15 June 2008

Is even better than the blind leading the blind.


So one of my agility friends is a scientist. I believe she is the only scientist I know! Isn't it weird when you find out your agility friends are things like important scientists or famous professors or Jeremy Piven? OK. Maybe Jeremy Piven is not an agility friend. But wouldn't he be a good agility friend? I think he would be one friend I would be able to actually beat all the time is what I think. And would tell me when my legs look to fat to squeeze into my skort.

Leslie is a lab coat wearing (I think) molecular biologist (maybe I got that wrong-a genetics scientist for sure), and her company is one of the ones that can test dog DNA. So when I got Gustavo, she gave me a packet with a swab so we could test him because he was such a mystery pup.

This was back when we thought maybe he was the tiniest shrunken border collie in the world, that I had a authentic border chihuahuallie. He was the toast of agility town for a bit, Welcome tiniest border collie in the world! Well, after a month or two of teaching him to Sit, I was pretty sure that he was NOT a border collie type. Still feel some pressure on me when people at the dog show ask me, "How's the cutey mini border collie doing-ready to start trialing him?" and I am like, "la la la la la" and change the subject to his extreme cuteness. But we were still excited to see what kind of DNA he'd come back with. Maybe it would be a clue to his unique learning style.

Test numero uno came back nada on 38 breeds of dog, but the scientists said, Hey, we'll retest with the NEW test which tests over 100 breeds! And we'll even have you do another sample in case the first one wasn't quite right since he came back as a nada. Pretty much most breeds of dogs on the big test. Some I've never heard of. And definitely all the ones maybe you would guess Gustavo was. Chihuahua. Border collie. Sheltie. Papillon. Mystery Terrier. He looks like none of those, but they are always people's guesses. Does he act like any of them? Um, not that I can tell. I don't know much about papillons, or shelties so who knows. Do they take 3 months to teach a trick to that every other dog in your universe learned in 3 minutes?

So anyways, cool. Definitely the retest would show us what mysterious Gustavo was, our Mexican Pet. Gotta be one of all of those breeds. Gotta be some DNA in there somewhere. Prove Gary wrong that we do not have a squirrel mixed with cat for a dog pet.

His official certificate came in the mail today. Of these 100 breeds of dogs, he came back as an Untested Breed. Yep. His primary breed DNA is the variety of Untested Breed. With no secondary breed characteristics. Nothing In the Mix. 100% untested. Like untestable? The unteachable teaching the untestable dog who is hard to teach. Honestly, it seems like almost too cool to be true to me.

4 comments:

Jules said...

That is insane and insanely awesome. Hmm...cat-squirrel combo sounds more probably.

Elf said...

Wow! Gustavo rocks!

-ellen

Anonymous said...

Capt.
TSD is so beneficial to us all. I was just imagining if there was all a TMD: Team Medium Dog. But then I realized the world could not handle the stupdendous awesomeness of a TSD plus TMD. it would be like matter and antimatter. TSD is all we need. Well, I guess and tampons that don't fall out of purses.

gubblebumm said...

I have a red version of Gustavo, like a red border collie shrunk down...interesting they can't narrow down the "breeds"...kinda cool