Reply To: mutts vs pure breeds

[jesse mcclure]

Thanks Allison, we are really interested in the potential for North Amercan “village dogs”. It’s unclear, and a bit controversial, as to whether there are any remaining “just dog” dogs in the US. A majority of our mixed breed dogs in the US are just that **mixed**. They are a remixture of a variety of purebred dogs. But it’s possible that some of them are – or at least include some ancestry of – dogs that never went through a breed-creation bottleneck.

Detecting that, however, may be pretty difficult. There is a subtle but hugely important difference in saying we can’t confidently assign a block of DNA to a specific breed ancestry and saying we can confidently say is not from a breed ancestry. There are some genetic metrics that can get at this in principle, but in practice it depends on the resolution of data we can get.