Why Your Pets Need DNA Testing!
DNA testing is crucial in maintaining your pets’ health. But how does it really work? Janet King and Dr. Alice Jeromin are joined by Dr. Adam Boyko, Founder of Embark DNA Testing For Pets. He explains that this procedure is not just about identifying the breed of your pets, but also about preventing major diseases and detecting genetic defects before they worsen. Dr. Boyko also shares about his efforts with his brother to go around the world, which allowed them to build a database of DNA information of almost three million dogs – so far.
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Why Your Pets Require DNA Testing – Dr. Adam Boyko
Do you know what doggy DNA is? Have you done doggy DNA on your dog? The only one that I would recommend, and I’ve done it on my own, is Embark DNA. We have the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Embark DNA, Dr. Adam Boyko, who’s also an Associate Professor at one of my favorite vet schools, Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.
We have so many questions about dog DNA. What is it, why should we do the test, what are some of the coolest findings that he’s ever had, like did he do DNA on a poodle and find out it was part boxer? What surprising elements are in doggy DNA, and how can this in the long run help the health of our pets? Welcome, Dr. Boyko. We’re excited to talk to you.
Thanks, Alice, thanks, Janet. Excited to be here.
Janet, why don’t you start, because you were asking me a billion questions about DNA!
Why Get DNA Testing For Your Pets
Why don’t we start with: why DNA for your pet?
They’re members of the family. We do DNA testing for ourselves. I’ve done DNA testing for myself. It’s really cool to see which countries my ancestors came from, find long-lost relatives, you see in some cases why I can’t carry a tune or whether I’m a carrier for anything I should know about for family planning, all of these sorts of things.
Also, I’m a geneticist, and I love to hear all the cool research that happens as a consequence of people answering surveys and all of that stuff. I study dog genetics, because I think dogs are great, and as a scientific question, there are so many interesting stories with dogs that we can untangle because it’s due to genetics. There are just lifetimes of research that needs to be done in dogs. It’s a really fun time to be in a field like that.
Of course, I was like wouldn’t it be great if we had testing in dogs like we have in people. Cornell is probably one of the leading canine genetics veterinary research institutes out there. We have a really great biobank, great clinicians, great resources computationally. I was fortunate enough to get a position here, build a lab, create microarrays that could answer questions about people’s dogs.
We went searching for dogs around the world that was really fun doing fieldwork. I love getting out in the field and seeing the dogs in their natural environment, as well as going to dog shows, looking at purebred dogs, analyzing their results and what they’ve been selected for and all that stuff. There’s just so much diversity in dogs, and it’s diversity because of genetics, that if you have a genetic profile of your own dog, it can really tell you a lot. In some ways, more than a genetic profile in a human can tell you.
The founding of Embark was that we thought that we should have a test like this that people could use on their dogs. I was fortunate enough to start the company with my brother, get into the incubator here at Cornell, get some really great first hires, leaders in the field, push out a test within the first year and then just iterate and just add more and more content to it, building larger and larger reference panels.
If you have a genetic profile of your own dog, it can really tell you a lot. In some ways, it can tell you more than a genetic profile in a human can. Share on XHaving an engaged customer base that has told us so much about their dogs, has reached out to each other and found long-lost relatives of their dogs, just all of these wonderful stories that we’ve heard from people who have taken the test. Seeing the science that my lab and other labs work on and we talk about in scientific journals actually like getting through to actual pet owners who are doing different things with their dogs and understanding their dogs in a better way now that we have a test that they can take.
How does it work? I have Libby, who’s a four-year-old rescue Golden Retriever.
You know nothing about her genetics.
I know nothing. You did give me the thing that told us that she’s 100% golden.
I didn’t care, but you gave it.
You did an Embark DNA on her. Is that what that was?
You sent it to me and said do this and I only did it because, honestly, because it was free, because I really didn’t care what she was. What happens for a customer who uses Embark? How does it work?
