![]() With this and other pieces of information like weight history and body condition, you and your veterinarian may want to discuss your dog’s diet, exercise, and weight control plan to give your pup the longest, healthiest life possible. By comparing your dog’s weight to their genetic predicted weight you have one more piece of information about their ideal weight. While over half of American dogs are overweight or obese, fewer than 15% of their owners realize it. They can develop chronic health conditions and suffer from limited mobility and other issues. Just like with people, overweight and obese dogs suffer reduced length and quality of life. But genetic weight is also useful for people with fully grown dogs. By finding rare dogs carrying an ancient variant at a certain marker, we can make associations with behavior, size, metabolism, and development that likely caused these unique signatures of “doggyness” in the genome.įor people with puppies, you probably want to know how big of a crate to buy or just how big to expect your dog to become. Scientists have known about “domestication gene sweeps” for years, but do not yet know why each sweep occurred. These markers are thought to be related to "domestication gene sweeps" where early dogs were selected for some trait. Your dog’s Wolfiness Score is based on hundreds of markers across the genome where dogs (or almost all of them) are the same, but wolves tend to be different. They are bits of a wild past that survive in your dog! These ancient genes may be a few thousand years old, or may even date back to the original domestication event 15,000 years ago. Wolfiness scores up to 10% are almost always due to ancient wolf genes that survived many generations, rather than any recent wolf ancestors. ![]() (If your dog has recent wolf ancestors, you will see that in the breed mix report.) Instead, the Wolfiness Score is based on the number of ancient genetic variants your dog has in our unique Wolfiness marker panel. Your dog’s Wolfiness Score is not a measure of recent dog-wolf hybridization and does not necessarily indicate that your dog has some recent wolf ancestors. ![]() We find populations and breeds with higher scores of 2-4% occasionally, and unique dogs with scores of 5% or above more rarely. Most dogs have wolfiness scores of 1% or less. It can help you and your vet know what you should feed your dog, what screenings to get, and other aspects of your dog’s care. Nevertheless, genetic age is the primary risk factor for numerous diseases in dogs, including cancer, kidney disease, osteoarthritis, cataracts, cardiac disease and cognitive decline. Exercise and diet also play a role in how long your dog will live. Like in humans, in dogs females tend to live longer than males (so an “80 year old” female dog = 80 year old woman). We then factor in your dog's breed composition, information at certain genes that affect size, and their inbreeding coefficient to calculate genetic age. It's okay if this is an estimation: it is just a starting point. Personalized genetic age table for Nuke - HP58054002Īll we need from you is a calendar age. So going back to our Dane/Pom example, we'd estimate a seven year old Great Dane at about 80 years old (senior citizen), but a seven year old Pom would be about 42 (adult). So how do you best determine how old your dog is?Įmbark's genetic age feature calculates how old your dog would be if he or she were aging at an average human rate (using humans in the USA as the baseline). Just within this example, you can see that the old "one doggie year = seven human years" adage isn’t going to work.Īnd yet, knowing your dog’s age is important: it informs what your dog needs as far as food, frequency of veterinary checkups, and exercise. Body size is a strong genetic influence: for example, a seven year old Great Dane is at the start of his golden years, but a seven year old Pomeranian is just learning what "slow down" means. The genetic age in this report is an estimation of where your dog is in his or her healthspan.ĭogs age at very different rates due to a number of genetic and environmental factors. We can now estimate your dog's calendar age with the Embark Age Test. Please note that genetic age is different from calendar age.
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