This past March, we adopted a puppy from a canine rescue when he was about six months old. We named him Bowie—after David Bowie—because he has two different colored eyes and, honestly, he just felt like a Bowie. He’d been found as a stray in a rural Kansas town and spent over a month in an overcrowded animal control shelter. When the shelter hit capacity and started drafting a euthanasia list, they sent an SOS to regional rescues. A few groups stepped up, including Home 2 Home Canine Orphanage in Pacific, Missouri. We came across Bowie after browsing their website over coffee on a Sunday morning (and not really thinking we were ready for our next dog—but you know what happens when you start looking!!).

The rescue listed him as an Aussie/Lab mix. Our vet agreed, and we thought so, too. But curiosity is powerful—especially when you’re staring at a dog and thinking, What exactly are you? So we ordered a dog DNA kit from Embark, the company that’s basically 23andMe for dogs, only with fewer surprise children and siblings showing up out of nowhere.

The process was easy: Embark mailed a kit, we swabbed the inside of Bowie’s cheek for 30 seconds (which he tolerated like a champ), sealed it up, and sent it back. A month later, the email hit our inbox.

We opened the results:

“Wait—Husky? Pit Bull? BOXER?!”

This was not the Aussie/Lab prediction we had been confidently repeating to friends and neighbors. But the more we looked at him and got to know his personality, the more we could see it. (For reference, “Supermutt” means that a dog has ancestry from multiple different breeds, but the amount of DNA inherited from those breeds is very small. Embark’s guess for Bowie’s Supermutt portion was part Great Pyrenees and part Labrador.)

Still, a question nagged at me: How accurate are these dog DNA tests? Embark and Wisdom Panel, the two leading brands, claim 95–99% accuracy for primary breeds. There are even scientific studies backing them up. And yet I found myself thinking, “Okay, but is Bowie really a Husky-Pit-Boxer cocktail?”

So I decided to run a second test—this time with Wisdom Panel, Embark’s chief rival and the Pepsi to their Coke. Same process: swab, seal, ship, wait. One month later, the results arrived:

And once again, I was surprised—because Wisdom Panel’s results were nearly identical to Embark’s.

Both tests said Bowie is 39% Husky and 12% Boxer. Embark found 36% American Pit Bull Terrier, while Wisdom Panel found 29% Pit Bull/Staffordshire Terrier (basically genetic first cousins). And Embark’s 9.5% Supermutt—mainly Great Pyrenees and Lab—lined up neatly with Wisdom Panel’s 5% Great Pyrenees.

The similarity of the results is telling and makes me think that dog ancestry DNA tests are pretty reliable (at least from Embark and Wisdom Panel). They’ll give you a pretty good idea, but not an exact idea of what your furry friend is made of.

Here are a few bonus pics — Bowie likes to sit on furniture:

And here we are doing agility training back in August (he’s a lot better than this now, and I have a new ankle and won’t be using that brace anymore!):