Typically, they order the test online, either through our website or through Amazon or Chewy, and they’re going to get mailed a kit. I probably have examples of kits around here. This is the age test, but the you get a standard DNA test as well. You get the kit in the mail, and then you open up the kit, and it gives you the instructions.
You go online, you register your kit so we know which kit goes with which dog, and then you swab your dog’s saliva. We’re basically just taking a cheek swab sample from your dog. If you don’t think you can get enough saliva from your dog, the trick is to wave a treat in front of its nose and then swab the cheek, and that seems to work.
Some dogs drool a lot more than other dogs, but if you need to get drool, have a little treat in hand and then but don’t feed them the treat until after you’ve collected the sample. Just makes it easier. Not that the treat contaminates the DNA, but if you get pieces of the treat in the tube, then when you try to pull up the pipette, it can get stuck and then that could lead to a null result and then you got to do the whole test.
I have to tell you, it’s very exciting as a pet owner when you get the results.
People love it. You get this little reveal. Sometimes for mixed-breed dogs, a lot of times have like bets going on about which breeds are in the dogs. Our most rabid customer fans are the ones that bought the kit and then won that competition in their family, like they were the right ones.
By the way, your website is fabulous. I watched some of your videos on it. There is so much information on that. Not only for just pet owners, but for breeders too. I love that you do free consultations. Would you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, we have so many passionate breeders that use our test, either using the test for all of the animals that they’re using for breeding or in some cases testing whole litters so that they can decide who they want to keep in their breeding program. We really love working with these breeders to make sure we’re offering the test that they need in order to make their breeding decisions. They let us know when new research is being done.
We have worked with them in the past, so we worked with the Rhodesian Ridgeback breed club, and they sent us some affected samples that we could combine with our customer database and we actually were able to identify the genetic defect for recessive early adult-onset deafness in Rhodesian Ridgebacks. We published that and now it’s included just as our standard panel. Now breeders don’t have to worry about creating affected deaf Ridgebacks. Which is great, because like a Ridgeback wants to do a job, and if it can’t hear, it can’t do that job.
Think of how many pet owners sometimes don’t realize their dog is deaf. They’re trying to train a dog and poor dog can’t hear a thing and why aren’t you doing this? I didn’t even think about that. That’s really a wonderful service. We had Dr. Katrina Mealey on who did the MDR1 gene and won inventor of the year. Why haven’t you won inventor of the year? When I’m reading this about you, I’m like, “Maybe the award is on here and I missed it.” This is a fabulous test.
Thank you, I’m glad you liked it. Of course, we do include MDR1 testing on it because it is such an important test that Katrina developed and to have gone from vets just saying white feet don’t feed to now being able to say actually like it’s not the coat color gene that’s doing it, it’s the shepherd ancestry and not all shepherds have it. It’s like whether the dog has it’s this mutation. Let’s look at this mutation and treat this dog based on what we know about it as an individual.
I know what she’s going to ask. “White feet do not treat”, usually Janet, it’s a herding breed that normally has white feet and you don’t want to give them things like Ivermectin because it made them have neurologic symptoms with certain other drugs.
Even if it’s like on a black lab?
Black labs aren’t white. Even cream labs aren’t white. This is more technical.
Building The Biggest data Bank For Genetics In Dogs
The reason that I contacted you, Dr. Boyko, is because I was listening to another webinar you did for veterinarians, and one of my favorite parts was hearing about you and your brother going all over the world sampling dog DNA. You must have the biggest data bank for genetics in dogs, you have to have it.
Yeah, that’s probably true. We’ve collected thousands of dogs, just my brother and I, and then of course it’s actually a lot more efficient, in some ways more fun and in some ways less fun, to start a company and just have people send you the dogs from all over the world instead of you having to go out and collect it. 99.5% of our dogs are all purebred dogs and mixed-breed dogs, but that other.5% are like really interesting samples from places that my brother and I never would have thought to go to.
Places like Morocco. How did you approach them with a swab? Not all dogs are friendly. These were street dogs.
