I received my dog’s Breed Mix report from Wisdom Panel today. See below for the 17 breeds they detected from her DNA swab.
Based on her appearance and her personality, I expected to see Parsons Russel Terrier (aka Jack Russel), Daschund and Beagle. But I hadn’t anticipated that her dominating breed would be Chihuahua! She doesn’t look anything like a Chichuahua. She looks like a little hound dog to me.
As for Pomeranian, Pit Bull, Pekinese and the handful of other breeds, I don’t see it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe these genes were detected.
It just made me realize that dog breeds are made-up hocus pocus. Dogs were selectively bred by mating a male and female that looked or acted in some way that we wanted to reproduce. Along the way, there had to have been lots of “cross contamination” from various “breeds” that we could not ascertain by eye.
There is no such thing a “pure breed dog”. I suspect that any DNA analysis on any dog will show a lineage that includes a little of this and a little of that.
Which is fine anyway.
Most people get a dog for specific reasons – they want non shedding, or cute, or small, or big, or a swimmer, or a pointer, or a guard dog, or an easygoing family dog, etc. As long as their “purebred” looks and acts the way they want, they’ll never know that “pure bred” is meaningless.
Which leads me to the human race.
We all are aware of how throughout history, societies have killed, enslaved, abused and conquered other societies that were different “races”.
In the US, we’ve been focusing a lot on the wrongs that early American and Europeans perpetrated against Native Americans and African Americans. It’s nothing new. Other countries have done the same to “others” forever.
This post is not about the atrocities nor to minimize them.
Instead, I want to discuss the concept of “race.” I recently finished the book Guns, Germs and Steel. In it, the author tracks ancient civilizations from the earliest times when humans transitioned from hunter gatherers to agriculture based societies.
These early societies, in New Guinea, South Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, all initially developed independently of each other. He detailed how the environment, the availability of naturally wild edible crops and the existence and use (or not) of large mammals greatly impacted which groups of early hunter gatherers grew into civilizations.
Then, he showed how trade and migration from these early groups led to assimilation, integration, conquering and merging of these civilizations over time. Guns, Germs and Steel had a lot to do with which civilizations lasted and which ones disappeared.
As I read his section on Korea and Japan, I learned that these two countries have a long history of despising each other. I also learned that they have a shared genetic ancestry, which many people, for political and personal reasons, want to refute.
As do apparently, anyone else who makes a bug deal about race and “racial purity”.
There is no such thing.
We made it up.
Just like dog breeds.
People like to think we can distinguish between races from features, customs or lineage.
That’s not true.
Sure we can evaluate someone’s physical appearance – their hair, eyes, skin tone, facial features, etc. And we can group people by these features.
But we might as well use any other arbitrary trait to determine race. Why not have races of people who:
- Have Blue eyes (vs. the Greenies and the Brownies)
- Run Fast (vs. the Tortoises of whom I’d be part)
- Go Bald (vs. the Long Hairs)
I could go on with this ad infinitum. You get the point.
Instead, societies have usually settled on skin color, religion, birthplace, language, grandparents/parents birthplace, country, and a few other completely f***ing arbitrary markers to indicate race.
It’s arbitrary and silly.
If we want to right the wrongs done to others, let’s do it. We don’t need to sort it out by skin color. I think we can find better ways to recognize who has been unjustly treated and how we can address it.