I have never been a fan of the Kennel Club, although I have owned and loved three pure-bred pedigree dogs, all from working gun dog breeds, but its latest announcement regarding the Queens’s corgis have given me cause for a wry smile.

The club, organisers of Crufts, the world biggest dog show, has just announced that the Pembroke Welsh Corgi, the breed which the Queen favours, is in sharp decline with only 241 new born puppies being registered on the pedigree records this year. At this rate, the breed could die out in the near future.

Announcing this, the Kennel Club issued a statement lamenting the fact that British people were behind an “astronomical rise” in the purchase of foreign dogs like French bulldogs and Boston terriers, thus putting the future of traditional British breeds at risk.

And who or what is to blame for this? Could it be that for decades, the Crufts judges had chosen as prize winners creatures that have been so inter-bred to “improve” their looks to make them into fashion items rather than living creatures?

Many suffered from terrible physical or mental harm as a result.

This led to British bulldogs with skin cancers in the folds of their pushed in faces, Alsatians which could barely walks because their hindquarters had been pulled so far back, or golden cockers with a “rage” complex that made them snappy and a danger to children.

In 2009, BBC Television broadcast a savage documentary of these in-breeding practices and gave up televising Crufts. Since then, the Kennel Club has made valiant efforts to bar un-naturally bred animals and have even introduced a category for mongrels. I applaud this but to have the vapours over the import of healthy foreign specimens has them barking up the wrong tree.