The next fad dog will be the merle American cocker spaniel.
And you will get double merles that have all sorts of problems.
Merle coloration exists in no other breed of gun dog.
So I have no idea where this color came from.
That particular breeder understands the rule about breeding merles, but my guess is the average cocker puppy miller who founds a colony of these dogs won’t follow that rule. Breeding merle to merle will make more merles to be sold for higher prices.
Keep in mind that this breed of cocker has just now started to recover from decades of insane over-breeding. There aren’t many of them that work as useful gun dogs, and if you find a working cocker, it will most likely be of the English cocker breed.
Yuk. I hate puppy mills. I’m all for the pound.
It’s a shame that color is linked to so many problems. Those dogs -are- very beautiful.
I’ve seen a merle Powderpuff Crested before too. People are nuts for that color: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v485/Pietoro/webjunk/merle.jpg
That dog could be in a horror movie.
The ‘cold stare’ is why most breeds who see a sudden uptick in Merles often scramble to ban them in the standard. It was one of the common arguments used by the anti-merles in the Chihuahua club.
By ‘most breeds’ I meant ones where Merle never existed before in the breed and the all of a sudden appeared under suspicious circumstances.
If you’ve ever been around wolves or coyotes, they have an eye that can give you that exact same look.
I know this because I had a coyote look right through me. He followed my very soft-headed dog up to me. The two had been playing. He came upon me as the dog headed back, and he just stood there– about 10 feet away, and then headed for the high ground when my more coyote-hating dogs discovered his presence.
Most large dogs hate coyotes with a passion. They can be the nicest dogs with other dogs, but as soon as they see a coyote, they go ballistic.
That is why most breed standards penalize light eyes; people do not want to be reminded that their dog is a predator, no matter how big or small it is.
Dogs aren’t predators.
In doemsticating them, the goal should be to turn them into total herbivores.
They tried it in Hawaii.
Maybe the vegan dog owners would like that. They could be sold for lots of cash like the ‘hypoallergenic’ cats.
I loved that hypoallergenic cat scam: http://www.webcitation.org/5ZsXrSEH4
At least the president of the ASC has his head where it’s supposed to be regarding the coloring on his breed. I have to give him major props for that! Too bad the Pomeranian people can’t follow suit. http://www.lovelypomeranians.com/merle.htm The blue-eyed thing is what people usually go for too…I’ve seen a litter of Huskies where, out of 5, one male had one blue eye. He was the first to go, and it took FOREVER to place the rest of the litter (could other forces be in play? Sure, but the sheer number of questions they had about blue eyes had to factor in!). People place way too much emphasis on the most trivial things that, in the end, make the pet no better than another one sitting next to it. Give me health, personality and heart any day over cosmetic points!
I think people just like it because a) it’s a cool-sounding word, and b) it’s a krazy kolor. Unfortunately, it’s like the Overo Lethal White Foal Syndrome that usually occurs when you breed frame overo Paint horses. Something ultimately ends up suffering for the breeder’s greed for prittee krazy kolors, and while most of the double-merles out there might be “JUST FINE,” that doesn’t excuse the breeder for breeding a litter in which they know without a doubt that some will turn out wrong in some way.
just read this and would like to ask this question as a devil’s advocate. “How do breeders of double merle dogs respond to horse breeders whose matings produce foals with Overo Lethal White Syndrome?
Lethal white also occurs in golden hamsters.
When I was a hamster fanatic, I was always told never to breed certain whites to other whites:
“The Anopthalmic White, also referred to as the “eyeless white” or “blind white” carries a semi-lethal gene. These hamsters are generally recognized to be white bellied hamsters (the Roan and some Black Eyed Whites are Anopthalmic Whites). If two hamsters carrying the Anopthalmic White gene are bred, approximately one quarter of the litter will be eyeless (with the eyes being either totally non-existent or merely rudimentary). ”
http://www.hamsterific.com/SyrianHamsters.cfm
I can’t agree that 1/4 of a litter will be affected, each member born in a litter has its own 25% chance
it will be RR or rr and 50% chance it will be Rr.
We expect that percentage to recur as a statistical average over time and that leads to confusion,
Doesn’t every member of the litter have the same chance of inheriting dominant or recessive characteristics?
After the F1 generation, when breeders start to eliminate the RR & Rr and start playing God with the rr that we have problems.
