Family adopts a shelter dog — then learns he’s the father of their late dog

Sydney Page

Jillian Reiff and her husband had an ongoing debate about their new rescue dog, Ziggy.

Ziggy’s appearance and personality are similar to those of their late dog, Rufus, who died a few days before they brought Ziggy home in early April. Reiff thought Ziggy was the same breed mix as Rufus - rat terrier Chihuahua - while her husband wasn’t convinced.

So to settle the debate, Reiff submitted a DNA test for Ziggy, just as she had done for Rufus.

But when the results came in June 26, she was so shocked, Reiff stood up and screamed.

“I had a verbal outburst,” said Reiff, who lives in San Francisco.

The DNA test confirmed that Ziggy was not just the same mixed breed as Rufus. He was Rufus’s father.

“I’m still so flabbergasted,” Reiff said.

Rufus joined Reiff’s family in 2016, after she and her husband adopted him from the San Francisco SPCA. At the time, Reiff and her husband - then her boyfriend - had just moved in together. Rufus carried her engagement ring around his neck when her husband proposed and was in their wedding photos. When Reiff was pregnant with their first child, Rufus regularly curled up by her belly.

“That dog was like my soul dog,” said Reiff, who has two children, Maya, 6, and Ben, 4.

“He was the most social dog ever, loved meeting people, being the center of attention,” she said. “But at home, when the kids came, that was his true meaning for being here. He took his job as protector so very seriously.”

Rufus died unexpectedly in April. Although he was a senior dog - around 16 years old - he still acted like a puppy, even at the end of his life, Reiff said.

But one day, out of nowhere, Rufus stopped acting like himself, and his family learned he had a ruptured gallbladder.

“Given his age and the nature of that condition, there were no options,” Reiff said.

The family took the loss hard. The same night, April 5, Reiff and her daughter were scrolling through the social media pages of local shelters.

“We always look at dogs on social media - dogs that need fosters, dogs that are up for adoption,” said Reiff, who has long been active in the rescue community. She has fostered dozens of pups over the years, including 18 since Christmas.

Maya paused when she saw a dog on Muttville Senior Dog Rescue’s Facebook page, as he looked strikingly similar to Rufus. She showed Reiff.

“When I looked at the phone, I thought she had just gotten into my photo album,” Reiff said. “I could pull out a thousand pictures of Rufus that look exactly like the one that was on Ziggy’s adoption page.”

Reiff felt she wasn’t ready to bring home another dog, but she couldn’t get Ziggy’s face out of her mind.

“I emailed Muttville and was like, ‘I need to meet this dog,’” Reiff said.

Sure enough, Reiff went to the San Francisco shelter to meet Ziggy on April 9, and “we adopted him within 10 minutes of meeting him,” she said.

Reiff quickly realized that Ziggy acted like Rufus.

“They’re both just very, very easygoing, very happy, very gentle and child-friendly,” she said.

They also have similar quirks.

“Both of them talk and kind of warble and make these really ridiculous non-dog-sounding noises to communicate,” Reiff said. “I used to think it was the most unique thing that Rufus did.”

Like Rufus, Ziggy also sits up on his hind legs, sleeps on his back and, despite having many dog beds in their home, inexplicably rests in spots that look uncomfortable, including in the garage.

Still, she had no expectation that Ziggy, who is thought to be about 16, could be related to Rufus - let alone be his father.

Reiff often tests the DNA of her dogs - including fosters - to gain clarity on their breeds and health. When she saw that Embark, a dog DNA company, was having a sale, she decided it was time to test Ziggy. She had tested Rufus using Embark as well.

Reiff swabbed Ziggy’s cheeks and sent back his saliva in a test tube. When the results came in, it showed Ziggy’s two primary breeds, and “there was another tab right next to it that said ‘Relatives,’” Reiff said. “I had never seen the relatives tab pop up … I was like, ‘Maybe there’s a long-lost cousin.’”

She clicked on it and saw that Rufus’s profile was labeled as “child match.” It showed they had 68 percent shared DNA.

Reiff could not believe her eyes - the two dogs were adopted nine years apart from different shelters.

“It’s hard for me to make sense of it,” Reiff said. “I keep thinking, if my daughter hadn’t seen that picture at that exact moment, the algorithm of Facebook probably would have panned her another dog and I would have never seen that dog.”

The discovery was initially bittersweet for Reiff’s husband.

“The first realization and emotion that he had was to say, ‘I’m so happy, but I’m also just so sad that there was this very small window where if we had seen this Muttville posting even 24 hours earlier, they could have been reunited,” Reiff said.

Before long, though, they began to see Ziggy’s familial connection to Rufus as something to help them through their grief.

“In three months, he basically made us feel like he was here with Rufus the entire time,” Reiff said.

Muttville Senior Dog Rescue shared the discovery on social media, and people were stunned. The story was first reported by San Francisco’s ABC7.

“Nothing has blown me away as much as this story,” said Sherri Franklin, who founded the rescue for senior dogs in 2007. “It is truly serendipitous, kismet. The universe works in mysterious ways.”

“Here is a family who’s grieving and now has its second chance at a soulmate dog,” she continued. “We all wish for that when our animal passes away.”

In a statement, Embark called it “a DNA discovery that defied all odds.”

Ziggy arrived at Muttville a few months ago, after he was found as a stray in March. Since discovering Ziggy’s relation to Rufus, Reiff has looked into Ziggy’s background, and all she has found was a medical record at the SPCA dated a few weeks after they adopted Rufus.

Rufus had been adopted and surrendered by several other families.

Reiff is still trying to figure out whether Rufus and Ziggy were in the same home at some point or whether they overlapped at the shelter. Or possibly neither.

“We’re trying so hard to untangle this, and we keep hitting dead ends to connect that first part of their lives and what happened,” she said.

In any case, Reiff said she is grateful for the unexpected twist that has helped her family heal.

“It’s more than a good ending,” she said. “It’s the craziest ending you could possibly script.”  |  The Washington Post