Chew on this!!

So the other day I was in one of those horrifying specialty pet shops searching for a gift for some new dog owners.

You know them… The little boutique ones that sell terrier cardigans for $60 alongside home made dog cookies whimsically shaped like cats. I LOVE dogs. Really truly deeply love them. But there’s something off kilter about these stores. They smell like beef jerky sitting in the sun for weeks and I swear the people that work there inhale helium behind the counter just to keep their baby-talk-to-dog voice just so.

But hanging on the wall of dog toys, between the pink mint flavored bone shaped chew toys and the reindeer dog costumes WAS THE COOLEST THING EVER.

It was a chew toy SHAPED LIKE A STRAND OF DNA!!! Pull on it and you can see those gorgeous base pairs hydrogen bonded like rungs of a ladder but in it’s natural state the helical strands (AKA the phosphate deoxyribose backbones) coil just like Shirley Temple’s ringlets.

It came in a mini dog version and a big dog version. And I wanted both of them BADLY and I don’t even have a dog. So instead I’m urging all you friends of science geek dog owners to snap these up in an effort to make the world a more joyful place all filled with DNA chew toys.

You can buy them online at DNAStuff.com for $13.95. Or brave some cutesy tootsy pooch boutique store in person.