The first thing that didn’t seem right when I woke up at around 6 am was that Boone was not asleep on the dog bed that’s in my bedroom. He’s the only one of my dogs who has decided that he would rather sleep near me than on one of the couches or the giant Snoozer dog bed in the living room. But last Thursday morning, he was not in his regular spot.

I got up and went looking to see where he might be – just curious, not worried. He can sleep wherever he wants! I found him curled up on the Snoozer – odd, but not unthinkable. I greeted all three dogs, and opened the front door so they could go outside and pee. But only my two older dogs got up to go outside. Now, that IS weird. Fifteen-month-old Boone is usually jamming his nose in the gap between the door and the frame, cramming his body outside before anyone else. He loves being the first dog outside, so he can joyously race across the lawn, hoping to surprise an unwary squirrel on the ground and make the robins fly. But on this day, he stayed curled up, just looking up at me with his eyes, not even raising his head. “Hey buddy,” I said to him. “What’s up with you?”

I grabbed the dog bowls and headed over to where I keep the dog food. This was the big test, because Boone always – and I mean always – accompanies me to fill the dog bowls. He watches my every move, hovering near the bowls. He doesn’t help himself to the food I measure out,  but gets to grab for and scarf up any stray kibbles that hit the ground as I scoop and pour the food into the three bowls. But on this day, he stayed on the dog bed as I prepared the dogs’ meals.

I called Boone over to me. He got up very stiffly, noticeably limping on his right front leg. His head was down. When he stopped walking, he stood in a strange stance, with his right front leg turned at a weird angle. He looked miserable.

I sat on the floor in front of him and did a quick exam. Did he have a cut on his paw, a thorn, a broken toenail? No. Did he have any cuts or scrapes? No. Did he flinch when I pressed and flexed the various joints in his ankle, elbow, or shoulder? Also no. But when I got up and asked him to follow me outside, he moved very stiffly and slowly, not at all like his usual bouncy self. I watched as he urinated – it seemed like the usual color – and then asked him to come back into the house.

I went straight back to my bedroom and got dressed. The closest emergency veterinary hospital is about 30 minutes away and they open at 7 am. If I left right away, we could be there within a few minutes of opening and stand a chance of getting seen before 10 am. I don’t know what was wrong with him, but given that this was on a Thursday before a holiday weekend, I didn’t want to take any chances. As I drove, I thought to myself that I should have taken his temperature before I headed to the vet, but on the other hand, then I wouldn’t be close to first in line at the ER.

My plan paid off; I wasn’t first, but was among the first people there, and they had an opening. We were in a room by 8 am. A technician took his vital signs – and he had a normal temperature. Whew! That ruled some things out. But Boone was definitely not himself. Instead of checking out the room or bugging me for attention and petting, he sat across the room from me, leaning on the wall, head down. When I told him to lie down, he ignored the cue and continued to sit.

When the doctor came in, Boone greeted the doctor in a very low-energy way. The doctor noticed his limp and his strange stance. The doctor also listened to his breathing and heart and palpated his abdomen, but said, “His posture is weird. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hurt his elbow, the way he’s standing. But I’d like to take him in the back and lay him on a table, to rotate and move his shoulder and elbow. And we might need to take some x-rays – but I’ll let you know.”

Within 10 minutes or so, the doctor was back. “Boone didn’t have any trouble with flexing or rotating any joint,” he said. “It’s weird. While it’s possible that he has a hairline fracture or something, I think it’s more likely that he strained or pulled something. I’d like to send him home with some carprofen (an NSAID); let’s see if this resolves in a couple of days of rest – and if it doesn’t, bring him back and we’ll take some x-rays.”

But as the doctor was talking, I was looking at Boone, who was again sitting and leaning against the wall, head down, eyes half-closed. “I feel like there is something else going on!” I said. “This is usually a very energetic 15-month-old dog! Look at his eyes! He’s closing them! He just looks so dopey!”

The vet sort of cut me a look at that last phrase. Until I spontaneously said the word “dopey,” I hadn’t even considered the possibility of Boone having ingested something intoxicating – mostly because neither my husband nor I use any form of cannabis, nor any other type of opiate or medication. I hastily added, “We don’t have any dope on the property! There’s absolutely nothing to get into – no medications, no recreational drugs, nothing!”

“He does seem awfully subdued,” the vet said. He checked the chart, and asked the technician about Boone’s temperature. “It was normal?” he asked. “And you got a good temp, no messing around?” She assured him that she had the thermometer all the way in for the full length of time – that the reading was good.

