Manny's Dna Test, My Absense And, Florence

[lutece]

I personal find the BasePaws tests interesting. As mentioned above, it is in its infancy. Ancestry, 23 and me, etc. also had to start from somewhere. Many also think thee tests are all fake. I know some of my results are very bizarre, but I do think that with another update they could make more sense.

There's a huge difference between the human ancestry tests and Basepaws. Human ancestry tests are comparing people to human populations from different areas of the world. Everyone's ancestors actually did come from some mix of human populations in the world, so this makes sense. Dog DNA tests also work, because dogs mostly do descend from a mixture of different breeds. That just isn't true for cats. Most cats simply are not mixtures of breeds, so it's fundamentally misleading to give a report with a list of breed matches for most cats. It's not just "the test is in its infancy" (which it actually isn't... UC Davis has had cat DNA tests for years, and in general, DNA testing for cats is just as advanced as for dogs). The problem is that they are trying to produce breed results for every single cat, and most of these cats don't have breed ancestry.

Try thinking of it this way... Look at Basepaws' "Wild Cat Index." This test gives your domestic cat a percentage match to various different wild species including jaguars, lions, mountain lions, and tigers. No domestic cat has lion or tiger ancestry. You can't say this test is "in its infancy" and will return better results later when it is improved... there is no way to return "better results" when the Wild Cat Index itself is fundamentally flawed and doesn't make sense.

For most cats that do not have breed ancestry, a breed index is no more meaningful than the Wild Cat Index. You can't significantly improve the results, because the premise of the breed index itself is flawed.