A Dunedin dog dodges death row but can't escape his ancestry. In an attempt to better understand his canine's quirky characteristics, Shawn McAvinue fetches a misunderstood mutt's DNA.
In 2013, ready to settle down after more than a decade of city-hopping, I bought my first home, in Dunedin. And I wanted a dog.
My wife had never owned a dog but I was raised in Hawkes Bay with four purebred ones - two white West Highland terriers and two black curly coated retrievers.
I knew my chances of getting a dog after our first baby arrived would be slim, so I needed to act fast. I needed to convince my wife and considered a dependable and docile purebred dog for the pitch.
But secretly, I wanted a lively dog with character and searched the photos of impounded dogs on the Dunedin City Council website.
If an impounded pooch wants to evade an eternal sleep, it needs to sell itself in the photo to attract potential adopters. It needs to express the extreme of an emotion: either drooping sad eyes or a beaming wide smile.
But it was a photo of a 5-month-old black collie cross that caught my attention.
The dog was scared, looking away from the camera, an unfocused blur exiting the frame. A pound staff member was in the shot holding on tightly to the canine's collar. The dogs in the other photos were in focus and without a staff member.
Alone, I went to see the scared dog on a Thursday.
A man at the pound warned me the dog was found roaming in Dunedin, malnourished, aggressive and scared of people. When the man opened the pen door, the dog bared his teeth and growled, while retreating to the corner of the pen.
As the man got closer, the growling became louder and I knew this would be an impossible dog to pitch to my wife.
I told the man not to bother.‘‘Don't worry, I'm not after a project,'' I said. ‘‘Go see him and see how he reacts to you,'' the man said, walking out of the open pen.
As I entered the pen alone, the dog stopped growling, walked over, faced away from me, sat down on my shoes and looked up. That was it; I was sold.
I told the man I'd return with my wife the following day. The next day, the dog did the same routine with my wife, growling at staff before sitting on her shoes and looking up. The mutt had played it perfectly but I needed a way to close the deal.
I decided to play dirty with an awful truth.‘‘If we don't agree to take him today, he will be put down tomorrow and nobody else has shown interest in him.''
The dog looked up again from my wife's feet. Deal done.
I continued to reassure my wife this dog would be easy to look after but was nervous I was introducing an animal with the potential to ruin our home.
When buying a purebred puppy, you often get to see its parents and the breeder can offer an insight on the breed behaviour. But with a roaming mongrel, there are no clues on its behavioural traits. The pound staff's labelling of him as a collie cross was a wild stab in the dark.
What could his ancestry be? An unsavoury mix of leg-humpers, midnight howlers, cat killers and baby botherers? Having decided to get him on Friday we were told we couldn't take the dog until we paid the Dunedin City Council $144 and sign a disclaimer statement on Monday.
So I had the weekend to think of a name. On the Sunday, Hawkes Bay beat Otago in a Ranfurly Shield match at Forsyth Barr Stadium. It was Father's Day, the first one since my dad died.
Sentimentality got the better of me and I named the black and white dog Magpie.
Magpie shared traits with Hawkes Bay. In Hawkes Bay, many of its party people pride themselves on their unique way of entering a celebration.
Take, for instance, the signature entrance of two brothers, who wear hockey masks and wield roaring chainsaws (minus the chains) and whose full-throttle entry turned sour one night when an out-of-town reveller mistook it for a home invasion and knocked one brother out with a plank of wood.
Magpie endures similar misunderstandings.
At a dog park, he'll swoop into a dog pack with teeth bared to get the others to engage in play. If the uptake is not immediate, he'll bark to convince the pack to change their mind. Some play, others cower.
The entrance often backfires, overprotective dog-owners kicking Magpie in the ribs.
Other dog-owners wait until we've left the park and anonymously contact Animal Control. Consequently, Magpie has two black marks at the council.
Sure, I understand some people reserve the right to dislike big, boisterous dogs and want stricter measures in place to keep the party in check, but this one is all bark, no bite.
Maybe modern life has limited room for pack animals and the preferred mix is more purebreds than mixed breeds.(On reflection, Hairy Maclary is a mixed breed and he always seems to be leading the purebreds astray.) Back to Magpie. Perhaps, if I knew more about his breed, I could try to explain his behaviour to concerned dog owners and stop the anonymous complaints before those black marks become warnings.
As the seasons passed, I struggled to determine his breeds. The sun made Magpie more dark brown than black and his healthy appetite for food and exercise revealed a muscular body.
So I bit the bullet and visited Helensburgh Vet Clinic in Wakari for a Gribbles Veterinary Bitsa (Breed Identification Through Scientific Analysis) test.
The vet swabbed saliva from inside Magpie's mouth and couriered it to Gribbles for cross-referencing against a genetic database designed to identify about 60 breeds of registered pedigree dogs in New Zealand and Australia.
The results took about three weeks and surprised me.
Gribbles Veterinary general manager Kevin Darling says results are broken down into four categories - dominant, primary, secondary and distant.
A dominant breed discovery reveals if both of the dog's parents are the same pure breed.
A primary breed discovery indicates if a pure breed is one of the dog's parents. Magpie had no dominant or primary breed discoveries. A secondary breed discovery indicates the parents are mixed-breeds, or a grandparent is a pure breed.
Magpie had a secondary breed discovery, revealing he is about a quarter pedigree boxer.
The test searched deeper in Magpie's ancestry for distant breeds but none were found, including the breeds which were people's favoured guesses: Border collie, Labrador or Staffordshire bull terrier.
Some dogs' ancestry is so mixed, no single pedigree can be detected among their three generations.‘‘It's quite rare, believe it or not,'' Darling says.
In genetics, a dog's behavioural cues are stronger than its visual cues. Darling said a past Bitsa client believed she owned a purebred Chihuahua and doubted the test results which indicated the most dominant breed was Staffordshire bull terrier.
However, when Darling got the owner to describe the dog's behaviour, she told of a territorial dog, one that preferred to dig outside than sit inside on the owner's lap. The woman's description was ‘‘spot on for a Staffy''.
‘‘We have difficulty getting people to move beyond the visual clues . . . the behaviour is the really strong feature of the dog and that's what is driven by the genetics and you get dogs that behave completely different than they look.''
Magpie's results listed boxer traits, which matched his behavioural traits: a strong, intelligent guard dog with a love of pulling, fetching, barking and playing in water; affectionate, with a muscular body, weighing between 27kg and 32kg and standing between 53cm and 61cm tall.
Darling says a dog's behaviour is genetically imprinted, dictated by centuries of breeding. Thus, learning the genetic make-up of a crossbred dog could give its owner an insight into the dog's behaviour and personality.
Such information could help the owner understand the exercise, feeding, training and care the dog needed.
The report said boxers were highly friendly with other dogs and affectionate with family. Now, I'm wondering whether I should take the report to the dog park and show it to concerned dog owners. Perhaps it might prevent any anonymous calls when Magpie, inevitably, makes his grand entrance to the pooch party.
THE BITSA TEST
The Bitsa test costs about $250 and its popularity has steadily grown since it was launched in New Zealand about six years ago.
The report lists potential health concerns for the breeds detected, allowing owners and vets to better manage any onset of disease.
Many canine health problems are hereditary and some breeds are susceptible to certain genetic health problems.
For example, the boxer in Magpie makes him prone to juvenile renal dysplasia, hypothyroidism, hip dysplasia, gastric dilatation-volvulus, deafness and cardiomyopathy.
