Ancestry Company gets fooled by Dog DNA Twice in 2018

Ancestry-oriented DNA Tests are the latest hot thing, but not all DNA testing companies are created equal. One Canadian company has sent back supposedly human ancestry results from DNA that actually came from a chihuahua. Shockingly, this not the first but the SECOND time this has happened.

This was not a comedic mistake in sample collection, but a coordinated sting by a suspicious colleague. Louis Côté, who worked with the company to collect samples, started to suspect something was wrong. So he bought three kits, submitted two cheek swabs from himself and one from his girlfriend’s dog, Snoopy. The results showed that both he and Snoopy had almost the same ancestry profile!

“I thought it was a joke,” Côté told CBC News. “The company is fooling people … the tests are no good.”

Once local media picked up on the story, it led to other companies being put through the paces. CBC News submitted samples to several different DNA Ancestry companies, from three of their employees known to be natives of India and Russia. And NBC Chicago tried submitting labrador DNA to one other DNA testing company.

In CBC New’s case, all the DNA profiles correctly identified their employees Eurasian origins, except for that one same company, who came back that they were natives of Canada, in a suspiciously similar profile to both Louis Côté and his Chihuahua. This company is no good, we say!

NBC Chicago didn’t fare much better. The company they tried was unable to detect that their DNA wasn’t human, and the company’s gene profile recommended the dog would be a great candidate for basketball (no Air Bud jokes, please).

So does this mean all DNA Testing is inaccurate? Absolutely not. What it DOES mean is that all DNA Testing companies are reputable. There has been an explosion of online DNA Testing, especially as it relates to Ancestry. Some of these companies appear to be sending out pre-generated or falsified results. Please make sure you have a legitimate company for you DNA Testing so you don’t waste your hard earned dollars and so you obtain an accurate result!

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