Not a Marketplace No Pay-for-Placement No Listing Fees No Buyer Fees Annual Re-Verification
Line illustration of two Labrador puppies

Built By

A breeder and a buyer
who met at the same problem.

FN
Co-Founder · Breeder

Fabian Negron

Owner, Gallivant Labradors
Pocono Mountains, PA

Decades of breeding and working alongside other programs showed him which breeders do it the right way — and after thousands of buyer calls, he saw how much time the best ones spend just explaining what quality really means.

AD
Co-Founder · Buyer

Adam Donahue

First-time Labrador owner
New York, NY

Before Adam and his wife found Brutus, the dog of a lifetime, they spent months and long conversations only to find out they were being led astray by low-quality or unethical breeders.

Line illustration of a man crouching beside his Labrador

The Problem & The Solution

A market built on bold claims. A standard that filters them out.

Many breeder websites make claims about pedigree and health that are misleading or inaccurate, and many first-time buyers fall for the trap. LINEAGE has created a set of standards used by the best breeders in the world.

Bred to three or more champions in the last 5 years.

An AKC Champion title requires 15 points and two majors — no small feat. Many breeders claim "champion lines" when they bred to one champion four generations back. We require three or more in the last five years.

CHGCH

Complete health clearances and AKC registration.

"Vet-checked" isn't enough. We require hips, elbows, eyes (CAER), cardiac evaluation, and genetic testing — plus active AKC registration. All records pulled directly from OFA and AKC databases.

HipsElbowsCAERCardiacGeneticAKC

Only the breeders who earn it.

High-volume, slickly marketed programs now charge what serious breeders charge — without doing the work behind it. LINEAGE only lists programs verified against the standard, so what you pay reflects what's actually been done.

Not a MarketplaceRe-verified Annually
One additional mark

The Active Showing badge.

Breeders who have personally shown a Labrador in an AKC event within the last 12 months earn this badge. It isn't required to be listed — but it signals a program currently in the ring, evaluated against the standard in real time.

Actively Shown · 2026
Line illustration of a person and their Labrador among wildflowers

The Mission

Make the right breeders findable, and the wrong ones irrelevant.

LINEAGE isn't a review site, a marketplace, or a lead-gen tool. It's a directory of breeders who meet a single standard, verified annually, and presented honestly — so serious families can find serious breeders without spending four months sorting through the noise.

Line illustration of a person walking two Labradors

The Directory

Verified breeders, coming soon.

We're verifying the first programs against the standard right now — full health clearances, champion records, and active AKC registration, each confirmed at the source. Listings go live as breeders clear verification, and the list stays short on purpose.

The first programs are being verified now.

I'm a breeder, I meet the criteria, and I'd like to request an invitation.
Tell us what you're looking for and we'll reach out the moment the directory opens.
I.Our Story

Two sides of the same frustration.

LINEAGE is built by a breeder and a buyer who met, independently, at the same problem — from opposite ends.

We kept meeting families who'd spent six months looking, paid thousands for a puppy, and still ended up with a dog that shouldn't have been bred. The breeders doing it right were getting drowned out. That's what LINEAGE is for.

The Labrador market has a quality problem that's easy to miss. Thousands of programs advertise "champion bloodlines" on the strength of one great-great-grandfather four generations back. Health clearances get skipped, faked, or quietly substituted — "vet-checked" in place of OFA-certified. Prices have crept up to legitimate breeder rates without the work behind them.

The breeders producing structurally-sound, fully-cleared, champion-bred Labradors — the ones writing ten-page contracts and placing puppies on waitlists that stretch eighteen months — are drowned out on Google by programs running on volume and marketing.

LINEAGE applies a single filter. If a breeder meets the Standard, they're listed. If they don't, they aren't. Breeders pay nothing to be on it, and the directory takes no pay-for-placement from anyone.

FN
Co-Founder · Breeder

Fabian Negron

Owner, Gallivant Labradors

Fabian has spent more than a decade building Gallivant Labradors in the Pocono Mountains into one of the most respected English Labrador programs in the country — producing Best in Specialty Show winners and Westminster qualifiers whose pedigrees now appear in breeding programs from New England to California.

But the longer he's spent inside the breed, the more clearly he's seen what buyers on the outside are up against: a market flooded with programs cutting every corner he's spent over a decade refusing to cut. Fabian started LINEAGE because the breeders doing it the right way — full clearances, real show records, transparent contracts — deserve to be findable, and because quality matters more than quantity.

Quality over quantity isn't a marketing line. It's the entire job.
AD
Co-Founder · Buyer

Adam Donahue

First-time Labrador owner

Adam came at it from the other side. When he set out to buy his first Labrador, he expected the decision to take a weekend. Months and a stack of dead-end phone calls later, he was still searching — wading through Facebook listings, "breeder" websites with no health records, and classified ads asking twelve hundred dollars for a dog that would need eight thousand of vet work by age five.

By the time he finally found the right program, he'd become accidentally expert at the process: the questions worth asking, the clearances worth demanding, the breeders worth waiting for. LINEAGE is the platform he wishes had existed the day he started looking.

The information exists. It's just not in one place — until now.

Shows

The show schedule, coming soon.

A calendar of AKC conformation shows where LINEAGE-verified breeders will be competing this season. Plan a trip, meet a program in person, watch a Labrador work.

Store

The store, coming soon.

Curated products for Labrador owners — leads, collars, training gear, beds, and books — selected by the breeders themselves, not by a buyer in an office.

Art

The gallery, coming soon.

Original photography, sporting prints, and commissioned portraiture from artists who know the breed. A rotating gallery, with a portion of each sale supporting LRC rescue.