You’re right. People really don’t understand the concept of probability at all, and this is the classic example:
http://www.smari.com/index.php?/news/article/many-dont-understand-weather-forecasts/
As a thought on your devil’s advocate: I think the dog breeders don’t even consider the horse breeders. Dogs have litters, where there’s a chance that SOME will turn out healthy (or some facsimile thereof). With a horse, it’s usually all or nothing because there’s only one foal. And the ones who own the mare are usually too stupid to either SEE that they have a frame overo who has been bred to another, or too CHEAP to do the test for the OLW gene. IMHO, the only thing both have in common is the drive for krazy kolor, some extra $$, and little regard for what comes out as long as it is prittee.
French Bulldogs have two “fad” colors at the moment – black and tan, and ‘Blue’.
Black and Tan is the classic, dominant B&T marking pattern seen in Rottweilers. It was originally a DQ in our breed standard because of its dominance. It was bred into the original Frenchies via Toy Terriers and possibly Manchester Terriers. Most of the so-called “Black and Tan” Frenchies for sale today are probably mixed breeds, with some B&T Manchester bred back in.
Blue is believed to be the DQ originally called ‘mouse’ in our breed standard. It carries, along with unattractive ‘yellow’ eyes, an increased incidence of skin lesions, allergies, staph infections and other unpleasant conditions.
Blue French Bulldogs and Black and Tan French Bulldogs routinely sell for upwards of $6,000
I actually created an entire blog, just to mock Blues and other ‘rare’ colors –
http://www.plaidfrenchbulldogs.com/
That is hilarious!
Chocolate french bulldogs?
I’ve seen them; they are actually called livers. http://www.finefrenchies.com/images/600Liver_French_Bulldog.jpg
I’ve also seen breeders who sell Boston terriers that come in every color imaginable. http://www.bluebostonterrier.com/index2.html
I would go along with this breed creation myth for your plaid Frenchie:
The plaid Frenchies were developed in the Old Killtown, Scotland, (hometown of Groundskeeper Willie) where they were used to keep badgers out of gardens. The founder of the strain, Auld Seumas McGill, wanted a dog that was so bizarrely absurd that even a near-sighted broch would run away in terror.
I’ve seen “white” goldens being offered for nearly 3 times what you would pay for a top-of-line field-bred dog. Everyone wants a dog like Oprah’s.
The ‘health guarantee’ of that breeder is priceless:
“This guarantee does not cover what in the bulldog breed is considered normal: cherry eye, entropion, loose hips, skin allergies, elongated soft palate, and stenotic nares (collapsed nostrils.)”
That liver photo is actually mine, from my personal collection (yes, I collect photos of odd French Bulldog colors). Ever since I used them to illustrate the Wiki entry on French Bulldog colors, they’ve popped up on every conceivable French bulldog website. I actually pulled a bunch of them off of Wiki, because of it.
That liver dog was an anomaly – he cropped up in a litter of otherwise ‘normally’ colored French Bulldogs. He had the typical ‘yellowish’ eyes and self colored pigment of most liver/chocolate colored dogs of other breeds that I have seen. I’m not actually aware of any health issues associated with this color – is anyone else?
The only ‘true’ Black and Tan I’ve seen was a bitch named ‘Maxine’ . Again, out of two ‘normal’ colored parents (one of which was the grandsire of my Tessa). The breeder repeated the breeding several times – the color never reappeared. The bitch was bred several times, including back to her own sire, and again – no repeat of the color.
Color fascinates me, but people who breed for color at the exclusion of everything else drive me just up the freakin’ wall. It’s hard enough to breed for health as it is, without factoring color in. I’ve actually just experienced my first incident of a color linked health defect, in almost 21 years of Frenchie breeding – deafness, in a pied puppy. I’m seriously re thinking my breedings, based on this event.
Chocolate/liver causes no health problems that I’m aware of. In Labradors, where all three colors of retriever exist (liver/chocolate, yellow, and black), it is strongly suggested that chocolates/livers and yellows not be bred together. Such breedings eventually produce brown-skinned yellows, some of which are dudleys that have pink noses. Brown-skinned yellow is a dog that is eebb in its genotype. Virtually all golden retrievers are eeBB, which is why if you cross a golden with virtually anything, especially a chocolate Labrador, which is EEbb or Eebb, you can get black puppies.
