The main advantage of the European-type golden retriever is they produce far cuter puppies than the old leggy red dogs do.
I should note here that this color isn’t rare. It’s only relatively less common in North America than the other colors are. In Europe, the vast majority of goldens look like this.
And the color is not white.
It is a very pale cream.
***
If you want to find a rare color in golden retrievers, you can’t get much rarer than mahogany:
Judging from the ads and websites promoting these creme-white pups, they are so rare that the breeders just have to charge you more. FWIW, they may keep their pigment better. As for mahagony or liver coloration, that is a disqualification in the UK club’s standard.
I like this line too, “The ear color will determine how dark the coat will get” While factually true, the ears continue to darken and so does the coat.
Liver always would be a disqualification, but mahogany was within the breed from the earliest days. The first dual champion in the breed Balcombe Boy was a mahogany. When the UK decided to go after the darker colors in this breed, it was something like saying let’s ban black and white in border collies.
I’ve noticed that the lighter colored ones don’t go through snow nose as often as the darker ones. It is only in the depths of winter that you get any brown on the nose.
However, if you’ve ever seen one of those light colored ones that has brown skin pigment (these are very rare), they could quite possibly be the ugliest golden retrievers ever. They aren’t very common, because brown skin pigment (a genetic liver) is very rare in the lines that produce “white ones.”
I’ve noticed that in this country the very light colored ones are sold for 3 or 4 times as much as you’d pay for an unstarted field-bred pup.
And because this very light color is frowned upon in the AKC ring, you know those dogs don’t even have conformation titles in this counthttp://retrieverman.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php#comments-formry.
I was going to bring up the price difference too.
About a month or two ago, there was an ad in my local paper for “Golden retrievers – Rare white color” and was awfully tempted to call them and ask a few select retriever-esque questions. The price was $1000.
To be honest, it’s not worth wasting my time over, people are still going to buy the “rare-colored” puppies to be “unique,” and these people will probably keep breeding. I don’t remember the website but I’ll know it if/when they have another litter for sale. :/
I’ve seen them for $2500– just 8-week-old puppies.
OK correction: they MIGHT have been $1000 at one point, but with 2 females left, they’re either down to $800 or they’ve been priced there the whole time. Another litter of cream goldens is going for $600.
Oh well. Still don’t like the trend.
I don’t like it at all.
Some of the “white” dog breeders sell them as “British white retrievers.”
Just google it.
Another advantage to some is that they are easier to see in low light conditions (like in the backyard at night) than the darker dogs. As long as you’re scraping the barrel for advantages, there you go!
They are cute pups but I find these light colored dogs to be very unattractive adults. Coarse and boofy.
My sister had a dog that looked exactly like the mahogany one. I don’t know if she was purebred, we always thought she was a mix because of the color since we’d never see a red golden. She was wonderful with children.
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/in-golden-retrievers-breeding-for-cuteness-leads-to-coarseness/
I just had a purbred retriever pup dumped on me. She is inlike any retriever I have ever seen. She has a very light golden coat, not white. Her nose and skin coloring is not black its a pink color and she has very light greenish amber eyes. She is a beautiful pup, about 6mon. old, but really I think there are some problems with her coloring! Is there any specific name for her type of coloring? You guys seem to be pretty knowledgable and I just stumbled across this page.
Brown-skinned yellow. She is genetically a liver/chocolate dog with the recessive gene that prevents that liver/chocolate color from appearing on her fur. It’s just on her skin. Greenish amber eyes are often found on dogs of this color
Is she golde retriever?
If she is, the she is really unusual color!
Most very light gold goldens have been selected for black skin (which are actually black dogs with the same recessive gene).
It is usually in the field lines, where the color is usually quite dark and approaches that of a setter, that the brown skin tends to pop up.
Brown skinned yellows are not favored in goldens. It is recessive to black skinned yellow.
Now, some brown-skinned yellows have pink skin.
These are totally faulty in the breed standard.
These are called Dudleys, and they are even faulty for Labradors, which allow for brown skinned yellows in their bloodline.
Here’s a Dudley Lab stream on photobucket:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/dudley%20labrador/Lindsey6384/OliversBabyPictures008.jpg
i love this dog i have one just like it i think they should be worth alot of money. they are smart they listen and allways potect you.
A golden retriever shouldn’t want to protect you.
Hey that’s my red girl Ginger’s photo you are using! Please give credit or post a link to her webpage with her photo:
http://www.chicagocanine.com/ginger/
Ginger was a stray rescued Golden Retriever, so we do not know her pedigree but breeders have told us she looks like she is from Windbreaker Kennel lines.
If the dog is from Northern Illinois, chances are very high that it’s a working-type golden.
One of the most important breeders of working goldens is in Elgin, Illinois:
http://www.topbrass-retrievers.com/
And: http://www.bird-dog-news.com/MTB/JF98.html
Jackie Mertens has not lived in Elgin for several years.
And yes, Topbrass has turned out some superb working retrievers.
Ginger was born in 1996 though.
The only things that made me unsure whether Ginger was a field type Golden (the other possibility was she was a BYB dog) was that I read they tend to be small, and she was 24″ tall… So she was over standard although her weight was in standard range at 63-65 lbs since she had a slim build. The other thing was that she was very calm and laid back even as a young dog, whereas I’m told the field Goldens tend to be high-energy.
Not to say that she had no energy, she could be very active if I wanted to be but in general she was very low key and calm…
Here she is jumping off a dock at 11 years old(not bad for a dog with severe bridging spondylosis either):
I had female that was 24 inches at the shoulder and varied from 58-61 pounds. She was out of total field breeding, derived from Holway Barty but a bit different lineage. http://retrieverman.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/goldie.jpg?w=500&h=281
She could have passed for a flat-coated retriever except for her color.
There is a recent development among field line dogs to breed them really small and really lithe– essentially making them goldens with border collie bodies. That’s great for agility and other dog sports.
Miley, the dog in the header, is 23 inches at the shoulder and varies from 71-73 pounds.
She part field and pet type, mixed in with “English white” dogs.
The Windbreaker’s dog you are thinking of is an important sire, and a very red dog: http://www.k9data.com/pedigree.asp?ID=1511
A huge percentage of goldens can be traced to this breeding: AFC Yankee’s Smoke’n Red Devil OS and FC Windbreakers Razzmatazz OD.
(OS means outstanding stud and OD means outstanding dam. That particular breeding was very influential in producing working type goldens in the United States. Not so great for genetic diversity and health issues…
The Topbrass dogs derive from roughly this same root stock.
But there is also a “native” Midwestern working type golden that was established very early on– 1930s though the 1940′s– and these were mostly darker dogs with lighter builds, which were about the only dogs being shown at the time.
Yeah I found Topbrass back when I was looking for Windbreakers dogs. Several of the dogs from Topbrass resembled my Ginger quite a bit. Interestingly, one dog I found on their site that looked a LOT like Ginger is named Smok’n Zig Zag and has the two dogs you mentioned as parents.