I asked about various issues that were caused by tick bites (such as tick paralysis) or carried by ticks (such as Lyme disease or anaplasmosis); I had walked Boone and Woody the day before in a particularly tick-infested area. However, I hadn’t let either dog off leash (because we kept spotting deer) and we were walking on a wide dirt road – not many chances to come into contact with the brush or grass that ticks are generally waiting on. And I hadn’t seen any ticks on either Boone or Woody the night before. The doctor said that tick paralysis affects the back legs first – a limp in the front ruled that out. And while a limp could be a sign of a tick-borne disease, a limp that moved from one limb to another (because all the dog’s joints were painful) was more classic – and the dog would most likely have a fever. He said, “It might be helpful to run some blood tests, to see if anything is out of the ordinary. We can check for tick-borne disease, and he’s due for a heartworm test. Let’s get all that, give him the carprofen for a few days, and see where we are after that. But of course, bring him back if he gets worse!” I agreed; maybe the test results would shine some light on this strange, nonspecific malady.

I drove home, and offered Boone the chewable carprofen. I was heartened when he ate it readily, as well as the breakfast that he hadn’t been interested in earlier. But not long after that, he went back to the Snoozer dog bed, and resumed sitting in that weird position, head down, eyes closing. And when I told him to lie down, he again ignored me. He didn’t want to lie down for some reason. We had been home for about 45 minutes when I called the vet again, asking if I could bring Boone back. The receptionist said they could see him again at 12:30. We had to wait 2½ hours – but at least they could see him.

Fortunately, over the next couple of hours, Boone began perking up. When we went out to my office, he went into the big soft crate with the other favorite dog bed in our home, the Wash ’N’ Zip Pet Bed, and lay down, instead of continuing to sit in that strange pose. And when I went to get some coffee from the house, he volunteered to come with me, and it looked like he wasn’t limping as much. Could the carprofen be working that quickly, I wondered? After I got my coffee, I walked around with Boone outside until he went poop; I was relieved to see that it looked normal.

By noon, he was back to sitting in front of my office door looking through the glass like he normally does. I called the veterinary hospital and told them I was sorry for the inconvenience, but that I would not be bringing him back after all; it seemed like he was feeling better.

By that evening, Boone was behaving 100% normally – normal energy, normal appetite, normal gaits (no limp whatsoever). And he’s been fine ever since. What the heck?!

The next day, the vet called to report that all Boone’s blood values were normal, he was heartworm negative, and his tick-borne disease titers were negative.

I’m thrilled that nothing more seems to be wrong with my young dog, but I’m still mystified as to what all that could have been about, and concerned that something is lurking and might resurface. He looked seriously ill for a couple hours – and his limp was not in my imagination; everyone saw it. Did he just have a sprain, and was being the world’s biggest wimp about it? Could he have eaten something intoxicating that someone had thrown over the fence – and the limp was a coincidence? The vet said he didn’t show any signs of discomfort in his gut, but his strange posture and reluctance to lie down made me feel like something was uncomfortable in his tummy. Unless any of these symptoms recur, I’ll never know.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a story that had been widely shared on social media about mixed breed dog DNA tests. The story had been generated by a Canadian news organization, which had conducted an investigation into the tests, by submitting DNA from three dogs and one human to four companies offering these tests. The results were widely reported as being crazily false – and the results from two of the vendors were bananas, but there were actually pretty good results from the two leading vendors of these tests (Wisdom Panel and Embark), with the latter’s results being, as far as I was concerned, spot-on!

Neither the Canadian news station nor I mentioned the only nonprofit purveyor of mixed-breed DNA tests. Today I’m trying to correct that, as well as promote their services for entirely selfish reasons.

Darwin’s Ark is a nonprofit scientific research project that offers mixed-breed dog breed identification tests – but, more seriously, the project is using dog DNA in order to find answers to common health and behavioral issues in dogs, with implications for human health and medicine. It’s the brainchild of geneticist Elinor K. Karlsson, a professor of Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and the Director of Vertebrate Genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Karlsson’s current projects include the Zoonomia Project, an international effort led by the Vertebrate Genomics group at the Broad Institute to compare hundreds of different mammalian genomes and identify critically important segments of DNA. She is also studying recent human evolution to find the genetic variation that makes some people resistant to ancient infectious diseases, like cholera.

Karlsson has a special interest in diseases shared between humans and dogs. She leads the citizen science-driven Darwin’s Dogs project, which invites dog owners to participate directly in research exploring the genetic basis of dog behavior, as well as diseases such as OCD and cancer.

There’s a very good article about Karlsson’s work here, written by sometime WDJ contributor Jessica Hekman, DVM, who studies the genomics of dog behavior at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and who is a post-doctoral associate who works on the Darwin’s Dogs project.

