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

[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.