Wisdom Panel Premium Review – PCMag

The best dog DNA kit, with an ideal balance of price and information
Wisdom Panel features almost everything offered by the more expensive dog DNA testing competition, but with easier-to-understand results.
Wisdom Panel Premium (previously known as Health Canine Breed + Disease Detection) offers just about everything you could want in a dog DNA testing kit. The tests are comprehensive, the packaging is professional, and the results are easy to understand. More importantly, the results are consistent, giving us faith that we could trust the test outcomes. Wisdom Panel’s combination of accuracy, presentation, and features make it our Editors’ Choice for dog DNA kits.
All the doggie DNA tests trumpet that they can peg your dog’s breed composition back to its great-grandparents. You could do that alone via the $99.99 Wisdom Panel Essential kit. That simpler version also includes tests for about 25 important-to-know gene mutation problems, such as MDR1 (multi-drug resistance) and EIC (exercise-induced collapse). Wisdom Panel claims to have the world’s largest breed database and pegs the number at over 350, but Embark claims the same number now. Wisdom Panel has tested 2 million dogs to date.
Instead of just testing for the breed, we went big with the $159 Wisdom Panel Premium. This tier offers everything in the basic package, plus checks your hound for 211 other genetic health conditions. You pay more, but arguably get something much more useful than simply the ability to claim your pooch is a certain breed. 15 percent of the dogs Wisdom Panel has tested in 2020 so far have had at least one mutation related to a medical condition. Embark, the main competition, tests for 190 health conditions.
Wisdom Panel is a division of Mars Petcare, a division of Mars, Inc. That’s right, the candy company. That makes it a sister company to Whistle, the maker of our Editors’ Choice in pet trackers and GPS collars. I should disclosure that my wife is a veterinary technician who works at a veterinary hospital recently bought by VCA—another Mars-owned corporation.
Of all the dog DNA kits we’ve tested, Wisdom Panel comes the closest to matching Embark Dog DNA Test Kit‘s excellent packaging. A branded sheath slides off after you break the shrink wrap, and the box inside holds the tests. The box also doubles as the package for returning your dog’s DNA samples to Wisdom Panel’s lab in Nebraska. Postage is included if you’re shipping from within the US.
Inside the box’s lid are all the instructions you need, but most are about how to handle the box when returning the DNA sample. I’d have preferred to see a depiction of how and where to insert a swab in my dog’s cheek. Embark’s instructions shine in this regard.
Swabbing your dog’s cheek pouch may seem a tiny bit harsher with Wisdom Panel’s kit than with competitors, because, unlike the other kits that look like a couple of long cotton swabs, these look like tiny bottle brushes. That said, the bristles are soft enough that my test canines didn’t balk (at least, no worse than with the cotton swabs) with it stuck in their cheek pouches for 20 seconds. When you finish, there are holes in the box for standing the sample swabs until they air dry.
Before sending it off, if you haven’t already, go to ActivateMyKit.com and set up an account with the Sample ID from the box. You can create accounts in English, French, or German. Once you have an account, skip to https://wisdompanel.com to log in, and use that account to activate as many canine DNA test kits as you like in the future. You can expect a Wisdom Panel response two to three weeks after a sample arrives. With three tests, I got results in 16, 18, and 21 days, respectively.
The video below explains how Wisdom Panel gets DNA results. It involves a lot more computers and algorithms than it does looking through microscopes.
You can view a Wisdom Panel sample report online. After you send the DNA samples, you shouldn’t expect frequent progress updates like I got with Embark, which arguably sends too many emails. When it is ready, you’ll receive an email with a link to the results on the Wisdom Panel website. A recent revamp of the data seems to have taken away the ability to output the data as a PDF or share it with others (like your vet) remotely, but Wisdom Panel says they’re working to restore it. The site’s easy to access and read on mobile browsers.
When your results arrive, though, skip to what most people really want: ancestry info.
My methodology was to test a pure-bred dog (Griffin) once and see if the test company would get it right, then test my mixed-breed companion (Madison) twice—once under a false name (“Daisy”) and a new account—to see if the results were the same both times.
With Griffin, based on its “sophisticated computer algorithm [that] performed over 17 million calculations,” Wisdom Panel pegged him correctly as 100 percent golden retriever. It was also interesting to note that at the end of the About section, I discovered an extra section called Additional Breed Tests. There, Wisdom Panel explained why its analysis stated that Griffin was a single dog breed. It contains graphs showing where his DNA samples fall in comparison to other golden retrievers in the Wisdom Panel database. There’s also a look at his homozygosity, a measure of genetic markers identical to those of a mother and father. Again, Griffin fell squarely under the Golden rule, so to speak.
