e adopted Maggie from a dog rescue shelter in Yadkinville, NC when she was about 7 weeks old. The shelter was listing her as a Beagle mixed breed but from the first view, I knew there was little if any Beagle in her background. Even as a pup she was long-legged and gangly and the shape of her face was more houndish. As she grew, she was a very picky eater and very thin and her coat became a light tan color. She also was an extremely fast runner and seemed to have a Greyhound stride. So for years, we assumed she was perhaps a mix of Lab with perhaps some Greyhound and/or other hound varieties and when asked what kind of dog she was we told people that was our best guess. However, as she’s gotten older and put on some weight her appearance has left us with doubts about our guess.
I finally decided I had to know the answer to the mystery of Maggie’s family tree and purchased a canine DNA test from EmBark. It was a simple matter of swabbing of her inner cheek and then waiting for several weeks. The results were that she was a mostly clean mix of four main breeds:
- 39% German Shepherd Dog
- 28.2% Treeing Walker Coonhound
- 12.6% Plott Hound (The NC State Dog)
- 11.0% Collie
- 9.2% SuperMutt with small amounts of DNA distant ancestors of Redbone Coonhound and Boxer
he German Shepherd was a real shocker and I never would have guessed it. The only thing I can see in her that looks German Shepherd is perhaps her bushy tail. However, while the German Shepherd is the single highest percentage breed if you add up the total ‘hound’ percentages there is a little more hound in her then German Shepherd. “SuperMutt” is EmBark’s designation for very mixed distant relatives. Here’s one possible depiction of Maggie’s family tree which could give her the above breed percentages:
So there you have it…mystery solved. To all those we told she was a Lab and Greyhound mix…sorry about that! 😎
Maybe her German Shepard part is her intelligence. The German Shepard is a pretty smart dog (as a breed).
Ken, I wish that were so, however, I don’t think Maggie’s the brightest bulb in the pack. lol :-) But she is very sweet, tender-hearted and loved very much.
Very cool! Before you mentioned it, I saw German Shepherd and thought of her tail (that’s about it though! :-) ). She has quite the mix going on there, hopefully giving her a strong genetic makeup to live a long healthy life. We did one of these tests for Willow and got a result of 100% Alaskan Malamute – which we were a little surprised. She is a little smaller than typical AM’s, and we thought she might have a little Husky in her background, but nope. It reinforced our guess that she was probably dumped at the pound because she was a pure breed and they found she had hip displasia – so no breeder wanted her. Lucky for us in rescuing her.
A genetic health perspective came with Maggie’s DNA test and there was only one low occurrence issue identified and considering she’s already 11 I doubt it will ever be a problem. Hey, lucky for you guys in rescuing Willow and very lucky for her in getting such loving parents!