These were street dogs, but they’re still treat motivated. It depended on the community we were in. We did not do generally cheek swabs with the dogs because that’s the business end of the dog. It’s much easier, well easy is a relative term and it depends on the dog, but the goal would be to get a leash on the dog and muzzle the dog and then draw a blood sample from the dog.
That’s even harder.
We would work with local veterinarians or I would have vet students in my lab that would travel with us.
I’m picturing these two guys with backpacks with syringes backpacking through these countries.
When we started doing it, we would actually centrifuge the blood in the field and then ship it back in a more stable format. We actually were able to eventually get the EDTA tubes to store the blood well enough in the shipping well enough that we didn’t have to carry around a bulky centrifuge and then have to try to explain in Swahili to border guards the concept of a centrifuge and why we’re carrying it in and all of that.
You have to write a book just about the collection. Janet, can you imagine him and his brother? Can you imagine you and I doing stuff like that?
No, because my friend Ann tried to get this special salt through security like white powder and I’m on the other side of security going, “Just leave it behind.” She goes, “I can’t. It’s in my possession.” It was some gourmet smoking salt. I can’t imagine. You must speak several languages Dr. Boyko.
I speak Spanish, and my brother speaks French, and that gets us about 60%. I don’t speak Spanish well. Un poquito, sí.
That’s what I said. Me too. Mi perro en mi bolsillo. Just kidding.
Un cafe para llevar.
What is your brother’s training? What side of the business is he?
Both him and I actually were Computer Science majors as undergrads, and then I got a PhD in Biology, he did some anthropology work and then decided to go into public health. I’m the older brother and so I got the faculty position as he was finishing up his Master’s. We had worked together because he was going to all these outrageous places doing his public health work, studying hookworm transmission and Ebola and all sorts of stuff, and I’m like, “Grab some dogs while you’re out there.”
He didn’t want to stay in academia and we had been developing at Cornell, we’d been working together on the village dog project and then my lab had also been working on trying to develop dog genetic testing. We didn’t like the fact that other companies that were doing dog DNA testing weren’t generating data that we could use for research to explore and make new discoveries but also didn’t even think village dogs were a thing.
If you sample the dog from India, it would come back as this outrageous mix of like 30 different breeds even though Indian street dogs have existed for Millennia before we even started building any of these breeds. We’re like, “We could totally do a better test.” We did the legwork for that and we tried to license that to all the existing companies that were out there that would talk to us and none of them wanted to do it.
They’re like, “It’s good enough the way it is.” I guess it’s a credit to my brother saying, “I don’t want to be in academia. Let’s actually like build this as a product. Let’s license it from Cornell. Let’s get in the incubator and let’s do this thing. He raised money we got seed funding we raised a Series A, we raised a Series B. We have a team now and we’re almost to 3 million dogs in our database just from this test. Lots of people are buying the kit and then buying the kit for their friends buying the kit for their next dog.
It’s fun. It’s not only scientific and helping the health of the pet but it’s fun. I’m retired now but when I was in practice and people said, “I want to do DNA on my dog,” I would always say, “Use Embark. It’s the only one with true science behind it.” I’m serious. We had never met Dr. Boyko but the reputation of the company was so stellar that I didn’t want people spending money on some worthless stuff.
I got to ask, what’s the weirdest, strangest DNA result that came back? Did it have horse or a poodle that came back with boxer or something?
We’re building all of these informatics pipelines. We were still probably 6 or 9 months into selling the test. Every week, a tranche of results would be coming back. The scientist would get a ping if we had what we thought was an unusual result just so we could make sure there wasn’t a bug in the pipeline or anything like that. We could we could stop it from going live and fix it if there was an issue. Starting out, it would happen occasionally and then it trickles off and doesn’t happen anymore right now that we’ve got millions of times.
We got this automatic flag. Somebody sent in a dog that’s 100% coyote and we so we look at it and it, it was coming from an animal shelter and so we wrote the animal shelter and we’re like, “Before we release this result, we wanted to just let that this is what the DNA is saying.” They’re like, “We thought there was something up about this dog. That’s why we decided to do a DNA test before deciding whether to adopt it out.”