Darwin’s Ark is collecting DNA samples from as many dogs as they can get their hands on, and the DNA will be available for use by all the Darwin’s Ark researchers in any of the fascinating and meaningful studies they are conducting. One focuses on working dogs: assistance dogs, military dogs, SAR dogs, bomb detection dogs and more. The Darwin’s Ark website describes, “Our goal is to find genetic markers for the behavioral traits that make successful military and working dogs. By using new genetic technology, and working closely with dog breeders and trainers, we want to be able to select the right dog for the right job.”

They also have a cancer study in progress. “By studying cancer in dogs, we’re working to help both people and dogs survive cancer. Dogs get many different types of cancer, and many of these cancers look and behave like human cancers. Canine cancers are also treated with many of the same drugs and other treatments that humans receive. Additionally, some cancers that are very rare in people are more common and easier to study in dogs. Together, we’ll be learning more about why dogs get cancer and the best ways to help them. We plan to study risk factors passed down from parents to puppies, test methods to detect cancer in a blood sample, and compare exposures to potential cancer risk factors in each dog’s home and surrounding areas.”

All canine DNA submitted to Darwin’s Ark – including that submitted in search of identifying the breeds in a mixed-breed dog – will go into a pool of data that can be accessed by the scientists working with Darwin’s Ark, for strictly noncommercial purposes. Darwin’s Ark makes a big point that this is all open science: “We are a non-profit that subscribes to the open science model. This means we do not own and will never sell your pet’s data. You contribute to an open source database and we share all the new discoveries we find freely with you and researchers around the world. Together we can advance health care for pets and their humans.”

You can participate in Darwin’s Ark’s research by submitting your dog’s DNA to Darwin’s Ark for free; they just ask you to answer a number of surveys about your dog’s health and behavior. Once you’re answered 10 surveys, Darwin’s Ark will ship a DNA collection kit to you for free. Once returned, they sequence the DNA from the saliva and send you genetic and ancestry information about your pet – but the timetable for receiving these results for free depends entirely on the funding Darwin’s Ark receives as a result of its constant grant-writing. If you submit information about your dog and return the DNA collection kit that you requested for free, it may take years for you to receive any answers.

However, Darwin’s Ark now offers a paid service that will return the results of a mixed-breed identification test to you on a more prompt schedule. Yippee! For $149, Darwin’s Ark will send you a DNA collection kit that you return in a postage-paid envelope – and you’ll receive the results faster. . . but since this is not a commercial enterprise, the timetable of your results will depend on the number of paid samples they receive. Darwin’s Ark doesn’t run DNA tests on individual dogs, but will run the tests any time they have a batch of 20 paid-for DNA samples.

We’re finally at that place of self-interest that I mentioned earlier.

As I mentioned in the previous blog post about mixed-breed dog identification tests, I had DNA for my dogs Woody and Otto analyzed by both Embark and Wisdom Panel, and have shared the very similar results. I also sent DNA from my youngest dog, Boone, to Wisdom Panel. A few weeks ago, I submitted Boone’s DNA to Embark and to the paid service offered by Darwin’s Ark. I’ll share the results of those tests when I receive them, but as I learned when I checked with Darwin’s Ark, to see when I might expect results from them, their results will arrive promptly after they have received a total of 20 paid tests and run them as a batch.

If you’re interested in getting a mixed-breed dog identification test done on your dog – especially if you’re interested in science and would love to contribute to open-source science involving dogs and being conducted by scientists all over the world – consider getting a paid DNA test from Darwin’s Ark! You can read more about how to order the tests and what Darwin’s Ark is doing with its data here. And when Darwin’s Ark sends me results on Boone’s DNA, I’ll share that with you – and would be happy to also share any results you receive from your dogs that you send us. It would be fun!

Darwin’s Ark explains the difference between the methodology of how its tests are run versus the how the commercial labs get their results; it sounds like Darwin’s results will be much more complete than those offered by Embark and Wisdom Panel. According to the Darwin’s Ark website, “We generate about 9,000,000 markers for each dog for our research. Our breed ancestry panel currently uses 688,060 of those markers. We are limited in the number of markers we can use for breed ancestry, because the algorithm we use requires that every dog in our breed panel have the same number of markers.”

For comparison, this information is from the Embark website: “Embark is the only canine genetics company that uses a research-grade genotyping technology. The Embark dog DNA test is based on the Illumina CanineHD microarray, which has long been the leading research platform for dog genetics. Our dog DNA test analyzes 230,000 genetic markers. That’s more than twice as much genetic data as the competition.”

I am eager to learn more and compare the results for my dog from Wisdom Panel, Embark, and now Darwin’s Ark. Are you, too?