In goldens, brown skin pigment is considered very undesireable, unless it comes from “snow nose.”
When goldens were separated from the flat-coat, a few liver flat-coats that were rusty liver in color (and were EEbb or Eebb) were put in the golden registry. When bred to golden that wre eeBB, black puppies resulted, which is the main reason I think they made certain that the golden not have brown skin pigment.
One dog that is important to both goldens and flat-coats is Don of Gerwn. His sire was a Tweedmouth-strain flat-coat (what eventually became the golden) of a light yellow color. He sired a litter with the top trial rusty-liver flat-coat named Rust. The golden must have had brown skin pigment, because the puppies were all rusty livers. (Rusty livers are just regular livers, but the way the pigment appears on the long hair looks a bit different from a chocolate Lab.)
This is his photo:
When lots of goldens looked like this: http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/1d2df3952019c8af77620f97e0bfab60?s=80&d=identicon&r=G
It was very easy to confuse a flat-coat that looked like this: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/49/144194872_fc2c100094.jpg or these: http://www.littlehill-flatcoatretrievers.co.uk/our_flatcoats.html
with a dark-colored golden retriever.
Because goldens come in only one color (with different shades), many golden “experts” believe the dark color in the early dogs came breeding with black flat-coats! Never mind that genes that make a dog solid black have no effect on the intensity of color in the yellow to red dogs produced with that line. Otherwise, the majority of yellow Labradors would be of the fox red shade or even darker.
There is also a tendency in golden retrievers to deny that the darker colors were the majority color of the breed/strain from the early days. It comes from some rather political historiography, which correctly debunked the Russian circus dog story of the golden’s origins, but then added another myth that first dogs were all really pale in color.
And it is repeated and parroted by all sorts of people who have never looked at the evidence and just parrot everything they read or hear.
I don’t know if similar things exist in the French bulldog, but I do know them best from the work of Toulouse-Lautrec: http://dreamdogsart.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c192953ef010535d7eb32970b-450wi
I don’t know if similar things exist in the French bulldog
You know, we really don’t have any great French Bulldog myths. Their breed origin is pretty well documented, although the ‘laceworker’ stories have been blown all out of proportion. Of course, we’re a breed with a well defined beginning, as opposed to one ‘shrouded in myth’.
Frenchies have changed remarkably little since the 1800’s. A dog from 1890 could walk into the ring today, and if not win, at least be easily recognizable as a Frenchie. The radical changes (flatter faces, heavier bodies) have actually come within the last 30 years, and many of us are fighting them.
We do, however, have one color ‘myth’, and this is the theory that fawn pieds are a relatively ‘new’ or fad color. I actually de bunked that one a decade or so ago —
http://frenchbulldogz.org/learn/redwhitenew.htm
You’re lucky that your breed isn’t in the Top 5 of AKC registrations (we were once #2). When you get to that level of popularity, the puppy mill and backyard breeder issues simply take over a breed.
The color in goldens that is actually new is very pale color that approaches that of a Kuvasz. In fact, I have a hard time telling these dogs apart from Kuvaszok and Maremmas unless I look very carefully. That color is from Europe and can be traced to a standard revision in KC golden club in 1938. It is often said that this is the original color. It is repeated ad nauseum and ad infinitum by so many people that you would think it has to be true. However, it’s not.
Light colored dogs did exist in the strain that became the golden retriever, but none of them could be mistaken for Kuvaszok! The preponderance of the early dogs looked more like the dog in my gravatar, but there were light gold dogs. These were what were called cream-colored. What is called cream-colored now is the almost white dog.
I get told by people who are too lazy to look at the evidence that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
But really, they don’t, simply because they look at only the evidence that supports the a priori that appears in all the breed club literature.
The truth is these people wanted justification for radically changing this breed in the late 1930’s, and this happned just as the golden was “improved” into a decent strain of working retriever.
When you have two groups with such obviously different goals, you wind up with big splits in your breed.
And like it or not, this split is here to last in this breed.
Oh, and one other thing, where do the bat ears on the French bulldog come from?
I’ve never seen another true Molosser with them (except for the Boston terrier, of course).
Oh, and one other thing, where do the bat ears on the French bulldog come from?
I’ve never seen another true Molosser with them (except for the Boston terrier, of course).
Boston Terrier ears are often – but not always – cropped.
