Natural History

Anka’s results from Embark arrived today.

They were rather interesting, for she is a bit of an enigma. We know that she is a working line German shepherd, and she is so svelte and trim that she has been mistaken for a Malinois at least once when we’ve had her out.

We have lots of friends in German shepherds in the Greater Younstown/Pittsburgh area, and we thought we had tracked down her breeder. This breeder produced an accidental litter of puppies when a sable daughter of Czech imports got bred by a black SAR dog of mixed DDR and West German working lines.  This litter was born 3 years ago, and thus, Anka would be 3 years old and a carrier of recessive black.

Her results showed that she is homozygous for sable and could not have a black father.  Further, her genetic age is listed as 25 years old, which is the equivalent of a 2-year-old dog.

What’s more, her genetic coefficient of inbreeding is 50 percent, which shows she is derived from some relatively tight line breeding and not an outcross of two working type dogs of this breed. Yes, this breed does have a fairly tight pedigree because it derives from a single dog that was bred from quite tightly for several generations, but I was not expecting such a tight inbreeding coefficient from a dog that was an outcross as would have been supposed in that accidental litter.

So her exact ancestry is still a mystery. We know that she has the general head shape and size of a lot of Czech working line German shepherds, and what’s more, she is a carrier for long coat, which does occasionally pop up in those lines.

The good news is we know Anka is clear of degenerative myelopathy, which is the bad spinal disorder that takes out a large number of German shepherds once they hit 10 years old.  She is also clear of all the other genetic diseases Embark tests for.

However, she has no diversity of DLA haplotypes, so her immune system is not all that great.  So we  are going to have to watch her whenever she gets any kind of infection.

And yes, I am aware that the genetic COI stuff is a bit controversial, and I have been told that I should call Embark to see if her COI really is that high.

It might not be, but I do now that she far more inbred on the chromosome than either of the two golden retrievers we had tested.

So this breed might not have that much genetic diversity, especially if you’re breeding for working traits.

Inbred like a thoroughbred racehorse she may be.

But she’s still the best dog ever.

And the search for her breeder continues.