My Big N-O to Dog DNA Tests

I picked up the brochure at the pet supply store, and it's still sitting on my desk. I haven't done a thing with it.

For something under a hundred bucks, I can get a test kit and send off cheek swabs of DNA from my dogs' mouths and find out exactly what their canine components are.

No more mystery mutts. DNA will answer all those "What kind of dog is he?'' questions.

For a while I wondered which dog I would test. Edgar, the one the vet swears is mostly Jindo? Daisy, who the smart money says is half-Jack Russell and half-Staffordshire? Or Oliver, my mystery boy, fluffy as feathers, grey with grey-brown eyes?

The more I think about the test, the less I'm inclined to do it. All of my dogs, for all of my life, have been mixed-up rescues. They are much, much more than the sum of their parts. To break them down into 10% this or 20% that is to reduce them to something less than their sweet and singular selves. I would rather think of each of them as a breed unto himself or herself, a unique mix to go along with a unique personality.

And I think I'll keep them that way -- 100% certified American multicultural canines.

--Patt Morrison

Mu$$$t Love Dogs

Maybe she did it because she hated people and loved dogs.

Whatever the reason, if the two folks who described Leona Helmsley's ''mission statement'' to the New York Times are right, the Queen of Mean might have left something between 5 and $8 billion dollars to care for needy canines.

The statement may not be legally binding, but if it sticks, the newspaper says even the lowball figure of Helmsley's trust, $5 billion, could provide at least ten times more money to care for dogs than all the assets of every one of the animal-related nonprofit groups reporting to the IRS a few years ago.

Helmsley died last year. She served prison time for tax evasion -- she was famously quoted by a former housekeeper as saying, ''Only the little people pay taxes.''  Evidently a few of the ''little people'' were so furious at Helmsley for leaving several million to her own dog, Trouble, that they threatened the pooch's life -- which meant the estate had to spend even more to protect the Maltese.

Now it's billions-with-a-b, not millions, that might be dedicated not to not one dog, but to the care and shelter and welfare of thousands upon thousands of the nation's blameless, homeless, abused, neglected and abandoned dogs, for decades to come.

Me, I'm all for it. Maybe Helmsley didn't get past the velvet rope at a human heaven, but she'd be welcomed with open paws in dog heaven -- which, from the sound of it, is the place she'd rather spend eternity, anyway.

-- Patt Morrison

Dead Dogs Walking .. to Safety?

    Keep in mind the mantra that ``There are no bad dogs, only bad owners'' when you read this.

    Animal shelters of Los Angeles and beyond are full of the canine equivalents of India's ''untouchables.'' These are strong and strong-minded dogs like pit bulls and some big breeds. Prospective pet seekers often tend to regard these breeds as unadoptable, whatever each dog's individual temperament. A lot of them will probably end up at the wrong end of a euthanasia needle.   

   The most ''hard-core'' and dog-aggressive of these are ``Death Row Dogs,'' and Downtown Dog Rescue is working to rehab them through a program outfit called Canine Communications. The stories of dogs like Spartacus and Clancy are moving, and all the more so considering that something -- someone -- made these dogs what they are.

   http://www.downtowndogrescue.org/deathrow.htm

The

   -- Patt Morrison

Plastic Poultry -- Off With Its Head

     Yeah, yeah, I'm a spoilsport. So what? I'd rather save real whales than fake ducks.

     The big-and-getting-bigger Duck-A-Thon did its bit in Huntington Beach over the weekend, dumping thousands of plastic rubber ducks off the pier -- first ones to the beach winning their sponsors a prize, and the rest going who-knows-where.

    It's for a very good cause -- a community clinic -- but not doing it is a very good cause, too. In our part of the Pacific Ocean, there's six times more plastic than plankton -- six times. Along the North Pacific shores, a hundred thousand sea mammals are killed every year from gobbling plastics that they thought were edible.

    The plastic poisoning of the oceans isn't getting better, and the once-amusing spectacle of tides full of yellow rubber ducks isn't helping. 

    We're a smart country -- if we can stamp out crackers shaped like goldfish, someone can come up with an edible, floating, ocean-friendly food substance and make it look like a duck. Because otherwise, in this case, if it looks like a duck and floats like a duck and quacks like a duck -- it's deadly.

-- Patt Morrison

Patt Morrison's column appears Thursdays in The Times.

Photo courtesy of Community Care Health Centers

Franken-Meat? Mmm Mmmm Good ... For All Concerned

Patt Morrison, a writer and columnist for The Times, joins our L.A. Unleashed blogging team today with occasional posts on her view of animal-related issues.

I’m all for what the skeptical are calling ‘’Franken-meat.’’

PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has put a million dollars where our mouths are: a big honking check to whoever can create marketable, affordable, realistic-tasting lab-grown chicken parts by the next presidential election year, 2012 – a date which, like the warning on your rear-view mirror, is closer than it appears.

A million bucks – a dollar, says PETA, for the number of chickens killed every hour in this country. Baby pork back ribs without killing the piglet … veal that doesn’t slaughter a calf … chicken wings that don’t require a dead chicken.

Perfect, lab-cloned, made-to-order meat. Cloned foie gras means Arnold Schwarznegger could make the stuff legal in California again. Cloned lamb chops mean not cloning a whole Dolly, just her baby gams.

As a vegetarian, I think in vitro meat is a swell idea. Beyond the billions of domesticated animals not getting killed, wild species now on the verge of extinction because they’re on the menu might still be saved – and in Africa, that includes our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees.

And you – even if you don’t give a hang about the multiple billions of blameless creatures slaughtered every year to feed our species, perhaps you do give a hang about how much, or how little, time our species might have left on the planet.

Livestock raised for human food reportedly accounting for nearly 20% of greenhouses gases -- and I’m not sure that that includes the destruction of natural forests and grasslands to grow animal feed. That little enterprise also releases tons and tons of greenhouse gases, and wheat acreage and cornfields are many factors less effective at cleaning up carbon dioxide than trees and natural grasslands.

Anyway, on-the-hoof meat is a pretty inefficient means of delivering protein. You’d have to run your shower for at least three hours nonstop to equal the amount of water it takes to grow a single pound of beef.

And as my columnist colleague Paul Krugman points out, it takes 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef. Fewer cattle, pigs, chickens – fewer greenhouse gases, more available water, more forest, more open space, more available land.  I like that recipe. By 2013, restaurants could be bragging about serving cloned chops and filet.

And McDonald’s can change all those signs to read, "Billions SAVED."

-- Patt Morrison

Patt Morrison’s column appears in The Times’ opinion section every Thursday.

Photo illustration: Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times