People are now hosting parties to learn from genetic testing what breed their canine companions are, Inside Edition reports.
For the party Inside Edition attended the owners had previously purchased DNA kits for their pooches and sent in their samples for analysis. "And then we just thought it would be fun to tell all of our friends together," one owner tells Inside Edition. Before the big reveal, the partygoers guessed what breeds the dogs might be.
As GenomeWeb reported last year, the dog DNA testing market has taken off, with companies like Mars Veterinary, DNA My Dog, and Embark Veterinary offering testing. Embark, which offers its services direct to consumers, tells Inside Edition that it can provide not only breed information, but also diseases that pups might be at risk of developing.
Recently, however, animal science experts cautioned in a commentary in Nature that genetic tests for dogs are largely unregulated, remain to be validated, and often give imprecise results.