Every famous family has members who steal scenes without ever giving an interview, and in Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s household, those members have four legs. Pula, the family’s Black Labrador, has just become the face — and the jaws — of As ever’s first-ever pet toy. Mia, their Beagle, completes a canine cast that has quietly accompanied every chapter of the couple’s life together.
Pula arrived first, joining the family shortly after the 2018 wedding. Her name means “rain” in Setswana, the language of Botswana, a country woven into the couple’s early story. As a Rescue Dog in spirit and a Labrador by breed, she has been the steady presence through royal tours, a transatlantic move, two children and now a return to Britain — a résumé few family pets anywhere can match.
(GabboT / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))Mia’s Second Chance
Mia’s story is different, and in its way even more Meghan. The senior beagle was rescued in 2022 from a Virginia breeding facility, and the couple adopted her through the Beagle Freedom Project, an Animal Rescue organization that rehomes animals from research and breeding situations. Dog Adoption has long been one of Meghan’s genuine causes — she was a rescue-dog advocate years before she was a duchess — and Mia’s arrival turned that advocacy into a daily household fact.
Together, the two dogs map the family’s geography. Pula is the wedding-era dog, the one who knew the couple before the children, Archie, now 7, and Lilibet, 5, arrived. Mia is the California dog, adopted during the Montecito years. Both made the journey back across the Atlantic when the family moved to the U.K. in August, reuniting the pack in Britain for the first time.
(mrgarethm from London / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))Dogs in the Royal Frame
The British Royal Family has always been a family of dog people — corgis are practically heraldry — but Meghan’s dogs belong to a newer, more personal tradition. As Duchess of Sussex, she has let Pula and Mia appear the way family dogs actually appear: muddy, toy-obsessed and unbothered by occasion. It is a small, deliberate softness in a public image often defined by formality and dispute.
That is also why Pula works as a product tester in a way no hired model could. When Meghan teased the As ever plushie in her Instagram Stories, viewers were not watching an advertisement; they were watching a dog who has grown up on their screens carry a toy shaped like her owner’s jam jar. The Montecito garden in the background has changed to a British one, but the scene itself — dog, toy, garden, morning light — is the brand’s whole promise in a single frame.
(Fuzheado / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0))A Family Move, Dogs Included
The family’s Family Move back to Britain in August was reported in terms of schools, homes and royal logistics. For the dogs, it was simpler: new fields, familiar people. Pula, whose life began alongside the marriage itself, is now back in the country where she started, while Mia experiences Britain as the latest stop in an improbable journey from a Virginia facility to a royal-adjacent garden.
Rescue at the Center of the Story
Meghan’s attachment to rescue dogs predates her royal life, which is part of why it reads as conviction rather than branding. Long before the duchess title, she was the kind of owner who adopted from shelters and said so publicly, and the habit followed her through every change of circumstance: a wedding-era Labrador adopted into a palace-adjacent life, a senior beagle adopted from a rescue pipeline in California, and now both dogs resettled in Britain. Careers, countries and headlines changed around the dogs; the approach to getting them never did.
Mia’s route into the family deserves its place in that account. The Beagle Freedom Project exists for animals leaving breeding and research facilities, dogs whose early lives are spent in cages and routines rather than homes. Adopting a senior dog from such a background is not the photogenic choice — it comes with patience, quirks and veterinary unknowns — which is precisely why advocates point to it. Mia’s second act, dozing through a royal-adjacent retirement in Britain, is the organization’s entire argument made visible in a single animal.
Pula’s public role this week adds a lighter verse to the same theme. The As ever plushie works as marketing because the tester’s enthusiasm is unscripted, but it also quietly normalizes something animal charities celebrate: the family dog as a full participant in household life, present at product launches and garden mornings alike. Archie and Lilibet are growing up in a home where dogs are not accessories to the picture but fixtures of it, on two continents and counting.
That, in the end, is why a $20 squeaky raspberry earned its headlines. It is a small product carrying two complete dog biographies: the Labrador who arrived with the marriage and has seniority over almost everyone, and the rescued beagle whose journey from a Virginia facility to a British garden is its own quiet fairy tale. Meghan built As ever to sell the feeling of her home. Pula and Mia are not helping with the marketing. They are the home. And for a couple whose public story has so often been told in palaces, courtrooms and headlines, the dogs offer the simplest available summary of the life they keep choosing instead: adopted, adored, slightly muddy, and entirely uninterested in the news cycle.
So when As ever’s first pet toy launched this week, its tester was never really in doubt. Pula has seniority, enthusiasm and a proven willingness to carry the product personally. Behind her stands Mia, the rescue whose second chance mirrors the family’s own talent for new chapters. The toy is small, squeaky and $20 — but the story it carries is the oldest one in the Sussex household: home is wherever the dogs are.