Reply To: Dog DNA tests

[Jennifer]

So you’re on St. Kitts then? That must be an interesting place to be a vet! For some reason, the image links for your dogs aren’t working for me (I think you have to either link to photos in your DA profile, or else post an external link to Imgur or similar). But anyway, I did look up some pics of “St. Kitts brown dogs” and also Googled out of curiosity to see if Embark had any test results for such dogs publicly available, since they test for “American Village Dog” as well as for mixed breeds. They did have some:

Link One
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Link Four

I did also notice results for a couple dogs from St. Kitts who tested as, and looked like, predominantly-pit-type (AmStaff/APBT) multimixes, so that would be more like your dogs, presumably. I’m not sure whether Embark also maintains a disclaimer regarding dogs from outside certain countries. Their “village dog” reference panel dogs are definitely from all over the world, because the founders of the company already had that DNA from their own research, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their reference panel dogs for the pure breeds they test for are comparably internationally diverse.

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I’ve had my mutt (the dog in my avatar) tested with both WP and Embark. She was born in a shelter, and the shelter people had seen her presumed sire as well as, of course, her dam, who were stray traveling companions. They guessed that mom was either a high-content-ACD herding cross, or else an unusually lanky pure ACD, and described dad as looking “like a Boxer/Collie mix.” Within a short time after bringing Luna home, we were pretty sure the ACD and Boxer parts were correct (nip nip nip, boing boing boing). But we were really curious to see what the rest might be, because her build is distinctly more delicate than a 50/50 ACD/Boxer’s would generally be, and she also showed some behaviors that, while herder-y, didn’t seem quite ACD-ish (very “soft” and almost comically earnest about training, flashes of “strong eye” behavior during herding play).

her WP results:

~ 50% Australian Cattle Dog (predicted as one purebred parent)
~ 25% Boxer
~ 12.5% Australian Shepherd (asterisked, indicating uncertainty as to whether the predicted % is really accurate)
~ 12.5% too mixed to call/unknown, with Herding and Sighthound groups listed as possibilities

her Embark results:

34.9% ACD
15.1% Border Collie (predicted to come from the same parent as the ACD, therefore one “Border Heeler” parent)
25.1% Boxer
15.8% Australian Shepherd
9.1% too mixed to call/unknown, with Sheltie specifically predicted to be in the mix

her Darwin’s Ark results to date, by % of ancestry (hopefully these will fill out more as their reference panel grows):

35.6% ACD
26.7% unknown
21.2% Boxer
6.2% Border Collie
3.8% Collie
3.6% Sheltie
2.9% Australian Shepherd

So overall, pretty similar results. And all three work pretty well to explain her looks and behavior, I think. Both WP and Embark were pretty much spot-on about her weight, but from what I’ve seen that’s often not the case, even when the reported mix itself seems very probable.