GREENVILLE, Texas — As the administrator of Turtle Creek Veterinary Medical Center in Greenville, Jennifer Butler was looking through pictures of dogs available at the local shelter when she saw something shocking: her dog.
“I audibly gasped,” Butler said. “There’s no way. And then, once I let everything calm down a little bit, I realized it wasn’t Benjamin, but it was a very, very similar looking dog that was at the shelter.”
Butler rescued Benjamin, (AKA "Benny") five years earlier, after he was found abandoned and crying in a field as a puppy.
Since the dog in that picture looked so similar, she felt compelled to rescue him too.
Benny and Lenny, or Leonard, have been peas in a pod ever since. Virtually identical, not even Butler’s friends can tell them apart.
“People would always ask me, ‘Are they siblings? Are they from the same litter,’” she said. “And I had to tell them, ‘I don’t know, but they look like it.’”
Eventually, she gave them a dog DNA test from a company called Embark, mainly to learn Lenny’s medical history, but was surprised to find out her tow dogs are brothers.
What are the odds? Two dogs, from the same litter, landing in her lap, five years apart.
“The stars had to align perfectly for that to happen,” she said. “It was pretty shocking.”
However, that wasn’t nearly the end of it.
“That wasn’t the end of it,” Butler said. “I thought it was the end of it, but it wasn’t.”
Earlier this year, after another picture was posted on the shelter’s page, Butler started getting a lot of messages from friends and family all saying the same thing.
“'This dog looks exactly like your boys,' and I was like, ‘There’s no way,’” Butler said. “There’s no way this could happen again.”
Two years after finding Benny’s brother, Butler found his sister, Penny.
“With those three, they’re like the three musketeers from the moment I brought them in,” said Butler.
After spending a while with Butler and her husband, Penny was adopted by a family friend and renamed Lulu.
She still sees her brothers from time to time.
Butler is amazed that over the course of nine years she found and reunited three dogs from the same litter, opening her own home to two of them.
And if she finds another one?
“There’s no way,” she said. “There’s no way. My sanity couldn’t take it.”
Someone’s going to need a lot more treats.
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