French Bulldog ears are NEVER cropped, but always natural. Frenchies as a breed originated with the selection of naturally ‘tulip’ eared Bulldogs, preferably smaller ones. They were then crossed with a few kinds of Terriers, some pug and a bit of ‘who the hell knows’. As naturally ‘bat eared’ dogs appeared, breeders began to breed more selectively for this trait. Originally, the dogs could be shown with either ear, until the American club declared ‘bat’ to be the only correct ear type.
Jim Grebe has a nice article on breed origins – http://www.frenchbulldogclub.org/ht/d/sp/i/236/pid/236
Ear type is one of the reasons that some fanciers believe they can trace the breed’s origins to the so called ‘Chincha Bulldog’ of Peru.
I’ve known more than a few Bostons with naturally erect ears.
When I was younger and more naive, I once mistook a pied brindle Frenchie for a Boston.
Gosh, the French bulldog went through a fad period in the United States! I didn’t know this, but I did know that a French bulldog was on the Titanic. It didn’t survive.
As to “cream” in the Golden Retriever breed…the addition of “cream” to the UK standard circa 1936 was (in my opinion, based on research) intended to allow for the light shadings on golden dogs. Not dogs that were wholly of an extremely pale cream. Those didn’t really appear in the breed until well after WWII.
In the 1920s-1930s breeders favored dogs that were without any shading, that were (they hoped) a uniform golden throughout. This, perhaps unexpectedly, led to darker shades being favored, while a few people (including Mrs Charlesworth, one of whose dogs is your gravatar) insisted that the light shadings were completely typical and should not be penalized, although a dog wholly cream, was not acceptable (cf. Hutchinson’s 1933). And there were some lighter-shaded dogs performing very well at trials and at shows in the 30s. Hence the addition of “cream” to the standard, although it was a fatal mistake to not specify that it was the light underparts and featherings, not the complete all-over coloring, where “cream” was allowed.
Great!
I think I peed a little at the second chocolate frogdog post. Also, hungry now.
Hey, I gots a ginormous supply of fantastic, unique Pocket English Shepherds.
Why waste space on a regular-sized English shepherd when, for the same total mass of dog, you can collect (one might even say “hoard”) two or even three of our super-speshul pocket models?
We here at Brandywine are now privy to the sekrit proprietary canine bonsai process that can convert an ES with the genetics to weigh 45 pounds into a delightful 24-pounder.
The developer of this process is unfortunately under a rather strict court order to cease production, and rumor has it that her probation officer is a stickler about niggling details such as “feeding the dog,” so we have acquired the patent on this process and will commence production as soon as we can get this skinny bitch to come into heat.
Meanwhile, pre-bonsai’d ES are in stock and ready to move.
The About Page for the Plaid French bulldog: http://www.plaidfrenchbulldogs.com/?page_id=2
*mortified I spelled ‘two’ incorrectly*
I fixed it.
My suspicion is that someone crossed in a merle sheltie or mini-Aussie at some point in the not-too-distant-past.
Since merle is dominant, it would be fast to breed on a few generations until you got dogs that are merle and otherwise cosmetically cockers. Avoiding merle-merle breedings also helps avoid bringing out other traits that are cosmetically non-cocker, like pointier noses or shorter ears.
In general I would think that the cocker genome for health and temperament would necessarily be improved by almost ANY outcross. To, say, a Tasmanian Devil.
But any salutary effects were probably canceled in the first few generations of color breeding.
I was thinking more along the lines of aardwolf rather than Tasmanian devil.
Tasmanian devils are horribly inbred and very prone to a parasitic tumor disease: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6378279.stm
Fascinating discussion. And a very important one too. I am not familiar with many of these breeds. But I grew up around English Cocker Spaniels. And they were all around wonderful dogs. So I was surprised to find out how different the American Cockers are. I got part of an answer to that question from the comment above.
Popularity of a specific breed, or a specific ‘look’ is always a bad thing for the breed and/or the individual dogs involved, it seems.
[…] with said issues or in fact ever having seen or touched the dogs he’s talking about,” retrieverman (the winner and perpetual champion, of course, is terrierman). He passes along a complete myth that […]
People are always going to go gaga over unusually colored/patterned/coated animals. It’s human nature, and it’s one of the reasons that dogs are dogs and not still wolves: people have selected and bred for novelty from the time they first began keeping animals.