Followup on Pip

As noted in the original post, (August 17, 2008), Pip was a "rescue" dog, with no papers and with no information on his heritage. As Barbara was leaving the vets in Tuscon the final time, she told me on the phone "I'm going to find out exactly what this damn dog was!"

For a small(?) sum you can get a DNA analysis of any dog, to find out more or less what's in his/her background, and Barbara sent a specimen off. We finally received the results: He was very nearly 50/50 Border Collie and Australian Shepard. Nothing else was in there in sufficient quantities to detect. This explains a lot. His characteristics (high intelligence, loyalty, communication skills, etc) are pretty much those that stand out in both of those breeds.

Something did, and still, puzzles us. Pip was unusually large for either a Border or an Australian shepard. A vet once told us that the Borders in the northern England/Scotland counties can be quite large, better enabling them to fend off predators from the flocks. Maybe one of his "largeness" genes got turned on.

Should we ever have another dog (and it would be quite a while if we made that commitment), we would look for this mix again. . . it worked absolutely perfectly at least once.