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Wow, yesterday was interesting. Someone, an influential person in the dog rescue world wrote an “opinion” piece about DNA testing your dog and how they didn’t think it was a good idea. A “quick Google search” was done and surprise surprise when you don’t really do your research this blogger found and quoted a company that we don’t actually use.

Our guys in the US (Biopet) sent this response:

“BioPet has done research to validate that the DNA from the breeds listed in its database has been compared to samples from the same breeds in Hong Kong to be sure that the results are the same. The BioPet test is being used in a number of countries around the world and not just North America.”

When we read the post it was disappointing to be brutally honest – but we were happily surprised by the fact that many people emailed us their support  and do believe that DNA testing your dog is worthwhile and most importantly fun. This was my favorite:

“We’re behind you 100%, and I’m sure there are many others who feel the same. By the way, I told my boss about our DNA test and now she wants her husky tested too! She feels her husky has got some mix in her… “

Yes, its just a test for fun and yes it is appropriate for Hong Kong dogs. We deliberately don’t allow our service to be used to confirm a dog is pure bred because we don’t want to encourage this sort of clientele. There are so many terrible stories in Hong Kong of dogs being treated as fashion accessories and worse and with 4 rescue dogs of our own that simply would not be something we want to promote. I wish the blogger had asked us first as we would have been happy to tell them this. Perhaps we don’t make it clear enough on our site?

Then someone contacted us…

As I began to write this blog post a really interesting message came through – someone had read the blog and despite the harsh wording against testing your dog they were interested and urgently required our help. Urgent, Caz and I could only wonder what this meant. It transpired that the dog has cancer and with only 3 weeks or so to live and they wanted to do a test as a final reminder, something they had always wanted to do, but never knew how.  It’s virtually impossible (without access to the super-duper super expensive equipment seen on shows like CSI) to extract DNA once the dog has passed, so for this family the news came just in time.  We also promised the family a free photo-shoot if their dog feels up to it over the week-end. Seeing your best friend reach his last days is hard enough and it’s the little things that help.

So there we go, even out of a negative story comes some good – A lesson we could all use remembering, one dogs seem to know instinctively… perhaps not Padstow, but he is different, isn’t he!

(By the way, apologies for the blog site formatting, we are re-designing the site and I have not had time to implement the new design… It’s coming soon.)