Welcome to Sparta Shiloh Shepherds

Welcome to Sparta Shilohs!

Originally founded in Texas in 2008, Sparta relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2020. After taking a long break from breeding due to life circumstances, we brought our new girl, Keyleth aka "Kiki", home in the summer of 2022. We are excited to be re-starting our breeding journey!

Kiki is a very special girl, as she is descended from the ISSA's first foray into outcrossing*. Because Shiloh Shepherds are not part of the AKC, we are able to fight inbreeding and reduce genetic disease by introducing dogs of other breeds into our bloodlines. The dogs and breeds are chosen not just for diversity, but for health, longevity, and to help correct specific faults in our breed.

We then breed back to Shilohs for several generations, regaining the look and temperament of our breed while utilizing DNA tools to make sure we keep as much diversity as we can. We also run risk numbers on each breeding, attempting to lower the carrier risk for our most commonly seen genetic disorders as we work the new strain of blood into our gene pool. You can read more about outcrossing on our ISSA web site, www.shiloh-shepherd.com, under "Shiloh Health".

Kiki's grandfather, Boeke, is a half Standard Poodle, half Wetterhoun (a rare breed of Dutch water dog). He was created by the Wetterhoun breed in its own quest to improve genetic diversity, as the breed had become very small. Our Dutch ISSA chapter, with the help of geneticist Marjoleine Roosendaal, was able to arrange to use Boeke for our own first outcross. We were excited to have this opportunity, because there was so much health data that the Dutch Wetterhoun club had collected behind Boeke that we were very confident he did not carry our most common genetic disorders. We also hoped to pull forward the human-focused trainability from the Poodle, and the Wetterhoun brought a broader head and body type that we also hoped to capitalize on.

Kiki herself is a stand-out result of this outcrossing program. She has very good Shiloh type for a second-generation dog, and is super-smart, responsive, and loves to learn! We could not have asked for a better result, and we can't wait to see her as an adult!

Though we're hoping this will be an exciting new beginning, there are still a lot of hurdles for Kiki to overcome before she becomes a breeding dog! Our Shiloh organization, the ISSA (International Shiloh Shepherd Alliance), requires a battery of tests be completed before a pup is approved for breeding. Kiki must pass a heart auscultation and then an EKG (Holter monitor) test, plus hip and elbow x-rays and an adult temperament test. We also run DNA through our ongoing genetic diversity study with the University of California at Davis, and she'll be DNA tested for Degenerative Myelopathy (DM).

You can keep checking the site for updates on how Kiki's testing is going; results will be posted on her page.

We'll be putting up more new pages as we progress with this site.

*A Note on Past Outcrossing: Our Breed Founder, Tina Barber, utilized outcrossing when creating Shilohs, introducing mostly unrelated dogs into her Shiloh Kennels German Shepherd lines. However, most of the dogs she used were German Shepherd crosses or directly descended from the GSD themselves. In addition, back in those days, we didn't have the DNA tools we have now, so we have no idea how much diversity we got from those early outcrosses.

Because we are less worried about our first generation looking like Shilohs, and more interested in better health and longevity for our dogs, the ISSA has chosen to go in the opposite direction, breeding to dogs not related to the GSD. This helps us to breed away from and hopefully reduce the common genetic diseases shared between Shilohs and GSD's, such as EPI, SAS, hip dysplasia and GSDIVA (a disease causing potentially lethal arrythmias in puppies).