Shelties are generally a healthy breed — and keeping them that way is a high priority.

Any Polymath breeding candidates are tested for a wide variety of breed-relevant conditions, including all elective and optional-but-recommended DNA screening tests listed by the American Shetland Sheepdog Association (as of the time of this writing, 2024).

Transparency and Results-Sharing

In addition to testing, I report all of my dogs’ health testing results to the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (OFA) and have all stats set to public, including DNA tests, including any unflattering results. Right now, that’s the best way I know to make sure that anyone anywhere can confirm my dogs’ results in a publicly-accessible, independently-verified format.

We talk a lot about how important it is for puppy buyers to do their due diligence on any breeder they’re considering a puppy from and I agree that that is tremendously important. But an alarming number of breeders make that task difficult by obfuscating any less-than-ideal results to protect their reputation or to save a buck on OFA fees. I believe that if we want to tell people to do their due diligence, then we also need to be as due-diligence-able as possible. Regardless of whether I am still personally breeding or maintaining this website (where I also prominently display all of my dogs’ results: good, bad and mediocre), I want anyone with any interest in a relative of my dogs to be able to easily check my dogs’ health status and use that information as they see fit.

I also believe that “what gets measured gets managed,” which is important both on an individual level and also on a population-wide level. Testing my own dogs is primarily relevant to my own program and my individual breeding decisions, but reporting that data to larger bodies (like the OFA, ASSA health surveys or breed-specific research initiatives) allows me to contribute to ensuring that we have an accurate view of the true big-picture state of the breed as a whole, which is important to me.

How We DNA Test Polymath Dogs

For DNA tests, I currently use an Embark For Breeders test as my base panel and then add on additional tests from other labs as necessary for things that Embark doesn’t test for (currently: dermatomyositis and maxillary canine tooth mesioversion AKA the lance canine risk gene, both tested through GenSol).

This is a relatively uncommon choice among sheltie breeders — it means I need to swab each dog twice and it costs slightly more to do it this way than just doing a sheltie panel through AnimalGenetics, GenSol, Pawprint Genetics or similar. However, this combination gives me a few pieces of information that I wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

Coefficient of Inbreeding (COI):

First, using Embark as my base panel means that I have access to my dogs’ genetic coefficient of inbreeding — a metric which is vastly more accurate at measuring relatedness than their pedigree-calculated coefficient of inbreeding (such as what you would find on a pedigree website).

Pedigree-calculated COI only looks at the most recent generations and assumes (falsely) that all ancestors further back are completely unrelated, a thing which we know is inherently untrue within a closed studbook in an established breed like shelties. Simply put, pedigree-calculated COI is a convenient fiction which used to be our best means of guessing at genetic COI before DNA testing for dogs was widely available. Now that we are able to measure genetic COI more directly, there are zero valid reasons why pedigree-calculated COI would be preferable to genetic COI.

Matchmaker:

Second, using Embark allows me to access their Matchmaker tools.

Embark’s Matchmaker system appears to have been designed with the intention of allowing people to search for possible partners for their dogs, filter out any dogs who are carriers for the same genetic conditions, and contact the owners of dogs who may be good matches to learn more.

Personally, the main benefit of Matchmaker for me is being able to see the estimated coefficient of inbreeding (eCOI) of any pairing I’m already considering. Genetic COI is an important metric for measuring and maintaining genetic diversity within the breed. Since my goal is to produce only litters with below-average coefficients of inbreeding for the breed if at all possible, using Matchmaker allows me to filter out any dogs who share enough genetics to be “close relatives” to my dogs genetically (even if they are not actually closely related by pedigree). I use it to get more data on dogs that I’m already interested in, not as a place to start when researching possible pairings.

IGF1 Gene Status:

Third, to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing this (2024), Embark is the only large publicly-accessible dog DNA company that offers testing for the Insulin-Like Growth Factor 1 (IGF1) gene. Research suggests that one variant of this gene is associated with increased longevity, decreased overall cancer risk and increased overall healthspan in multiple species. In dogs, it also has associations with fertility and average litter size. In shelties specifically, we have research showing that one variant of this gene has some protective benefit against dentition issues such as lance canine. This is something that I am tracking in my program.

All ASSA Recommended DNA Tests:

And finally, the basic Embark panel + sending out the last two tests to GenSol a la carte allows me to test my breeding candidates for all of the genetic conditions that the American Shetland Sheepdog Association currently recommends that breeders screen for, including uncommon tests like the maxillary canine tooth mesioversion (lance canine) risk gene which are only available at specific labs. This gives me the ability to thoughtfully choose pairings that have the highest likelihood of producing healthy puppies.