Smokey a Pure Bred?

It's relatively recent news that the big ol' fur love of our lives has limited time left with us.  Without going into all of the sad details lets just say that we've been battling canine cognitive dysfunction (doggie Alzheimer's) as well as degenerative myelopathy (a progressive degenerative disease of the spinal cord) and a general loss of control in the poop department (probably brought on by a combo of his old age and the dementia).  Our pup is simply wearing out.  While this will be a difficult few months for us, I thought it would be a great idea to do one of those dog DNA tests so that after these 11 years we could finally find out what breeds make up our best friend.  I originally thought I'd do this for Ryan's Father's Day gift, but when the results came in I couldn't keep the surprise and I had to share.  I know, me not being able to keep a surprise - shocker.

Basically the company uses an algorithm that performs over 7 million calculations to analyze and predict the breeds in Smokey's last 3 ancestral generations that best fit the markers of his DNA pattern.  His chart looks something like this:  8 great grandparents = Labrador Retriever, 4 grandparents = Labrador Retriever, 2 parents = Labrador Retriever, Smokey = Labrador Retriever.  The report told us that the test is not designed as a pure bred test, but they only detected Labrador Retriever in his recent ancestral history.

How can this be?  The report also mentioned that non-AKC registries sometimes recognize a silver variant in Labs.  OBVIOUSLY if you've ever seen Smokey then you can tell he is not a pure bred Lab.  All we know for sure is that those silly rumors of his daddy being a blue heeler were completely false.  Some dog somewhere waaay back in his history most likely wasn't a Lab.  We'll never solve this mystery, but that's OK.  He's the sweetest, funniest, fartiest, most awesome pure bred mutt I've ever met.

Smokey is enjoying spring, so Matthew and I try to take him out in the mornings so that he can roll around in the grass.