Janet, I’m surprised they didn’t breed it with a poodle to make a coyote poodle. I’m in Florida right now. It’s doodle everywhere. Everything’s a doodle.
It must have been a tame coyote.
It was a juvenile, still. They still thought there was something off enough that they didn’t want to try to just adopt it out.
What DNA Testing Reveals About Genetic Defects
It’s like when your kid brings home a little baby raccoon and goes, “Look at the kitty I found.” I want to ask you because I was looking at some of your YouTube videos on your website, you had mentioned that about how when you have a breed defect, let’s talk about hip dysplasia for example, you don’t want to concentrate on always breeding it out because then other things take over. Am I wrong in explaining that?
You can only select for so much at a time. It’s a it’s going to be a balance of things. With hip dysplasia, it’s a complex disease and I think it’s not really fixed. It’s at a higher frequency in some breeds but I think you’re always better off concentrating on the dogs that don’t have hip dysplasia or have a lower grade of it and trying to keep out of the breeding pool the dogs that have the highest degree of it.
I think where you get into trouble is where you have genetic defects where you have single mutations that are at high frequency in that breed, like IVDD is at high frequency in Dachshunds and Beagles. You have such a low frequency of dogs that don’t have any copies of it that if you just concentrated breeding those dogs, you would really decimate the genetic diversity because not only do you lose the genetic defect, you lose all the other genetic diversity that’s in those dogs.
You’re looking at the positive as opposed to the negative. Now here’s a question. Do you have any information on Hemangiosarcoma in Golden Retrievers?
We have some information in the Embark data. I’ve actually been looking at it a lot from the Morris Animal Foundation’s Golden Retriever Lifetime Study. That study is still in progress but they’ve been following them longitudinally and we do have over 100 now hemangiosarcoma endpoints. We’re starting to tease apart some of the genetics that goes with hemangiosarcoma and lymphoma and histiocytic sarcoma and it’s not the same locus for all of these cancers.
My first dog died of hemangiosarcoma and I’ve been following it ever since. It wasn’t a golden. It was just a big mutt. To be honest, Dr. Boyko, it doesn’t seem like we’ve made much progress at all with that disease, which is very scary.
Mapping cancer risk just requires larger data sets. Most of the scientists, to recruit that many cases when you’re working even at a research hospital is extremely difficult. If you can follow up with the owners after the DNA test or if you have donors with foresight that can fund a study in a breed like Golden Retrievers that have a high cancer frequency, then you will get enough well-phenotyped cases for the for the for the cancer. You can start to tease apart the genetics of it. We’re starting to see different studies in different cohorts settling on the same genetic loci, which is encouraging.
How DNA Testing Help You Become A Better Pet Owner
How can this DNA testing help me be a better pet owner?
First of all, it tells you is there anything in terms of the genetic health screen that you should be aware of. Most pet owners aren’t going to breed their dog so they don’t really care if their dog is a carrier for something. They only care if their dog is at risk for something. Most of the time, the dog is not at risk for something but it’s still like each genetic defect is maybe up to 1% frequency in the general pet population.
DNA testing tells you everything there is in terms of the genetic health screen of your pets that you should be aware of. Share on XWhen you’re testing for 270 different genetic defects, it turns into 15% to 20% of these dogs are going to be at risk for something and pet owners should know about it. A lot of the times, it’s things that you can just change the environment or change the diet. If you’ve got exercise-induced collapse, if the dog is at risk for that, you can just how you exercise the dog and you know.
Again, that was another case where we flagged early on this Labrador came back with exercise-induced collapse and the owner hadn’t told us anything about it so then we call up the owner and the owner’s like, “That explains so many things.” Their dog had exercise-induced collapse but it never had gotten diagnosed because they never even heard of the disease before or thought to bring it up with a veterinarian.
