Let’s play “What Breed are you?”
When I was in school, there was a resident who could best be described as a holy terror. She ate senior students for breakfast, washing it down with the salty tears of our despair when she would mercilessly rip us to shreds in rounds. And hoo boy, did she love me. And by love, I mean, love to rip me up one side and down the other. I was an easy target; I didn’t know much at the time. Her very favorite snack.
“The patient in room two is a….” I studied the chart…”Belgian Mali-noy?”
“Malin-WAH,” she would correct, rolling her eyes. That sort of thing. You had to see her in action to get just how well she did ‘condescending eyeroll’. And then I would make it through the room, and proudly pronounce the next day that there was another Malinois there on the service, only to have her whip out a droll, “No, um, that would be a … Tervuren” plus eyeroll at the senior clinician. While the difference between a Malinois and a Tervuren are now clearer to me, they really weren’t at the time, and well, they are hard to tell apart to the untrained eye.
We don’t learn breed identification in school. We learn it on the fly. We learn that the whatever-it-is in the room has an ear infection, and how to deal with it. It’s much easier in a clinic, where the owner has already filled out paperwork and told at least two other people what breed you are looking at before you go in and mess it up.
It’s still not easy. While this may be easy to ID:
I’ll take, “What is a black lab in a bikini top for $500, Alex”;
This, less so:
As you can tell by the shirt, this is a Pumi. Without that hint, I would have said, what a cute schnoodle.
One of the most fun parts of watching a dog show is getting to see all sorts of dogs you don’t run into on an every day basis. And because I’m nosey, and because it’s fun, I thought I would ask some of the people at the AKC/Eukanuba show what their breeds were most commonly mistaken for by people like me who don’t know them all on sight. The answers I got were pretty entertaining.
I’ve got a couple giveaways to do leading up to the big AKC/Eukanuba show airing on the 4th, and I figured I would kick the first one off today for Giveaway Tuesday: I have two vouchers for a bag of Eukanuba dog food- up to a 40 lb bag! Good for any breed or combination thereof. 
To enter, watch the video and leave a comment below with either- your favorite moment from the video, or the funniest thing someone has ever mistaken your own dog for. Don’t forget to enter on the Rafflecopter widget! Good luck!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
