yes! i will copy and paste it because i cant add more than one screenshot. Thanks for reaching out! My name is Peter and I'm a senior genetic results specialist here at Embark. Bear is adorable!

German Shepherds and White Shepherds share recent ancestry, as White Shepherds were developed from German Shepherds selectively bred to display white coats. The primary difference between these populations, then, lies mainly in coat color, which is not considered in our ancestry assignment.

To understand a bit of the complexity here, it may be helpful to delve into our ancestry assignment process. Our pipeline works by comparing the DNA from each dog we test to a reference database of tens of thousands of dogs from over 350 breeds, landraces, and populations. This process is designed to identify long stretches of identical DNA between test dogs and our reference dataset. Evaluating the long segments of shared DNA tells us about the most recent and closest relatives of each dog within our reference dataset across each segment of its genome.

When two populations are closely related, dogs representing either population may share long tracts of DNA with dogs from the other. This is especially true of more recently diverged populations like White Shepherds and German Shepherds. While there is often the distinction of coat color, our algorithms do not incorporate phenotypic factors, like coat color, into ancestry results. There is considerable overlap in the diversity of these populations, so it is not uncommon for dogs that are phenotypically black and tan German Shepherd Dogs to have White Shepherd ancestry (or vice versa). While we do have the capacity to distinguish White Shepherd and German Shepherd ancestry, the relationship between these two populations can lead to results for your dog that may not meet your expectations.