HUU. You change the diet of the dog and now suddenly, like this really expensive and painful bladder stones that the dog experiencing, you never have to go through that, all the expensive diagnostics and the pain that your dog has. There are all these opportunities to prevent the ravages of the disease but even when you can’t prevent it, if you know your dog is going to go deaf or your dog is going to go blind, you know what to look out for.
You know, “I should train my dog with hand signals or I could train my dog vocally. Maybe I should get a seeing another dog that can be a seeing-eye dog for my dog later on.” You can make these sorts of decisions ahead of time that people find. There was another case where somebody just wanted to know the breed mix of their dog but it turned out their dog also was at risk for a bleeding disorder. Is that a disease that the dog’s going to die from necessarily? No, but in this case, the dog, months later, got hit by a car but the guy had already done his research and knew to take him which vet hospitals had transfusions on site and immediately took the dog there and the dog was able to recover.
It’s so proactive. Right now, I’m helping out a shelter. It’s called Silver Snout Senior Dog Rescue, it’s all little dogs and so we don’t know what breed they are. We have some wonderful owners that just adopted a dog named Randy Patrick who was on prednisone for so long because he had a disease called pemphigus. I got him off the prednisone and we’re controlling him with something else so now he’s got a lot of hair so now we can tell what breed he is.
I want them to do Embark DNA on him because, first of all, he probably is a Schnauzer mix and he was on all these steroids and I’m worried about pancreatitis with him so I want him on a high-fiber, low-fat diet. These little mixes, it would behoove the owners adopting them do this Embark DNA. Let’s find out what they are so because they’re older dogs too, so we can be proactive in preventing because if this dog had chronic pancreatitis, next step diabetes and we don’t want that to happen. We can stave that off with the proper diet.
You know how people do the outfit of the day like on Instagram? Alice gets a daily update on what is it? Randy Patrick?
Yes, because the owners, I sent him to the ophthalmologist, corneal dystrophy, and God bless them, guess what? I got a picture of him at the ophthalmologist office at Blue Pearl. This dog hit the motherload. These people worship him. That’s my point. These seniors are getting a second chance at life because a lot of them have been street dogs or not cared for properly and so to have that genetic information that can prolong their life even longer and a happier life, I think what you guys do is wonderful. Janet, we’ve got to nominate him for inventor of the year.
I know. Where’s the academy? We got to call them.
Why isn’t the brother on too? He needs a little credit for blood testing these Moroccan dogs. Tag team. The Novotny sisters with the Boyko brothers. It’ll be like the Kelsey brothers show.
We’ve done shows together before and we usually insult each other a little bit.
The Novotny sisters with the Boyko brothers. It’s Eastern European revisited.
The Future Of DNA Testing For Pets
What do you see happening in this industry in the next ten years? I see tons happening for them.
I do too but I want to know from the doctor what he sees.
Now that we have bigger data sets together, we are starting to untangle some of the genetics around more complex diseases. In addition to some of the rarer diseases that just affect afflict certain breed. When we launched the test, it was 150 health conditions we were testing for. Now it’s 270 health conditions that we were testing for.
Also, now we can use the genetics to predict in a probabilistic way this is a dog that’s at higher risk for allergies this is a dog that’s at lower risk for allergies. We don’t know if the dog’s going to develop allergies or what it’s going to develop allergies to but we can tell from the genetics how its immune system is wired and that risk for allergy development. We have not launched a cancer risk score but with all of this research going on, there are labs and development around risk scores for particular cancers where genetics seems to be well predictive. I think that’s interesting and it gives breeders yet another tool.
I wouldn’t breed on a risk score solely just like I wouldn’t breed on a COI solely and I wouldn’t breed on a hip score solely but to have that piece of information, because otherwise, how are you going to breed out cancer risk because the dogs are developing cancer after you’ve already bred them? It becomes extremely difficult. We want long-lived dogs. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a longevity score for all of these dogs. People who wanted to breed for longevity knew to include that when they were evaluating dogs for their breeding program.
People who want to breed their dogs for longevity must know to include a longevity score when evaluating them for breeding programs. Share on XAre you doing much with PRA? Janet, PRA is progressive retinal atrophy where dogs go blind affecting certain breeds. Are you doing much with that, Adam?
