Imagine you spent 11 years thinking you had a sister and then it came to light that you’ve been lied to all this time?!! Frankly, I think I’m more shocked than Bruno!

I love Embark DNA tests and have done all my dogs. So when their annual sale was happening last November and I’d no more dogs of my own to test I decided to buy a breed only kit for Juno.

Bruno and Juno were at the pound together, picked up together as strays and their owner knew they were there but never collected them. I always thought they were siblings. I originally got Bruno DNA tested because Juno has the longer snout so I figured he had something with a pointy nose in his lines. When he came back as 100% Amstaff I still thought Juno was his littermate but they had different sires.

I’ve always kept in touch with her adopter. We did a playdate once but Juno was kinda mean to Bruno so we never hung out again. These pics are from that day – BABIES!!

I’ve hoped that one day they’d DNA test Juno too but with both dogs coming up to 12 years old I decided I needed to do it myself or potentially never know for sure. I recently got sick of looking at the kit on my desk and made arrangements to swab Juno, at my studio.

Bruno was crated to give them time to settle. She wasn’t remotely interested in saying hi to him. After I took photos of her we let them meet on lead but she thought he was an asshat, and told him so. That kinda soured the mood for photos of them together so all bar one of these are composites (it’s really not necessary to guess which ones, haha).

Anyway, the results came back and, not only does Juno not have any Amstaff in her mix of five breeds, her and Bruno aren’t even related!! I asked Embark to check specifically for a link between them, which is a service you can request, but the answer was the same – they’re not even 8% related!

I’m still completely shocked that these puppies who had the same owner, are approximately the same age, size and build with sable markings aren’t even slightly related. Who’d have thunk it?!