One the latest fads in the mass production of pet retrievers is the so-called silver Labrador.
There are two theories about what it is.
1. The dogs are the result of adding a little Weimaraner blood to a Labrador line. (This is the most popular theory).
2. When outcrossing was allowed in the Labrador retriever, some Norwegian elkhounds were crossed in to make the coat denser and to ensure good bone.
3. The coloration has always been in chocolate Labradors. It is like the ash coloration in the Chesapeake Bay retriever.
The dogs are all livers (bb), but they are diluted (dd). A dog that is bbdd will look silver.
If a Bb or BB dog is also dd, then the dog looks blue.
In Weimaraners, the standard coloration is bbdd, but a dog with rare (and faulty) blue coloration is a dog that has the Bbdd or BBdd genotype. (Check out this website on blue Weimaraners.)
The first and third theories are the most plausible. If there were no ash Chessies, I’d totally accept the Weimaraner theory.
The second theory makes very little sense. Norwegian elkhounds are gray, but their coloration comes from the so-called agouti series. You will never find a Norwegian elkhound with the silvery gray coloration on its nose, lips, nails, and the skin around its eyes.
It is interesting that the AKC has decided to register silvers as chocolates. However, the fact that the dilution gene even exists in this breed means that the “charcoal” coloration will pop up.
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One of the common things I hear is that many silver Labs look houndy, and that alone is evidence of their miscegenation with the dogs of Weimar.
However, many Labs look houndy.
Yellow Labradors may have received some augmentation from in the influx of lemon foxhound blood. When I look at many yellow Labs, I see the foxhound influence coming through.
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I should note here that most silver Labs don’t come from the English show, American show, or field lines. They seem to be very heavily concentrated in what I call the “American giant Lab.” Most Labs in America are of this type, and some of which are significantly larger than the standard requires. In fact, I’ve read of dogs that were almost double the size they should be. These dogs are approaching something like a smooth-haired Newfoundland.
I’ve never understood why it is so fashionable to breed huge Labs. A big dog can withstand cold water longer than a smaller one, and a big one can break ice better.
One must remember that the big Newfoundlands were once used as retievers, but they just got so big and cumbersome that they are now relegated to their own water rescue tests.
The Newfoundland was the Labrador retriever of the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century. Everybody wanted one. They were great with kids. They had a remarkable history as working water dogs in Newfoundland, and more than a few worked on Western and Arctic explorations. They were useful. They were smart. They were the dog everyone had to have.
By the end of the Second World War, the Newfoundland dog was almost extinct. The dog that exists now is a survivor from that dwindled population.
Could the same thing happen to the Labrador?
Well, history suggests that it is indeed possible.
A silver Labrador is a most-likely overpriced but hopefully loving, healthy, and fun pet, though from what I understand there aren’t a huge number of silver Labrador breeders with multiple generations of health clearances, but we all make choices and take chances.
It is not what I would choose, because there are no performance-bred silver Labrador lines.
I favor the Weimaraner theory. Not only do the “silver Labs” I’ve seen have weim ears and body type, but they seem to have something between the wiem coat and the Lab double coat.
The color morph appears to be recent in origin.
And all the ones I’ve seen have been that “American giant Lab” type you describe — big shambling things that look like they were built by committee.
That is a really handsome dog.
At least some “silver” Labradors may well be due to Weimaraner influence. A few years ago a lady brought in her Labrador bitch to board, because she was in season and that pesky ^@*&^% Weimaraner next door kept jumping the fence, even after “Blackie” had been bred to a nice “Lab with papers”….
It’s always possible a cross or two occured simply becasue people like to take shortcuts. The deletion mutation in the MDR1 gene is found in one group of “German Shepherds” — white Swiss dogs. It’s likely a white collie was used to “fix” color (it may have had the beneficial side effect of reducing the extreme angulation as well). The same for “silken whippets” — a carrier sheltie was likely the origin.
However, recessive color does occur in any population of dogs. Given the huge popularity of Labradors, it’s entirely possible that a simple “sport” occured and someone latched onto it as a “rare” money maker. These dogs are popular for the same reason anything rare or exotic is popular — people like to have something the “other guy” doesn’t.
Given that it doesn’t take too many generations to re-establish a “look” if one takes the Corgi/Boxer or the Dalmation/pointer efforts as an indicator, I’m a bit surprised that the dogs have the “look” of mixes. Is it really because the dogs aren’t that far from the color cross in terms of generations or is it due to the color making the dog resemble the other breed a bit more than it might if it were more normally colored?
vr, Peggy Richter
I don’t know if I’ve written this anywhere, but the Labrador bloodline has a lot of different breeds that have been added to it.
http://www.labradornet.com/typecast.html
Scroll down to the bottom for the section on interbreeding. I would add that some golden retriever was added to the lines that produce yellow to make the dogs have a better coat. Many yellow lines had foxhound crossed in, and they had more of a hound’s coat.