We test for the known mutations and there’s several different known mutations for PRA. It’s a recessive disorder and it’s at relatively high frequency in some breeds. There’s lots of carriers out there and you want to be sure you’re not crossing a carrier with another carrier because you don’t want to create affected litters.
Not to talk about dermatology but how about Dermatomyositis? Doing anything with that familial canine dermatomyositis? Collie, Shelties are affected. It’s autosomal dominant with incomplete penetrance.
That’s the problem with that one. We have been doing some investigations but we haven’t launched it as a test because the models that are predictive. Collies aren’t predictive in other breeds at all and so we want to get to the bottom of it a little bit more before we do something like that. We are testing all different breeds of dogs and mixes of dogs and so just a better understanding about how different genes in different genetic backgrounds so we can make the right prediction.
It’d be interesting. One thing, Janet, real quick because this is interesting. That same disease in people affects the same portions of the body. The knuckles, the carpi, the tarsi, the face, and the tail tip. It’s fascinating except dogs have more skin lesions than muscle. Dermato-skin myo-muscle. When a dermatomyositis person goes into the doctor’s office, they’ll say, “Squat down and get up for me,” and they can’t do it because their muscles are inflamed. In dogs, we don’t see too much muscle activity. It’d be interesting to compare those genetics between humans with the disease and dogs with the disease. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I’m just saying.
Maintaining The Confidentiality Of DNA Information
I’m thinking about there’s these the human DNA banks and certain companies share that information with like the FBI and the police all that, but some of them don’t. They guarantee that they don’t share your information. Has it ever happened where you had to provide that DNA information for a dog like that was in a crime like a bite or something?
It’s never happened for a crime. I think most of the crime stuff goes through UC Davis because they’re set up for a chain of custody handling that we’re not set up for as a direct-to-consumer company. We have been called several times to evaluate dogs where they’ve been taken because the government thinks that they’re a wolf or an illegal wolf-dog.
Not a coyote. A wolf.
We’re looking at 100,000-plus markers, so we can actually much more accurately get to the bottom of what fraction of this animal is actually wolf or is it wolf? In some cases, you have dogs that were bred as wolf-likes that don’t have any wolf ancestry but you need a genetic test to do that and so you get desperate owners saying, “Can you please test my dog so I can get it back?”
That’s fascinating. I’m assuming you guarantee privacy for your patients, to the humans.
There is an option. People can opt in or out of having their dogs profile used for scientific research but even if it’s used for scientific research, it’s anonymized. We don’t release the dog’s name or the owner’s name. There have been cases where we’ve been collaborating with National Institutes of Health or other research institutions and there are samples that are particularly interesting for that study where follow-up by those researchers would be.
We will privately reach out to the customers and be like, “We wanted you to know, thank you for opting your dog into scientific research. It’s actually really valuable. Can we put you in touch with these researchers?” Nine times out of ten, the owners are just thrilled to be able to do that and sometimes they get their dog’s picture on the cover of a scientific journal and all that stuff.
Are you looking at different diseases like Addison’s disease, Cushing’s disease? Are there genetic markers for that too?
We ask owners in an annual health survey, “What has your dog been diagnosed with? What were they treated with?” We can turn those numbers. Comparing dogs that were diagnosed with Addison’s disease versus matched controls so dogs that have similar breed mixes and similar ages but don’t have that diagnosis, do we see any genetics pulling out?
We can ask that at scale for over 100 conditions. Some of them will do pull-out associations that are worth following up on of course, we don’t want to just take an association and then just offer it as a test we want to actually understand what’s the mutation going on what’s the penetrance of that mutation how should an owner interpret that so it’s an ongoing it’s an ongoing process.
Addison’s is often missed, so it’s so nice to have a heads-up if my dog isn’t acting right. I have this genetic screening and I can say to the vet, “Could you see if this is Addison’s? Could you do a test?
