I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how a pedigree registry works, and also some misunderstandings about what I wrote in my previous post, so I hope to clarify both.  I think breed registries are important both to working dog breeds and to conformation dog breeds and worth the explanation as to the roles they play and how they function.

To answer Laura's post, yes any dog may be listed as the ancestor of another dog in any registry without the owner's permission.  Certainly this is commonplace.  AKC studbooks list many dogs registered with foreign registries and not registered with AKC, and vice versa with every foreign registry.  These dogs' owners bred to dogs from foreign registries knowing of course that their dogs would appear in the registries of both their own country and the country of the other dog.  Additionally there are many "foundation dogs" listed in the ancestry of new breeds (or old breeds if you go back into the early books) for whom there are sometimes NO registrations at all and often only sketchy information.  What is not allowed is for a registry to knowingly misrepresent information about that dog, ie wrong breed, incorrect registration number, a different owner, wrong color, etc.  

Let's take the Morgan horse and Arabian horse registries as an example here.  There is a fairly new (well new to me, shows how old I am, I guess this registry is about 30 some years old now) Morab registry that registers horses that are a mix of Arabian and Morgan.  Of course many horses not registered as Morabs (purebreds registered with the Arab or Morgan registries)  are listed as ancestors in the pedigree records of this registry, many without permission of the animals' owners.  This is perfectly legitimate providing that these animals are listed with the correct name, breed, breed registry and reg #, owner, etc etc.  If this info is not known than it is also perfectly kosher to list an animal with what info IS known.  It is not acceptable to change existing known info however and the animal's owner could petition the courts to have the false info corrected.

Let's say Jim breeds his registered Morgan stud to a registered Arab mare and the mare's owner registers the resulting foal in the Morab registry.  Let's say the Morab registry has suspicions that Jim's stallion is not a purebred Morgan at all (despite his registration papers) but a cross between a Morgan and an Arabian.  This foal would still be registerable as a Morab if this were true.  However it would be unethical/illegal for the Morab registry when listing Jim's horse as the sire of the foal to list him as a Morgan Arab cross.  If the Morab registry questions the validity of Jim's stud's ancestry, it is incumbant upon them to bring their complaint to the Morgan Horse registry and request an investigation.

On another subject there seems to be a widespread belief that the AKC's records are only as correct as the integrity of owners who register dogs.  To a degree this is the case, but I'm afraid that the AKC is misperceived as being more gullible and powerless to preserve the integrity of their studbook records than is actually the case.  

Certainly there are dogs with impure bloodlines that have slipped through the cracks.  One instance of this would be the very early sheltie breeders who sneaked a number of collie/sheltie crosses into their foundation stock, to the point where nearly all shelties in this country contain 30% to 50% collie blood.  This is the reason why today's shelties are prone to "go oversize" and oversized sheltie(s) can and do occur in any given litter.  These dogs are purebred shelties (at least going by the statute of limitations) although they will not win in the show ring and are most often sold as pets.  And of course the setter and sighthound infusions of blood into the collie breed during the Victorian era is another example.

On the other hand there are cases where the AKC has aggressively taken steps to guard the integrity of their registry.  The Banchory sheltie registration falsifications is a prime example..  It is a story of a partnership gone wrong and a co-owner who refused to allow her partner to breed the co-owned shelties who were in her possession.  The irrate co-owner (who had possession of the dogs) created and registered fictional shelties having the same parentage as the shelties whom she was forbidden to breed (according to the co-ownership contract) and she used these fictional dogs to register litters resulting from the forbidden shelties.  AKC paid this lady an unannounced visit (which they are legally allowed to do to AKC members) and discovered a paper trail of multiple extra "blue slips" (AKC registration applications.)  The "Banchory Kennels lady" had her AKC privileges revoked and a list of corrections of the names of the shelties was published in the studbooks.  I used to keep a copy of this list on my desk when researching older sheltie pedigrees to be sure I got them right.  She had given them similar names, ie "Banchory White Iceing" was actually "Horizon White Ice," "Banchory Turtle Dove" was a renaming of "Banchory Nightingale" and so on.  It was high drama, quite the soap opera, and fascinating reading.

AKC also investigated the pedigree of "Smoke" (whose registered name escapes me at the moment) and who some of the old timers on this list will remember as the lovely bi-black AKC collie.  Smoke's purebred status was called into question by someone when his owner began to exhibit him in the show ring.  The controversy was due to Smoke's color, the result of a recessive gene not seen anymore in modern collies and believed to have vanished from the breed.  AKC did a thorough investigation and verified his purebred status.  

Perhaps the most effective step AKC ever took in preserving the purity of their registry was their decision some 10 or 15 years ago to require dna certification for all frequently used studs.  This decision threw the wholesale pet breeders into a tizzy since this would have sharply curtailed their profits, and because the dna results would probably have revealed much cross breeding.  (It had little effect on hobby breeders who use a stud dog much more infrequently, and who aren't in it for the money.)  The wholesale pet breeders' parent organization (I forget now but something like Missouri Pet Breeders Assoc) held a big meeting and advised all their members to boycott the AKC and to instead register their petshop bound puppies with one of the questionable registries (Continental Kennel Club for instance.)  That meeting resulted in about a 70% drop in sheltie registrations in the AKC stud book the next month and every month and year since. It is rare to find an AKC pup in a pet store today, and that is a blessing for the integrity of AKC pedigree records.

I'm sorry this is so long but I think this is important info to put straight and explain fully for anyone who registers and breeds dogs.  It is a remarkable thing that AKC collies can be traced back through the pages of the AKC studbooks  to the early Kennel Club (UK) studbooks all the way back to Ch Trefoil, a tri-color, born 1873, the very first registered rough collie, and even the names of his parents and grandparents.  Fascinating stuff.  The same criteria applies to all other registries as well, both for conformation dogs and for working dogs. Some live up to it (ie Canadian Kennel Club, The North American Sheepdog Society, and others) while some do not (Continental Kennel Club, America's Pet Registry, Inc, and other "registries" currently used by the wholesale pet producers for pet shop pups of questionable breeding.)