Ever since I brought Doodle home eight years ago, we’ve questioned her breed. 

One of the brothers at the feed store declared her a pittie when I showed him a photo. 

“I don’t think so,” I said. 

He shook his head. “Nope, trust me. That’s a pittie puppy right there.”

The repair tech from the phone company was scared of her when she was a few years old, saying she was a ‘dangerous dog.’ 

Trust me, the only thing dangerous Doodle does is she will look at something real dang hard. 

“She has moments she looks like a Rottie,” Cole stated. 

She does. 

Some moments, she has a Golden Retriever-esque look to her. After a bath, her fur will kind of curl up, too, even though she’s short-haired. It makes her look like a plush toy. And, there are times she looks completely like a pittie.

“We need to figure out what she is. I want to know what my dog is,” he said. 

True. We usually said she was a pitbull mix because that’s mostly what she looked like and what others said she was. 

Google wasn’t much help when we’d try to find images of different mixed breeds that we thought she may have been. 

None of them were her color — she’s a soft fawn color, with white on her chest. 

If you’ve ever had those caramels with the pure sugar center, that’s what she looks like. 

Most of the ones we found looked bigger too. 

Maybe it was because she was the runt of the litter and the only girl. 

She can also make herself look bigger or smaller, depending on the circumstances. 

When the ducks come up in the yard, she suddenly puffs up and looks humongous, but the rest of the time, she curls up in a tight little ball and looks tiny.

Cole downloaded an app that would scan her face and tell you what she was with a high degree of accuracy. 

“Pitbull and either a Lab or a Golden,” he said. 

We agreed with those results, but it only seemed to make us want more answers to be sure.

Why couldn’t they determine if she was a Lab or a Golden? 

“Can we just get a DNA test?” Cole asked. “We’ve been saying for years we were going to do it, and we haven’t. We need to find out once and for all what Doodle is.”

So, I finally did it. 

We had said it didn’t matter, that all dogs are good dogs, but sometimes knowing what a pup is can help you understand some of their quirks a bit better. 

We can look at Pumpkin’s behavior and attribute it to her Border Collie traits. 

Even though Mia’s a puppy, we know her drive is her German Shephard characteristics. 

But we weren’t sure what made Doodle Doodle. 

She’s not a big barker. 

She can jump about five feet straight up in the air from a seated position. 

She’s big on cuddling and acts like a human toddler. 

She’s only aggressive over food and the oddest things, too. Like a drop of peanut butter on the floor. 

Her methods of communication include nodding her head to tell us what she wants and backing up and putting her rumpus on us to either heal, comfort, or express affection. Although she also sat on Mia the other day, so maybe she thinks her hind quarters can be calming, too. 

The test involved swabbing the inside of her mouth twice with an extra long Q-tip. 

I had no idea a dog could clamp their lips together but Doodle did. 

She clenched those lips so tightly I thought I was never going to get them apart, not even for the thin applicator. 

After I got the samples of her cells, we put them in the envelope, and mailed them the next day. 

We waited. 

And waited. 

I checked the website daily.

I finally got an email saying they had the sample and would be getting me the results soon, but with the disclaimer that sometimes the pups end up being something totally different than anticipated. 

“She’s a Jack Russell Terrier and something else,” Cole suggested. 

“Or a chihuahua and pitbull.”

I could see that, even though that chihuahua would have to be extremely brave. 

Finally, we got the results: she’s 61-99 percent Bulldog and 10-25 percent Labrador. 

I was shocked — she didn’t look like UGA’s mascot. I reached out to the company and found out that it was an umbrella breed and pitbulls were among them. 

Of course, there was another test I could have done, to give us more specifics. 

I paused. I kind of wanted to know, and at the same time, I knew it didn’t matter. 

Doodle was a Crouch, and that’s all that counts. 

Sudie Crouch is an award-winning humor columnist residing in the North Georgia Mountains among the bears, deer, and possibly Sasquatch. You can connect with her on Facebook at Mama Said: A Collection of Wit, Humor, and Deep-Fried Wisdom. Her recently published book, ‘Mama Said: A Collection of Wit, Wisdom, and Deep-Fried Humor’ is available in paperback and Kindle download on Amazon.