Since I live in Europe, the next step was a trip to FedEx and a very interesting conversation with the guy at the counter about shipping dog saliva across the ocean. With the saliva sample collected, you lock the swab inside the provided tube, then shake it to allow it to mix with a special liquid, which protects the DNA until it reaches the lab. Rek wasn’t as keen to participate in the experiment and gave me a couple of death stares while I was trying to collect her saliva. I caught Jimi when he was just waking up from a nap, so I don’t think he had time to figure out what was inside his mouth and what exactly was going on before I got his sample. The idea is simple: use the giant swab provided to collect saliva from your dog. Once I got the two DNA-testing kits and read all the information, it was time to take a sample. descend from separate lines of dogs than the lines that have been bred into standardized breeds like Labradors and Poodles.” In essence, they are almost their own breed – and that alone deserved a test.
According to the Embark website, “village dogs are the free-breeding, free-roaming ‘outside’ dogs found around the world …. Embark has something called “ village dog” in their breed database, and that piqued my interest because Rek doesn’t resemble any breed. I also decided that, in addition to testing Jimi (my Slovakian maybe-terrier pup), I would also test Rek, the dog I rescued from the streets while living in Thailand. I finally settled on an Embark DNA test for a number of reasons, including the fact that Embark does charitable work with animal shelters and that the company partnered with Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine to ensure cutting-edge technology and accuracy in testing. The cheaper tests don’t have a large database of breeds available (these tests test for about 84 breeds out of the 187 recognized by the American Kennel Club), which means you might not get a complete family tree. Turns out, there are several dog DNA tests, with kits ranging in price anywhere from $60 to $200.
I started researching to see what my options were. My older dogs look like a little bit of everything, but my new pup definitely has some terrier in him, so I started to wonder: what breed is he, exactly, and does it really matter? I’ve moved a lot and ended up adopting a dog in every country I’ve lived in for the past 10 years. I have a purebred dog and three mixed-breed dogs, including a recently adopted one-year-old from a shelter in Slovakia.
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