As The World Turns

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76 – June, 2024

By Wayne Cavanaugh

At a typical 10AM meeting one morning in August of 2006, I began to reconsider the way I look at our sport as a truly international affair. It’s not only the differences in the culture of dog shows around the globe that struck me. It’s the differences in the phenotype and genotype of the breeds that we think of as ours. And it’s the differences in the opinions of judges that comes with that international diversity.

I recently found some old notes that I’d scribbled down at that 2006 meeting; it was a sales pitch from a new DNA group. Later that day, I was looking at photos from the World Dog Show held last month in Croatia. Both finds came together as interesting reminders of the international impact of the sport.

When breed identification DNA kits began to hit the market, an early developer visited to make their sales pitch for a hot new product. They were convinced, and eventually proven right, that dog owners–especially those with mixed breed dogs–would pay to know how much and what kind of purebred dog was coursing through their dog’s veins. Oh, the irony. The developers also thought that purebred dog registries and breed clubs would want to pay to verify dogs as purebred members of a breed. (Spoiler alert, they did not).

First up was a very popular breed in the USA, the Golden Retriever. They showed that with 86% accuracy, they could determine if a dog was a Golden Retriever using the baseline DNA they had collected, studied, and mapped.

Click here to read the complete article
76 – June, 2024

Short URL: https://caninechronicle.com/?p=289299

Posted by AnthonyA on Jun 7 2024. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.