Imagine meeting a potential roommate for coffee but instead of questions that gauge how compatible you both would be living together, you were asked about the ancestry of your parents’ families. Though this situation seems ridiculous, it happens all the time in animal shelters where dogs are assigned breeds that are often just guessed from their physical appearance. These assigned breeds are then used to infer how the dogs might behave and also often impact the length of time a dog waits to be adopted.