I came across a cool service in one of the dog magazines I read. For $65, Metamorphix claims it can run a DNA test that will reveal your dog’s breed composition. It apparently uses a cheek swab to sniff out the dog’s heritage from among 38 breeds. I’ve always been curious about Ozzy’s 57 varieties, and I’m thinking about giving it a shot. Even if this will only find 38 …
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Who’s yer dog’s daddy?
I came across a cool service in one of the dog magazines I read. For $65, Metamorphix claims it can run a DNA test that will reveal your dog’s breed composition. It apparently uses a cheek swab to sniff out the dog’s heritage from among 38 breeds. I’ve always been curious about Ozzy’s 57 varieties, […]
2 replies on “Who’s yer dog’s daddy?”
Sets off my scam detector since I’ve read that dogs are essentially identical regardless of breed. Let us now if you have it done.
Ooh, this sets off the potential for an entirely new field of litigation: Dog breed purity.
Say someone buys a Newf pup and pays top dollar. The pup hits 10 months old and the owner decides its coat looks more like a flat-coat retriever than a Newf. He does the Tufts cheek swab and finds out his dog has a unusually high percentage of something other than Newf. He sues the breeder. The new area of law is going to be figuring out when a purebreed (which is just an AKC-regulated brew of breeds) has too much of one breed. When is a basset too beagle-y? When is a Samoyed too Husky-ish?
And does any of it matter, because at the genetic level, all dogs are pretty much the same, as the Say Uncle noted.