Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/04/protect-your-dog-and-learn-its.html
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Don’t be surprised if they say that your dog is related to William the Conqueror’s dog.
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Or General Patton’s dog, even…
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There’s a group here trying to organize “Eastern metis”, maybe for the wrong reasons, and the CBC wad doing articles about the false claims. The group decided that if you have any native heritage, that counted, while the legit Metis organizations do genealogy searches and make sure you have Metis ancestry.
So the group uses DNA testing, dubious at the best of times. But the CBC submitted some samples to the testing facility, and dog DNA showed up as having native ancestry.
I’m sure this is well meaning for dog’s but maybe taken with a grain of salt.
Besides, shouldn’t dogs be loved for themselves, rather than their purity? How many times, even on this site, have people written about dogs who were rescued or of mixed breed? Yet someone cares about them, and will be sad when they die.
For six years I’ve been spending time with my sister’s dog, who is a black Labrador. But it’s his curiosity and his habits like, like expecting his late afternoon walk, that I care about, not that he’s pure. One time we saw a Labrador with white feet, I mention it to my sister, and she said “it’s not a Labrador” though I don’t think she discriminates, just stating the breed has specific criteria.
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They’re dogs. So is your dog. Per AKC rules, which are startlingly similar to the good old 19th century rules about quadroons and octoroons, a purebred can have a significant amount of mutt in its ancestry.
Furthermore (and several other multisyllabic words which are normally unacceptable outside of legal briefs), anyone who knows dogs can tell you that size, color, intelligence, and behavior varies like crazy even within a strictly controlled breed - line.
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“Your dog is a son of a bitch.”
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More likely it’s related to Genghis Khan’s dog.
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As many here know, I’m a Veterinarian, and can say that if you thought the human DNA tests were questionable, you’ll have a good laugh at the dog versions.
These DNA breed tests are so dodgy that when people ask me about them, I regularly just tell them to buy dog treats/toys/supplies with the $, and not waste their money. Or, you can give the money to me, and I’ll blindly guess. Seems about as accurate. I’ve had clients submit DNA on their dogs, only to come back with the most ridiculous answers. (and recommended that one client unhappy with their results use a free voucher that we had, and a completely fake name with our street address, but submit the sample (same company) with a sample from the same dog. Weirdly (or maybe not surprisingly at all), the results of the DNA testing from the same pet came back wildly different, so much so that they didn’t appear to belong to the same animal (because these tests are so much horseshit).
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Protect your dog…
Protect? How? By gene therapy? Or by putting it out of its misery, or on a low-cholesterol diet?
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