For Madison, the results were, obviously, more mixed. Wisdom Panel pegged her as 12.5 percent each of American Staffordshire terrier, Boston terrier, Boxer, Bull terrier, Labrador retriever, and Shetland sheepdog—then the leftover 25 percent was a mix of breed groups. What amazed me was that on the second test of “Daisy,” the breed analysis came back identical. Wisdom Panel is the only dog DNA test I tried that produced the same results twice for the mutt.
That said, the results don’t seem very precise, with a perfectly even 12.5 percent breakdown between the six breeds to hit 75 percent, then the leftover quarter tossed to a mix of breed groups. Compare that with Embark’s results, which determined Madison was 34.2 percent American pit bull, 17.5 percent sheltie, etc.—numbers that seem far more exact.
On a new test with Wisdom Panel I performed on my puppy, Clark, the breakdown seems more in line with Embark now.
But is there any way to really tell which test is the most accurate? Not that I can discern, and that makes the whole breed analysis aspect of all of these tools just a fun conversation starter at best, suspect at worst.
Wisdom Panel tosses in a few pictures of and trivia about the breeds and breed groups before getting to the family tree.
In the new results view, Wisdom Panel seems to have discontinued offering the “Statement of Authentication,” a printable certificate to show off your dog’s genetic makeup. I find these things ridiculous, but your mileage may vary. If you tested your dog with the older “Health” version of Wisdom Panel, you can still see the results in the old format, including that certificate.
You’ll see a Health tab if you got the Premium version of the test. If you’ve got concerns about your dog, they would likely be about genetic health more than origin.
Griffin got an all-clear from all disease mutations on Wisdom Panel. On both her tests, Madison/”Daisy” was shown as a carrier of the gene for the neurological disorder degenerative myelopathy. This diagnosis was also confirmed by the test of Madison by Embark, twice. Clark carries a skin disease called ichthyosis. (A carrier has one disease-causing mutation to pass on to progeny; it usually requires two copies of the mutated gene to manifest the disease itself.) However, all were clear of other possible mutations, all of which have linked info sheets in the report. Spayed and neutered dogs can rest easy as carriers—they won’t pass it on.
The finding underscores why it’s important to get a decent DNA test like this before breeding a dog. You could be handing a family a future of heartache and expense with puppies inheriting a dog’s mutated genes without knowing it.
There’s also a Traits section goes over traits your dog probably has based on the genotypes found in testing. For example, it said Madison probably has “base erect” ears that stand up with floppy tips, based on having genotype CT, and that she’s a brindle color (black and brown striping) from Genotype: ay/at Em/E KB/ky,kbr/ky I/wt—and they’re right. It was done without a supplying a picture, too. That it said her ideal weight is between 30 to 51 pounds, however, is troubling, as she looks like a barrel on legs once she’s over 35. But it also provided guidelines to determine if your dog is over- or underweight.
If you have questions on Wisdom Panel results, you can get support via email at [email protected] or by calling 888-597-3883 from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Time.
Wisdom Panel is priced right, and its presentation is professional. It doesn’t have a lot of fluff and filler, especially in its revamped data presentation. The breed determination is consistent, and more importantly, it offers a large number of genetic mutation health tests (perhaps the most important aspect of a DNA test). If you don’t mind paying more for finer grain genomic detail that most of us can’t understand, stick with Embark. For the rest of us, there’s Wisdom Panel, our Editors’ Choice for dog DNA tests.
Wisdom Panel features almost everything offered by the more expensive dog DNA testing competition, but with easier-to-understand results.
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Eric Griffith has been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally for 30 years, more than half of that time with PCMag. He was previously on the founding staff of publications like Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine, all of which are now defunct, and it’s not his fault. He spent six years writing exclusively about Wi-Fi, but don’t ask him to fix your router. At PCMag he runs several special projects including the Readers’ Choice and Business Choice surveys, and yearly coverage of the Fastest ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, plus regularly writes features on all tech topics. He’s the author of two novels: BETA TEST (“an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale” according to Publishers’ Weekly) and KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY, which you can still get as ebooks. He works from his home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
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