There were no other breeds mixed with White Swiss Shepherds. The white gene was there since the beginning (Greiff, grandfather of Horand von Grafrath, the first GSD, was a white dog), and it wasn’t uncommon for whites to be born. Those whites were bred together and voilà, the WSS. No collies involved.
Just saying.
In the case of silver labs, though I’ve never seen one aside from pictures, I believe they are the result of crosses with Weimaraners. Seems the most plausible theory to me.
I’ve changed my mind on silver Labs. I think the most likely source isn’t the Labrador, but it is the “ash” colored Chesapeake:
It’s a dilute liver in Weims, Chessies, and Labs. Chocolate is just cute word for liver.
And there is plenty of evidence of Labs having some Chesapeake ancestry.
Why not?
There are clearly different shades of liver – some more to “ash”, some almoast black.
There was time when the shades of liver , red, fawn and cream were very rare in retrievers. W.D. Drury in his early 1900-century book mentioned that after having bred retrievers over seventeen years (also labs), he had only one pup of those colours, and two elsewhere.
St. John’s water dogs used to come in a lot of colors.
The people of Newfoundland who fished, hunted, trapped, and farmed for a living preferred black, smooth-coated dogs. Any dogs that didn’t make that cut were exported with the cod. The big ones were good for hauling carts. The smaller ones were better bird dogs.
If these dogs had evolved in the US, we would be calling them curs today. The Newfoundland water dogs were both multipurpose working dogs.
Don’t forget that the Newfoundland has common ancestors to the labrador and also carries the dilute gene.
And to answer why they still look so houndy, it is mostly because the majority of people who breed silver labs just breed to other silver labs to get the color. So by breeding to a dog that looks similiar, their look never changed.
There are some good one out there though!
That’s possible, but the dilution gene in Newfoundlands is with the black coloration. It produces a dog very similar to a “charcoal Labrador.”
I have yet to see a silver one, but because you have the “bronze” coloration in Newfoundlands, I bet these get registered as grays. (Bronze is just liver by another name. It’s called chocolate in Labs, and red in herding breeds and Doberman pinschers.)
The Chesapeake Bay retriever’s ancestors evolved from the St. John’s water dog independently of the dogs that became Newfoundlands and Labradors. The term Newfoundland could mean a lot of different dogs in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. What’s interesting about Chessies is that they descend from two dogs that survived a shipwreck off the coast of Maryland. One was a dog, and one was a bitch. The dog was a rusty liver. The bitch was black.
I would have been a total believer in the Weimaraner theory if there were no ash Chessies.
BTW, I should note here that both types of Newfoundland (the big one and the smaller one) were used as retrievers, both in their native country, on the American and Canadian frontier, and in Britain. Both types are very closely related to the retrievers. Even the big ones used to look more like retrievers two hundred years ago.
Well no matter what color the Newfie is, it is the same gene that dilutes the coat color as the silver lab. Although I have seen a Silver or gray Newfoundland before. If you want me to show you the picture I could e-mail you the site. I’d rather not post it publicly. By the way, this site is all facts!! None of the BS false claims like most silver lab breeders, or opposers for that matter.
Im not positive, but this looks like a dilute brown Newfoundland.
Your history of the Chessie is incomplete and inaccurate. The two dogs shipwrecked were not mated to each other: that is a myth.
The Chessie breed was developed via hounds, setters, etc., in America.
The Newfoundland was a sometimes curly coated breed.
I have stud books from the English Kennel Club from the 1930’s. Retrievers were still being cross bred at that time and still being registered as one or the other of the retriever breeds.
I never said the two were mated together. Not anywhere on this blog. There are actually several different lines of Chessie. Some sources say Canton founded one line, and Sailor was used in another. The male dog was a rusty liver. The bitch was black.
The male dog was eventually sold to Governor Lloyd of Maryland. The Lloyd family is also of note because Frederick Douglass was born on one of their plantations. They are also of note because unlike the other Tuckahoes of Maryland, they were Puritans, not Roman Catholics.
Their breed was most likely the St. John’s water dog, not the big Newfoundland. The smaller ones were more common on ships in the early nineteenth century. The bigger ones became more as the nineteenth century progressed. There is actually some debate as to which breed Lewis and Clark brought on their journey. He was a retriever, so it is often suggested that Seaman was a St. John’s water dog. But the big Newfoundlands could be used as retriever and were until they got too big.
I did link to a very good website on long-haired and brindle Chesapeakes. It was unfortunately on Geocities, which no longer exists.