Hannah Zulueta The Dog Allergy Test That Cannot Tell Dog Fur From Fur From Plush Toy
What the mail-in fur and saliva kits are really measuring.
She brought the printout to our first call. Forty-seven items, marked in red. Chicken. Beef. Lamb. Oak pollen. She was close to tears because she thought she was doing it wrong.
A test that finds allergies in a vial of saltwater is not measuring your dog. It is measuring whether you mailed the envelope.
She was not doing it wrong. She had been sold a piece of paper. Here is how we know.
She had already pulled six proteins out of the rotation. She was down to sweet potato and a novelty meat she could barely source, and the dog was still scratching.
A whole category of companies will mail you a kit. You clip a little fur, swab the cheek, drop it in the post, and a week later a report comes back naming everything your dog reacts to. Some call it an allergy test. Some call it intolerance, or sensitivity. A few are built on a biofeedback device, which sounds like science and is not.
The reports look clinical. They are ranked, colored, specific. That specificity is the whole product. A worried owner will pay real money for certainty, and certainty is exactly what these reports are built to feel like.
So here is what happens when you test the tests
In 2018, two veterinary dermatologists ran the experiment and published it. They took fur and saliva from a dog with real, diagnosed allergies, and from a healthy dog with none. Then they added two fakes: synthetic fur clipped from a toy, and a vial of sterile saline in place of saliva.
All four went to the same company. Pick a sample and see what came back.
Real fur and saliva, diagnosed allergies
Came back positive.
Flagged: chicken, salmon, dairy, grainsThe sick dog reacted on paper. So far, so expected. Hold that thought.
Real fur and saliva, no allergies at all
Came back positive.
Flagged: chicken, salmon, dairy, grainsThe healthy dog’s report read no differently from the sick dog’s. A perfectly well animal, flagged for the same foods.
Synthetic fur clipped from a stuffed toy
Came back positive.
Flagged: chicken, salmon, dairy, grainsA toy was given a list of food sensitivities. It read no differently from either real dog.
Sterile saline, sent in place of saliva
Came back positive.
Flagged: chicken, salmon, dairy, grainsSaltwater was diagnosed with allergies. When the same sample went in twice, the answers came back different.
Every sample came back positive. The toy had allergies. The saltwater had allergies.
It gets stranger the closer you read
The scan does not claim to measure antibodies. It runs the sample past a biofeedback device, a method with no published support for diagnosing anything in an animal. Open each line below.
Poisons listed as allergies
The panel lists actual toxins as things your dog is sensitive to, as if the danger were an allergy and not a poisoning.
A section for electronics
The report scores your dog against household electronics. There is no mechanism by which a fur clipping reacts to a microwave.
The disclaimer in the fine print
The company says the scan is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. In writing, they say it does nothing. The report just does not read that way.
This is where it stops being funny
The owner on my call had spent two months rebuilding her dog’s diet around a list generated by a machine that cannot tell Dog Fur from a plush toy. She had cut foods the dog tolerated fine. She had added cost, and effort, and the quiet shame of believing the failure was hers.
The scratching had a real cause the entire time. It was sitting under the paper, waiting for someone to look at the dog instead of the report.
A real test finds something
Looks at your actual dog
Run a skin scrape and a mite is on the slide or it is not. Stain a cytology and the bacteria sit there in clusters or they do not. These point at a thing you can see under a lens. They can be wrong, but they are looking at your dog.
Looks at the envelope
It points at nothing you can verify. It found allergies in a vial of saline. It is not worth the paper it is printed on, and I can say that plainly because I ran these tests myself years ago, before I knew better.
Food is the easiest thing to test, and it costs nothing
Most people want to blame the food, and often they are right. No blood, saliva, or hair test can find a food allergy. Not the mail-in kits, and not the pricier panels a clinic might run. You find food the old way.
The hard ones, the dogs with years of inflammation and several things going wrong at once, belong with a veterinary dermatologist. Their reports are the most useful documents I see. I learned the difference the hard way so you would not have to.
Start with your vet, then bring me the food
Find out whether the itch is fleas, food, parasites, or something else before you change a single meal. I wrote a separate piece on how that work-up actually goes. You do not need a biofeedback allergy test to get there.
- Rule out the cause with your vet first. Western diagnostics belong with the people trained to read them.
- When the cause is clear and the question turns to food, that part is mine.
- Tell me what you want to feed. I build the recipe and balance it, alongside whatever your vet has asked for.
Read next: how the allergy work-up actually goes.
Based on a 2018 veterinary dermatology study that submitted fur and saliva from an allergic dog, a healthy dog, synthetic fur from a toy, and sterile saline to a direct-to-consumer fur-and-saliva intolerance scan, and on a larger follow-up analysis of more than 12,000 results. Both found that the reports did not distinguish real samples from fakes.
Sources
Coyner K, Schick A. Hair and saliva test fails to identify allergies in dogs. Journal of Small Animal Practice, 2019; 60(2):121-125. DOI 10.1111/jsap.12952
Bernstein JA, Tater K, Bicalho RC, Rishniw M. Hair and saliva analysis fails to accurately identify atopic dogs or differentiate real and fake samples. Veterinary Dermatology, 2019; 30(2):105-e28. DOI 10.1111/vde.12716
Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