Of course, a genetic result isn’t a diagnosis but knowing that your dog has a higher propensity to develop it, then what to look out for. I think that’s particularly helpful with degenerative myelopathy, where if you know that your dog carries the DM allele, that doesn’t mean he’s going to develop the disease but you hate it when the owner doesn’t know what to look for, and the dog is suffering, and the owner doesn’t realize it.
That’s another disease we know nothing about, sadly.
Dr. Boyko’s Household Pets
Okay, so I have to ask, do you have pets?
I do. I had a mixed-breed little gray dog. She actually had diabetes but actually was she lived with diabetes for six and a half years even though she was blind for the last three years and it was mast cell tumor that finally took her. We’re all sad about that but we still have four ducks and a bearded dragon.
Can you do duck DNA?
No. I’ve been asked that before. We don’t. There’s lots of exotic pets where there is interest in doing DNA testing. We haven’t branched out into any of that but maybe as a second gig, that’ll be fun to do.
Janet and I had ducks as pets, Phoebe, Romeo, and Juliet. We loved our duck pets. What are your ducks’ names?
We have Martha, Eliza, Stripey, and Archibald.
Eliza is from Hamilton.
Yeah, we tried to do all Hamilton but then the kids named Stripey and Archibald. They’re all female Khaki Campbells or hybrid Khaki Campbells.
Ducks are fun.
Yeah, they are they’re a lot of fun. My ducks are not particularly smart. Maybe some people have smart ducks but mine are not.
We always got them every Easter. My dad would bring them from some farm in Ohio, and then we’d raise them, and then they’d go back to the farm but we really didn’t know what happened at that point.
These were shipped as babies from a farm in Kansas. You tell your postal carrier that.
Dr. Boyko’s Biggest Pet Peeves
I was at the post office once and there were live chicks or something in there in the box. Dr. Boyko, we have to ask you our guest question. What is your pet or human peeve? What bugs you, like a turn signal or blinker?
Janet, I think he’s pretty tolerant because he’s been in so many countries. Is it your brother? Janet gets on my nerves sometimes.
Having traveled so much, I think my peeve is standing in line for two hours at a checkpoint usually at an airport and then the person in front of you doesn’t have their documents ready. I’m like, “You have had literally all day to prepare for this.”
It’s like when you go to the grocery store and someone thinks, “I have to pay for this?” You’ve been in line.
Here’s mine. When you’re getting off the plane. What takes so long?
I know, but Janet, you’re one of those that shoots out and people think you’re really rude.
Get your backpack. Let’s go, people. The other time, we were flying and I’m waiting for the guy in 8A to get out of his seat and I just went around and he went, “That was so rude.” I go, “It took you forever.” As soon as those brakes are on, I’m up in my seat. I may not be getting out but I’m up in my seat.
Grab the bag, make sure everything’s in the bag and then as soon as in front of me is cleared, I can just walk out.
That just makes me nuts.
The one thing that bothers me more than that is when somebody pushes past me because it’s important for them to get out of the plane before me and then I pass by them on the jet bridge because they’re waiting for their gate-checked luggage.
I have to say one funny story. My son and I were looking at colleges and I think we were in Atlanta and that’s a huge an airport. We wanted to get these special burgers. I don’t think it what company would it have been, some hot burger.
Whataburger or something like that.
Whatever it was. My son’s in line going, “Should I abort?” I’m at the plane and I know once you get on the plane, you can’t get off. I’m standing where you go on the plane and the pilot comes out and he goes, “Are you going to get on?” I said, “My son is at that burger place.” He goes, “I’ll hold the plane for you,” and he did. He got in the cockpit and I waited for my son Kyle and went like this to him and he goes, “Okay,” and we got on the plane.
Flying used to be fun. Now it’s not fun. It’s hell.
It is tough. Last Valentine’s Day, my wife and I and kids spent Valentine’s Day at the Atlanta Hilton Airport Hotel because we missed our connection. We got up for our 6:00 AM out of Syracuse. The plane was there, we were there, the pilots were there, the gate agent was there but the flight crew slept in.
