Some shelter dogs wait so long that staff start to wonder what is keeping people away. Often it is a question nobody can answer: what breed is this dog, how big will he get, is there something inherited going on?
Embark’s Long Stay, No Longer program, launched in 2025 through its shelter and rescue arm, gave free DNA tests to 75 dogs who had been in care for a long stretch. They had spent an average of about a year and a half in shelters before testing. When the company checked back in March, half of them had homes within 10 weeks of their results arriving.
One of them was Buckley, a dog described as a Supermutt whose mix could not be summed up with a single breed label. He had waited around two years. His results helped show that the condition he arrived with was not tied to an identified genetic cause and was not expected to get worse, and he was adopted about two months after testing. The company also promotes the dogs on social media, so DNA is probably not the whole story.
What this means for your dog
If you are looking for a dog, treat the breed label on a kennel card as a guess, because it usually is. Ask the staff what they have actually observed, then spend time with the dog. A cheek swab can tell you about ancestry, some inherited health risks and likely adult size. It cannot tell you whether a dog will like children, other dogs or your cat. Breed tests have their own limits too, as one rescue dog with six failed tests shows. What the test did for Buckley was narrower and more useful: it removed one worry from the conversation.