Find your dog's relatives

Connecting with your dog’s relatives can be helpful for your dog’s health the same way a family history helps humans manage our health. When owners with related dogs share information about conditions they’ve observed in their dogs, it can help both of them be better informed and proactive about their dogs’ health.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about the genetic roots for some diseases. The more genetic information we can collect about the genes that dogs share, the more health discoveries we can make.

Right within your pup’s report you can click Chat and start messaging other pups who share DNA with your dog. Set up a playdate, see where they’re located (if they’ve shared that info!), and chat about what fun quirks your related pups share.

Yes! All dogs have some relatives in our database, and 94% of dogs tested with Embark will have at least one dog in our database as genetically related as human first cousins. As more dogs join Embark, the chances of finding a close or immediate relative will increase.

All dogs of a single breed are closely related, because they descend from the same ancestors that started the breed. This means that purebred dogs share more DNA and will naturally have more genetic relatives than mixed breed dogs.

No. Relative Finder is included with every purchase of an Embark Breed + Health or Breed Identification Kit.

In your dog’s Embark profile, click the Relatives tab to see all your dog’s genetic relatives, from most closely related to distantly related. We’ll update this page as we test more dogs and find new relatives. (Relative Finder is available for dogs tested with a Breed ID, Breed + Health, or Purebred Kit.)

Family ties can be a little more complicated in dogs than in humans.

Genetic relatedness is the fraction of two dogs’ genomes that descend from the same ancestor(s). You probably already know that you are 50% genetically identical to each of your biological parents. Your siblings are, on average, 50% identical to you. (We say “on average,” because sometimes DNA can be mixed up and rearranged before it is passed down in a process called recombination.) Going further out, you are about 25% related to your aunts, uncles, and grandparents, 12.5% related to your first cousins, 3.125% related to your second cousins, and so on.

So, if your dog is about 12.5% related to another dog, does that mean that they are first cousins? It’s not quite that simple.

Just because two dogs are “as related as” first cousins doesn’t mean that they have that exact relationship. This is particularly true for purebred dogs, where a limited number of founder individuals created the breed, fairly recently in time. Because of this history of inbreeding, all dogs in a breed may be as related as first cousins (or even more so in some breeds), not because they are actually first cousins, but because they are third or fourth cousins several times over. For example, the figure below shows a pedigree for two purebred dogs. These two dogs would have results that say they are “as related as” second cousins, but they are actually quadruple third cousins (they have 12 instead of 16 great-grandparents).

Because of the tremendous variation in the amount and duration of inbreeding in dog populations, it’s harder to predict the relationship between two related dogs than it is in humans.

Although more distant canine relationships can be a bit harder to predict in dogs than in humans, we recently made our Relative Finder even smarter! We’re now able to tell you the relationship between your dog and other dogs when it can be determined. We do this by looking at how much DNA is shared and the pattern of how that DNA is shared between two individuals. Every dog inherits two copies of each of their chromosomes, one from each parent.

In a parent-child relationship, the parent passes down half their DNA to their puppy. This creates a specific pattern where the two dogs share one copy of each chromosome across their entire genome. When we see this pattern, we then use birthdate to determine who the parent is and who the child is in the relationship.

We would also expect to see about 50% shared DNA in a typical sibling relationship, but this occurs in a different pattern. Instead of siblings sharing just one copy of each chromosome as they do with their parents, we see a similar relatedness value but that relatedness is distributed across chromosomes in a different, but predictable way.

These pattern differences help us distinguish between parent-child relationships and siblings, even though the total amount of shared DNA may be similar. The exact percentage of shared DNA isn’t always exactly 50% — variations can occur, especially in purebred dogs where historical inbreeding can increase the shared DNA percentage above 50%.

Not necessarily. This is because the same two parents can have multiple litters of puppies, sometimes years apart. It’s also not uncommon to see differences in breed percentages and looks between siblings; even though each sibling inherits 50% of their DNA from each of their parents, it won’t be the same 50%.

Unlike humans, female dogs in heat release multiple eggs over several days (and can be fertile for up to 10 days!). This is called superfecundation. If the female mates with multiple male dogs during this fertile period, sperm from these different males can each fertilize eggs, resulting in puppies with different fathers in the same litter. This means puppies in the same litter can actually be half-siblings rather than full siblings!