DNA testing is one instrument. It is not the point. Every buyer of a Maison de Brume puppy gets a folder — lab reports, structural notes, and for a merle puppy a BAER hearing report and a veterinary ophthalmologist exam — but breeding well is a whole craft, and the paperwork is only the receipt.
What actually decides a Frenchton's fifteen years is structure, temperament, nutrition, environment, and the judgment of the person doing the pairing. The panel is a floor beneath that work, not a substitute for it. This page is honest about how we use it — what we run today, what we're changing, and what a DNA result can never tell you.
Where we are today
Embark.
Every parent in this house is DNA-tested through Embark. That is the state of the pack right now. The panel is wide, the platform is designed with veterinary geneticists, and it returns things a single-condition test never will: ancestry breakdown, relatedness between candidate pairings, and a coefficient of inbreeding calculated across the genome rather than estimated from a three-generation pedigree.
That last number matters more than most buyers realize. Two dogs can look unrelated on paper and still share an uncomfortable share of their genome, because this breed came through a narrow bottleneck. Embark's genomic COI is what I use to keep pairings honest, and the health panel is what I use as a screening floor across every recognized condition it covers.
And I have to say the uncomfortable part out loud: I've seen color-panel inconsistencies on my own dogs' Embark results. Enough of them, on enough dogs, that I no longer treat any single Embark call as final — and if I can't trust their color reads, I can't fully trust the health reads that come out of the same platform either. That is not a takedown of a company I keep paying. It's the reason for the next section.
What we're adding
Animal Genetics — in progress.
I'm in the process of moving the entire pack onto a second, independent verification through Animal Genetics. Kits are ordered. Samples are next. No dog in this house has been re-run through AG yet — and I would rather say that plainly than pretend a program is finished before it is.
Animal Genetics is the lab the exotic Frenchie community has leaned on for years when a color claim needs to be verified rather than assumed. Their strength is specific coat and color loci, tested individually and reported cleanly. That is exactly the axis I want a second read on — and if their calls diverge from Embark's on the color panels I already suspect, that also tells me something about how much weight to give the rest of the report.
The plan is straightforward: every locus that matters to a pairing — merle and its allele length, cocoa, the dilute series, piebald, the long-coat variants — gets a second independent read, and every parent's health panel gets a second look on the conditions AG tests for. When both labs are in the folder for a given dog, that dog's paperwork moves from a claim to a verified record.
Why the second lab
Redundancy, not marketing.
Any single genetic result is a measurement, and measurements have error. Sample handling, assay design, allele-calling thresholds, and plain human process all introduce it. One report is a claim. Two independent reports that agree is evidence. That is the framework I'm building toward — not because it sounds impressive in a listing, but because I've watched a single lab call the same dog two different colors on two different runs, and that was enough.
When the second lab confirms the first, you get both reports and you get to see the agreement yourself. When the second lab disagrees with the first, that's a signal, not a scandal — we retest, we take a fresh sample, and we wait before breeding. A pairing that depends on an unresolved discrepancy does not happen here.
One lab is a claim. Two labs are a verified record — or a question worth answering before a puppy exists.
Beyond DNA
Structural evaluation.
The traits that most determine a Frenchie's quality of life are conformational, not genotypic, so we assess them directly on every breeding candidate:
- Nostril aperture — graded visually against standard nostril grading images, because stenotic nares are the first and most fixable point of airway resistance.
- Palate and oropharynx — assessed with our veterinarian; soft palate length relative to the epiglottis is the second gate.
- Spinal palpation — every vertebra along the run of the back and into the tail set, with radiographs where anything reads irregular.
- Gait analysis — moving away, moving toward, and at a trot from the side, filmed so it can be reviewed rather than remembered.
- Post-exercise respiration — how the dog sounds and how fast it recovers, which is the whole point of functional grading.
Formal functional grading tools exist for exactly this, and they work. The Cambridge BOAS assessment, delivered to breeders through the Kennel Club Respiratory Function Grading Scheme, grades a dog's breathing before and after a standardized exercise test. We use that framework for our own candidates. Photos and notes are documented for every dog and shared on request.
Non-negotiable
Every merle puppy is screened.
Merle carries real, documented risk when it is bred carelessly, and the risk is auditory and ocular. So we audit it. Every merle puppy we produce — including our current Rivendell litter — is:
- DNA-verified for merle genotype. Single merle only. No double-merle pairings, ever. Both parents' cryptic-merle status is confirmed before a breeding is planned, because a cryptic merle bred to a visual merle is a double-merle litter that nobody intended.
- BAER hearing tested. Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response — the only test that catches unilateral deafness, which an at-home clap-and-watch check will miss every single time.
- Examined by a veterinary ophthalmologist for microphthalmia, coloboma, iris hypoplasia, and persistent pupillary membranes.
- Delivered with the full screening report in the puppy's folder — not summarized, not paraphrased. The actual report.
This mirrors the published merle puppy health screening protocol, and it is a present-tense commitment, not a plan. It applies to the puppies on this site right now.
If you are shopping merle and a breeder can't hand you a BAER report and a veterinary ophthalmologist exam, walk away. This is what ethical merle breeding actually looks like.