Remember that site owners may not own the copyright to images they make available and that you may need to make other enquiries in order to use them.

Names

Make sure you spell names correctly.

Please apply the general rules of capitalisation in English; in titles (i.e. animals' names and kennels' or studs' names), this means capitalising:

• the first word
• proper nouns
• all "important" words - nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, i.e. all words except "a","an", "the", "this", "of", "and", "or", "de la", "from", "but", "to", etc.

Please do not spell the names of animals all upper or lower case due to readability reasons!

Titles

Titles are not part of an animal's name. So please do not add the titles of an animal as prefix or suffix to its registered name!

Wrong: Ch Pencloe Dutch Gold
Correct: Pencloe Dutch Gold

A number of negative side effects occur if you add titles as part of an animal's registered name. For example, the animal can then no longer be found in alphabetical listings, etc.

There are dedicated possibilities for entering animals' titles, irrespective of whether they are prefix and suffix titles.

Health information

We offer a feature that allows you to enter health information for a particular animal. This information is stored with other animal data (name, date of birth, country of birth, sire, dam, ...…) and visible to every user of the website.

Recording health issues with a particular breed is important for the future of the breed and maybe even for its survival.

Please be aware that health information is sensitive data. It may only be entered by the owner or breeder of the animal, by someone with the explicit approval and authorisation of the owner or breeder, or if it has been published previously by a reliable source. Any information of this nature must be supported by a diagnosis or test results from a legitimate veterinarian or laboratory. Without a diagnosis or test results, health data will exceptionally be accepted if there is a good and comprehensible reason for attributing certain health information to the animal.

Conduct

Please behave as you would expect others to behave towards you when using The Breed Archive

• Do not harass, abuse or threaten other users.
• Do not post content that is vulgar, hateful, sexually explicit, illegal or offensive.
• Do not post commercial messages, fee-for-service postings, advertising, spam, junk mail or related links, etc.
• Do not post material that is protected by copyright without the permission of the copyright owner.
• Do not impersonate any individual, business or other entity.
• Most importantly: Enjoy the benefits of a great community and contribute to the archive anytime and anywhere

We reserve the right to delete content that is in breach of our Terms of use, if necessary, without notice in order to preserve the integrity of the website.