Meet the Animals
Many different animals have found a home and a safe haven with us. To view more information on an animal, simply click their picture.
We have sent most of our resident’s DNA to Embark DNA (Dog Ancestry). Embark’s founders have discovered many of the things that make every breed and every individual dog unique. Their pioneering work revealed an origin of the domestic dog near Central Asia over 15,000 years ago and the history of dog populations around the globe.
You may notice that all of our wolves’ DNA results show 95% wolf, not 100%. This is because besides being close cousins, dogs and wolves have also hybridized many times in the past. Thus good DNA tests can distinguish to the great-grandparent level whether a canid is a dog, a wolf, or a hybrid, but a precise percentage is impossible because of the “fuzziness” inherent in knowing what is truly a 100% pure dog and what is a 100% pure wolf.
Embark’s test is based on the world’s largest canine genetic database and uses over 200,000 markers from each dog it tests, and can tell with unprecedented accuracy how much wolf content is in a wolfdog, but even their estimate is currently only accurate to within about 5%. This means that wolfdogs with greater than 95% wolf content are not reliably distinguished from pure wolves with their test, and therefore we label all such canines as 95+% wolf.
