Breed-specific legislation requires breed identification. Breed ID is only rarely done with DNA testing, usually when an owner appeals a breed determination.
Johnson: If experts cannot ID dog breeds, how can cities?
By Bill Johnson
Denver Post Columnist
Updated: 12/16/2009 02:22:00 AM MST[...] “Think you can tell just by looking?” was the teaser for the breed identification study we participated in. It was run by Victoria L. Voith, a professor of animal behavior in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Western University in Pomona, Calif.
What I and the others ultimately learned is you cannot simply look at a dog and know what it is.
Shelter workers, she explained, are generally 75 percent wrong when they list or tell you the breed of a dog. The only sure-fire way of knowing, she said, is DNA testing.
[...] “Visual identification simply is not in high agreement with DNA analysis,” she said when I protested that a dog I had falsely, dead-to-rights identified as a pit bull turned out through DNA testing to be mostly Dalmatian. “Dogs in Denver may be dying needlessly,” she said.[...]
Full article retrieved 12/16/09 from http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14005785
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