Dog owners usually know the breed of their dog if it's purebred, and they usually know the primary breed of their dog if it's mixed And when the DNA test disagrees, most disagreements have to do with the test not covering a given breed or a breed being detected, but not primary

In another study, the top breed that was identified (i.e., >85% of total ancestry) matched the owner-reported breed for 98.7% of dogs registered as purebreds and 85.8% of those owners identify as belonging only to one breed.

For candidate purebred dogs, 58.2% derived at least 85% ancestry from the selected breed and just 4.4% had no ancestry from it. For mutts, ~5% were purebreds the owners didn't know about. So, across the lit (it's just these), owners are good at identifying their dog's breed.

This result is consistent with dog owners generally being able to identify the dogs they own and most report-DNA disagreement being a data issue rather than true misidentification. However, it is not definitive because the samples were volunteer samples.

The first sample was quite well off. But it and the first both featured breed distributions that were not far off from those reported in the country more broadly. So, there are elements here that indicate selectiveness and those that indicate it's fine.

Does this mean that these owners are better at identifying their dogs? Not really. I don't see why even poor people wouldn't be able to 'get it'. Maybe they'll do slightly worse due to lower rates of DNA using legitimate breeders. Otherwise, eh.

Given that, e.g., so many pit bull owners want one because it's vicious, I bet they recognize that sort of thing In any case, the level of error isn't likely to be far off because in some places, vets register breeds for new owners, and in those places, breeds differ expectedly

It's really fascinating how benign disagreements were For example, the geneticist standard for a purebred is >85% ancestry from one breed, but some owners said their results must've been wrong because their dog was 99.9% one breed instead of 100% And some need history lessons!