The Basics Of Forensic Testing

Want to try your hand at being a CSI? If you live too far from a pet detective, you still can help yourself find your lost pet. If you find blood or fur in the area and want to determine if it’s your lost animal, there are several identification tests that you can run. 

If you locate a stain but are not positive whether or not it’s blood, you can run a quick and easy analysis by running what is called a Hemident test. Basically, it’s an ampoule which when broken turns blue/green if positive. The Hemident test will verify that the sample is blood but that’s where it ends. You won’t know if it’s animal or human blood. 

The Hexagon test takes things a step further and verifies whether or not the blood is human blood. The problem with this test is that you need to keep in mind that just because the test results indicate that the stain is non-human blood doesn’t necessarily mean it’s animal blood. The test results will show one blue stripe if the stain is anything that is not human blood like catsup or motor oil. So, you would first need to run a Hemident test in order to verify that it’s blood before you run a Hexagon test to verify that the stain is not human. 

The most definitive test that could be run would be a DNA analysis. A DNA test can be used in lost pet investigations in 2 ways. First, it can be used to help make a positive identification. The is done by running a test to see if there’s an identical match between the DNA that was extracted from a sample of the missing pet which is then compared with the suspected stain containing DNA. The limitations of this test are that if you don’t have a control sample of the missing pet’s DNA then you can’t run a comparison. 

The second DNA test that can be done is simply an analysis of one DNA sample that can determine the species of the animal. It’s not recommended to start with a DNA test on a suspected stain because you might swab and send off to the DNA lab something like motor oil by mistake! Mistakes can be expensive, so that’s why it’s recommended to first verify that the stain is indeed blood with a Hemident test. So always conduct a Hemident test followed by the Hexagon test and then a DNA test.