Soooo… I DNA tested my dogs. Yes, I’m THAT girl. Let me start with how each of these hooligans came into my life.

I picked Shadow. I had just bought my first house and was a single twenty-something living alone. My parents came over, we went to the pound and started looking around. When I walked past his kennel, I knew. As it turned out, Shadow had a rough start in life. He was found tied to a tire, with bad water, and when he came home he had Giardia (a parasite that causes diarrhea). He was two years old and I was in love. The pound had told me that he was a lab mix of some sort… perhaps with some sort of pittie breed in him. He’s now 11 years old.

Brady, on the other hand, picked me. He showed up at the ranch one day and over a period of time slowly moved in. He would stay the night and then started bringing his toys over. He got along really well with the other seven dogs at the ranch. One more, though, was not really an option. One day I had gone over to the ranch to visit and went to leave… as I was pulling down the driveway, I saw a blur of dust in the field behind me in my rear view mirror. I stopped to get out and send him back up, when he jumped in my car. We chatted with his owner, who agreed to give him up, and the rest is history. He was definitely a lab, but with something else mixed in… turns out he was a pound puppy before his prior owner.

I thought it would be fun to DNA test both of them and try to figure out what they’re mixed with. Here are the results:

Shadow: 62.5% Labrador Retriever, 12.5% German Shepherd, 12.5% Rottweiler, 12.5% unknown

Brady: 62.5% Labrador Retriever, 12.5% Border Collie, 12.5% Shetland Sheep Dog, 12.5% unknown

While you may look at both of them and just think they’re labs, I find the results both fascinating and telling. Brady is easier to see – he’s definitely got the lab body, but the lighter eyes and longer muzzle of the border collie (and the fur length). In Shadow, while I don’t see it outright, the rottweiler is definitely in there – in the set of the ears and the shorter muzzle.

I used the Wisdom Panel kits (on Amazon) and it was totally a blast! It also tests them for genetic predisposition to drug resistance/allergy, which was kind of cool too!