Polymath What Ships Are For PKD-T SD-I TKN

“A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.“

BORN: October 29th, 2023
COLOR: Tri-Color (white factored)
HEIGHT: still growing, charting approx 14.5″
WEIGHT: still growing, charting approx 25 lb

About Merit

Merit’s origin story is nontraditional. I had been following a line of dogs closely related to my first performance sheltie, Indi, for about nine years. I told myself I was “just” looking, “just” making a spreadsheet, “just” keeping health notes,” just” knowing what there was to know for the sake of knowledge itself. I wasn’t going to do anything about it — I was “just” collecting and curating the broader information to the degree that it related to my own dog.

Well. You can see where this is going.

When presented with the opportunity to get a puppy from one of the last breedings this close to my late boy, I took a hard look at the years of combined data on my spreadsheet and realized: “Plenty of people have gotten puppies with vastly less planning than this.” Once I zoomed out to look at the forest instead of the trees, it turned out that all of those little “justs” aggregated together had added up to quite a lot cumulatively.

Bringing Merit home was still taking a risk on my part. Her parents were neither health tested nor titled, although I could reverse-engineer a decent amount of information. On the one hand, getting a dog from untested parents was a gamble. On the other hand, that part is the easiest thing to evaluate at face value in the dog herself because the answers are concrete and knowable. The intangibles and untestables (like temperament data, cause/age of death, repro stats, etc) are the things that would traditionally be harder to track down and that’s the information that I did already have, both deep and wide in her pedigree. I joke that I should have named her Excel because of how many spreadsheets I made about her before she came home!

So after years of “just looking” at Merit’s extended family, I rolled the dice and said yes to a puppy, who I will evaluate on her own merit. Whether she ends up being a breeding candidate or not in the long run, it feels right that the first dog to carry the Polymath name is a relative of Indi, the dog who helped me clarify my vision for what I believe a sheltie should be.

Our Goals for Merit

In a nutshell, the next two years are going to be evaluating her for All Of The Things to get an idea of where we’re starting.

The swabs for Merit’s DNA tests literally arrived home before she did. Her Embark results are set to public. DMS and lance canine tests took a little longer because the swabs “took the scenic route” by getting lost in the mail for a couple of months. All of the results will be on OFA and her pedigree info will be publicly accessible on both PedigreeLines (for sheltie people with access) and PedigreeOnline (for everyone).

As with any puppy, our performance goals are to try a little bit of everything for the first year and see what she likes. Based on her relatives, I feel pretty comfortable expecting interest in herding, parkour, disc and scent work.

Merit’s Gallery