ID this dog!

[furtech]

A friend of mine has a wonderful dog whose origins (breed-wise) are a total mystery. He looks most like a pariah dog-- like a dingo, but that's unlikely even given the eccentric personalities in Los Angeles.

Here's what he looks like:



His interesting features are his prick ears, boomerang-shaped brush tail, buggy-eyes, small feet and is somewhat lean/high-tuck. He's also got a double-coat, though he looks like a smooth-coated dog. He has an ordinary bark (no singing or baying and little howling). [edit: also fur between his toes!]

We got a canine DNA test kit for Banjo and hopefully the mystery will be solved...but in the meantime, we've got a pool to guess beforehand. If someone nails it, we'll figure out some appropriate prize...

I'm hoping Karena and Tracy (who both have known him) will take a stab at this.
My guess is corgi-collie...Roz has Lab-shepherd (classic mix!)...Steve is Corgi-Chihuahua.

Comments

[fatkraken.livejournal.com]

he reminds me of the village dog that the research group I once volunteered with adopted in Africa. Of course, the chances of random bred african dogs being in the US are pretty slim.

With the canine DNA kits, what results do you get if the dog has little to no pedigree animals in its past? I know a good chunk of the dog population can be placed to one breed or another, or a mix, but presumably there are a lot that are random bred all the way back. does it just tell you that your dog represents the bit of the random bred population that also gave rise to certain fixed breeds? Are they mitochondrial based or nuclear?

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Not sure what the details are, but here are the links:

This is what we bought:
http://www.k9electronics.com/product/boipet-dnatest/BioPetDogDNABreedIdentificationTestKit.aspx

We went with this brand because it supposedly ID's 58 distinct breeds vs 38 for the other brand.

The company's home:
http://biopetvetlab.com/dnahome.htm

Here's the company's FAQ:
http://biopetvetlab.com/dnafaq.htm

[fatkraken.livejournal.com]

looks like it's picking out multiple markers, since it claims to identify the proportion of different breeds present in your dog. I guess it's something like Microsats (non coding regions in the nucleus consisting of variable numbers of short code repeats). I guess in breeds with a restricted founder population the within breed variability of microsats would be pretty low, so you could characterise a breed entirely by microsat data.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

You're so cool! I keep forgetting that you're a *scientist*!! Doing cool science stuff! This is great information for me to check out. I'm very curious about these tests-- how much is real DNA-science and how much is hokum.