Rules and daycare 11218 to RFC the word 1942 liberty sliding them into plastic sleeves to reduce risk of contamination. I then activated each test online, a two-minute process that assigns a unique specimen number to each dog's sample. I affixed the labels, closed up the kits and, the following morning, handed them over to postal carrier. It was all easier than our average trip to the vet... Who's Your Daddy, Bitch? Tyche's report arrived first. Although she's like a well-conditioned boxer, her head is classic American Staffordshire Terrier, the breed most commonly associated with pit bull type dogs. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wisdom Panel declared she was 50 percent American Staffordshire. Each of her parents was the offspring of a purebred AmStaffie, as fans call them, and a mysterious mixed breed parent. I flipped a few pages past her shadowy family tree to a called Mixed Breed Signatures. The five breeds Wisdom Panel identified as being most likely somewhere the mix, to speak, were, descending order of probability, Standard Schnauzer, Curly-Coated Retriever, Great Terrier and Saint Saint I saw nothing of any of those breeds the black, blockheaded dog beside me on the couch, sniffing the report hopes that it might be edible. The next report to arrive belonged to Pullo, who everyone I knew had guessed was American Bulldog. Bigger than AmStaffie, with the snow white coat common to American Bulldogs, I was sure Pullo would be close to purebred. And he was just not purebred American Bulldog. Wisdom Panel found he was 75 percent purebred AmStaffie apparently, one great-grandparent ruined his otherwise snow-white ancestry. …what was that bastard interloper? Again I turned to the Mixed Breed Signatures While no other breed had crossed Wisdom Panel's detection threshold the line the data that gives the lab enough confidence to include the dog as a definite ancestor the breed closest was a Smooth Fox Terrier. According to the American Kennel Club breed standard, the Smooth Fox Terrier should not be more than 18 pounds. Pullo weighs at 70. The next four breed signatures potentially his background were the Retriever, Bull Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier and Great Pyrenees, none of which I saw the sleek-coated, big-boned doofus snoring lap.. Where the World are 's Roots? Then came the DNA detective work for the most recent addition to the pack. I'd been fostering him over the but no one wanted to adopt the big, dopey dog that I affectionately nicknamed Lurch. I kept him. has floppy ears shaped like perfect equilateral triangles and feet too big for his lanky body, which continues to grow. And grow. He topped 80 pounds a few days ago and shows no signs of slowing. Shelter staff told me they suspected he was part Great But his huge, baying bark and obsession with treeing squirrels suggested some kind of hound to me. Eagerly, I downloaded his report. Wisdom Panel found that was nearly half AmStaffie. The rest of his makeup was a mix of breeds but two signatures were strong enough to pass the detection threshold: boxer and Entlebucher Mountain Dog. For anyone unfamiliar with Entlebucher Mountain Dog it's the smallest of four regional herding dogs the Swiss Alps, collectively called Sennenhunden. I looked up the breed standard and saw a compact, tri-colored dog with all-business, very -Lurch-like expression. It's a rare breed, not exactly common to Milwaukee's mean streets. What was going on here? Was Wisdom Panel wrong? I wanted answers, I called Wisdom Panel's veterinary geneticist, Angela Hughes. Don't Judge a Book by its Cover. Hughes spends a lot of her time helping dog owners understand the test's results, and is willing to admit the test sometimes barks up the wrong tree. I'm sorry, but that Entlebucher Mountain Dog is a false positive, she said. Having had a few days to ponder the reports by then, I felt a little disappointed. I'd already concocted a romantic, sepia-tinted backstory for 's great-grandparent, perhaps brought to Wisconsin by Swiss immigrants to wrangle a few of the plentiful ruminants of 's Dairyland, then, one day, seduced by urbanite boxer passing through town, running off to the bright lights and big city of Milwaukee. The Entlebucher is a rare breed with a strong signature. The computer could be fixating on one or two chromosomes, Hughes explained, digging deeper into 's report, looking at breed signatures that popped up as possible ancestors but below the detection threshold. She decided that the Mastiff, suggested his Mixed Breed Signature, was more likely to be his background because it appeared on of the lineage trees the computer builds as it processes a dog's unique profile. Hughes also had explanation for why Tyche and Pullo's results threw me for a loop. Wisdom Panel looks for genetic markers that 't affect expression, she explained. The genetic markers aren't dictating a dog's behavior or appearance, and they're not causing disease. Instead, they're the product of random mutations that form a pattern over time a single breed, just sitting quietly the background of the dog genome. By focusing on those non-coding markers, Wisdom Panel reduces the chances of a false positive that's how the company can claim accuracy rate of 90 percent. It's also how, Hughes says,