They canceled the flight.
No, they delayed it three hours so everybody missed their connection. Instead of having Valentine’s Day in the Caribbean, we had Valentine’s Day at the Atlanta Airport.
My son was just going to Alaska straight from New York which is like eleven hours. They canceled the whole flight and he said it had something to do with the crew, like so many hours or something? They moved it to the next day so he’s like, “Do I come back out?” He came back out and they refunded his Uber instead of paying for the hotel. He goes, “I spent a whole vacation day at JFK.”
When you only have a seven-day vacation, like losing a day there hurts. Delta was good. They paid for a meal and they paid for the hotel. It was bad because we were going with my parents. We were traveling in a separate plane and so they land on this island and we’re not there. They don’t have an international calling plan, they don’t want to drive at night, so they were stuck.
Did they have a good time though after all?
After we got there, they had a great time.
Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
This has been unbelievable. Your website’s fabulous. We love it.
Embark DNA. I’m telling you, it’s the only way to go.
Glad you enjoyed it. We just love hearing customer stories, hearing what customers want. We’re always trying to do more research and trying to tell them as much as possible get on the cutting edge.
Find out if your dog is part coyote.
That’s always a curveball that most people don’t want to know about.
Before we go, what about cats? Anything in the works for cats?
Scientifically, cats are less interesting because they’re not all different shapes and sizes. They’re not all different behaviors. We foster kittens in my household. The kids love the kittens. My wife and I are allergic to the adult cats.
Scientifically, cats are less interesting because they are not all different shapes and sizes. They are not all different behaviors. Share on XLiveClear, the food by Purina, reduces the allergenicity by 40%.
We’ll try that and see if we can keep the kittens a little longer. Scientifically, there’s more than enough to do with dogs and there’s other cat researchers. We let them deal with the cats.
I have a feeling the next step for you would be bearded dragon or ducks, though.
I have received passionate proposals from everything from pythons to parrots so it could be whatever.
Don’t talk about pythons here in Florida because apparently, there’s no small mammals left in the Everglades at all. Including the key deer, the cute little deer. They eat them too. It’s bad.
You managed to freeze out a lot of the iguanas this winter, though, at least.
We had a place in Sanibel and iguanas are plentiful there. We’re in Venice now. Knock on wood, my husband said to me, “We haven’t seen any iguanas here.” They must like Sanibel better, farther South. Good.
My grandparents retired in Leesburg and then we traveled from around there.
Leesburg, we drive through that on the way here.
The dermpathologist I used to use is in Leesburg. Janet, we need to wrap it up. Adam, thank you so much. I was looking so much forward to talking with you. This has been so fun.
Thank you so much. Thanks for reading.
Thanks, everyone, for reading and we’ll see you next time.
Important Links
- Embark DNA
- Dr. Adam Boyko
- Embark DNA on YouTube
- Should I Breed a Dog Tested as a Carrier or At Risk?
- breeders@embarkvet.com
- Embark CSO Explains Genetic Diversity
- Oedipus Rex: Dog Inbreeding, its Consequences, and its Quantification
About Dr. Adam Boyko
Adam Boyko’s research focuses on genomic investigation of dogs as a model of genetic disease and evolutionary genetics. One aspect of this work is understanding the evolution and genetics of village dogs, the semi-feral pariah dogs found in much of the world today. Dr. Boyko is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and received an MS in Computer Science and a PhD in Biology from Purdue University before his postdoctoral research in the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University. He served as a Research Associate in the Genetics Department at the Stanford School of Medicine before beginning his faculty appointment at Cornell in 2011.
Dr. Boyko is a member of Cornell’s Center for Vertebrate Genomics, the Center for Comparative and Population Genomics, and the fields of Comparative Biomedical Sciences; Computational Biology; Genetics, Genomics and Development; Molecular and Integrative Physiology and Zoology and Wildlife Conservation. He also serves as Founder and Chief Science Officer of Embark Veterinary, a canine genetic testing company.