Which great presume account as workout professional dog a breeder 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, owners can be surprised by their pets' Wisdom Panel results. As humans we fixate on one trait, said Hughes. People think, for example, that bigger dogs with are Catahoula, smaller dogs are Australian shepherds. But there's a single for and it's dominant it could be from 20 generations ago, and everything from Schnauzers to Great Danes has it. We need to move beyond the single trait. It's like seeing someone with blue eyes and saying ‘Oh, you must be from Sweden.'. Trait-Baiting. Everything Hughes said made sense to me as a science journalist, but as someone who has spent a lot of time peeling off trees futile pursuit of squirrels, I clung to the idea of him having some large hound his background. Following up via email a few days later with Hughes, I asked for a better idea which specific marker might have caused all the Entlebucher confusion. Her reply answered question by providing greater insight into the overall test: The computer is making the neighborhood of 7 million statistical calculations matching 's data to our database and what I is a very distilled version of that analysis I 't have that degree of granularity available to look at and be able to tell you that it is making a match say on chromosome A at position D. What I can tell you is that some breeds have a genetic signature pattern that is very tight e.g. not a lot variation certain areas and if a mixed breed dog happens to have a similar pattern or signature by chance it can come up as a false positive match to that breed I tell you that the Entlebucher is not one I commonly as a false positive is definitely unique that way. Oh, is unique, all right. Lurch is special, as are Tyche and Pullo, and any dog loved by its forever family. But, if the Wisdom