Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/17/dna-my-dog-misidentifies-humans-as-dogs.html
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Hmmm, a Mandog, eh?
Meanwhile, in Lickey End…
“Mr Gorman? Mr Dave Gorman? We are here about the DNA sample you sent to ScrapeMyDNA.com.”
“I didn’t know you people did home visits.”
“We are from Animal Control. According to your DNA Test Results, you are 46% English, and 54% Dogo Argentino. This places you on the Dangerous Breeds’ List; and so we need to put you down.”
@Grey_Devil That gif is nightmarish. I love it.
Edit for maths.
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Can’t credit this properly but an academic colleague (who did restriction length polymorphic research) separately sent in two DNA samples from his own cheek swab to a DNA …ethnicity(?) business, circa 2011. Same donor and he gave two different names; let’say… “Michael Johnson” and “Juan Gutiérrez”. And yes indeed, he got back two very different, and predictable “Heritage charts”. Likely they aren’t all such dubious enterprises, but buyer beware
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Channel your inner Collie, funnel your inherent Fauve de Bretagne, route your repressed Rottweiler, give your concealed Appenzeller Sennenhund agency, empower your nuclear Poodle?
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Can confirm that dog DNA testing is highly dubious. We sent in swabs from our mixed breed to two different services and got wildly different results, neither of which seemed remotely accurate. Does this look like an American Eskimo dog to you?
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Genetic Bucket Shops.
A Bucket Shop is the Heraldic jargon for the sort of place where you go to buy your “family’s coat of arms” (even though that’s not how it works in the English or Scottish systems), and they do it by going through Papworth’s Ordinary, finding something close to your surname, and declaring that whatever they find there is “yours”. (In return for a fee, of course.)
There seems to be an almost exact equivalence in the amount of effort expended and care taken/
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“Well I’ll be a son of a…”
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I can’t speak for all of them, but Ancestry.com helped me bypass both men who were possibly my father (neither wanted to submit to a test). The man who doesn’t share my last name turned out to be the one. Found my cousins all over with our last name.
Unsurprisingly, given his Scottish surname, I also came back like 60% Scottish ancestry. But again, the company had no way of knowing who my parents were. I’m not saying their results are accurate (they’ve been updated several times and my small percentage of Norwegian ancestry keeps changing) but not completely* off-the-mark.
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He definitely looks like a Good Boy if I ever saw one.
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From quite a long way away, squinting… maybe.
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He is indeed, a very good boy. Sweet and gentle.
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And this is wrong. Club Dogo are fro Milan. An to be honest I like them: I don’t see any reaso to put’em down.
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Keep in mind with these, and with forensic DNA testing, they are NOT sequencing an entire genome. They’re just looking at a very tiny fraction of your DNA that they THINK will tend to tell them what they’re looking for. So it’s not particularly surprising that they wouldn’t identify human DNA sent to them because the parts of the sequence that is shared by dogs and distinguishes them from humans isn’t relevant to what they claim to be looking at. Theoretically what they want are the parts of your dog’s DNA that is DIFFERENT between different breeds of dog. What this actually tells you about the ancestry of your mutt is unclear to me.
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I get the same thing, and the Norse ancestry is probably since my Scots ancestry comes from the furthest north: Caithness, and the Orkney and Shetland isles.
On the science part, there are two things that are happening. One is that the read of your DNA is not error free. There are things like amplification drop out (ADO) plus sequencing error in the reconstruction of short reads. The other thing is that these services are still building their trees and changing how they attribute the presence of single nucleotide variations (SNVs) to one group or another.
Then you have to add to that the fact that they are probably just looking at a handful of SNVs and that you might not have inherited them evenly from your grandparents. (You are half mom and dad, but your inheritance from your grandparents doesn’t have to be a quarter each and it often becomes more skewed when you look at smaller samples.)
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Don’t forget about the use of genetic testing in criminal cases-people have been arrested because a DNA sample of a relative led the police to believe they found a guilty party. They talk a lot about how small the chance of two people matching in significant ways is and not at all about error rates in testing.
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Endeavour S02E02 “Nocturne,” involves a heraldry expert who did genealogy research, then provided his customers with coats of arms complete with motto and all. Turned out his “research” was all hogwash, and his Latin mottoes were beautifully composed ridiculous and/or insulting phrases. They were hilarious 
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Does not bear thinking about.
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Their own best friend!
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