or “How to make a merle retriever.”
Breed a liver flat-coat bitch to a merle Australian shepherd.
The puppies look like merle flat-coats.
And when the puppies mature, some of them can become guide dogs.
As adults, the puppies look like merle flat-coats.
And seeing as unusually colored flat-coats once founded a separate breed, I’m sure that some people might be chomping at the bit to get this breed started.
I have to say no on this one. No– without any exceptions or reservations.
Merle is stunning, but attempts to create entire breeds that consist of only merles are doomed to failure.
Merle is a dominant trait, but when a dog is a homozygous merle, very real health issues can result. Blindness and deafness are par for the course among double merles. Many of these blind dogs have no eyes or very small ones that are of no use to the dog.
I have no problem with breeding this cross for assistance dogs, but when you start playing around with merle, we need to be concerned.
A blind guide dog is of no use to a blind person.
The merle trait also has to be monitored in the Australian shepherd/toller outcross, for cryptic merles are not unknown. I would be careful about breeding any merle to a red retriever. The e/e genotype can mask the merle, and one could be breeding any number of double merles form tollers that might result from this cross.
Flat-coats wouldn’t have that much trouble, but you would still be playing with double merle.
And this is one color that you just don’t need in a breed that doesn’t already have it.
The breeds that have it are having a very hard time managing it– and there are breeders who revel in producing double merles, regardless of the health and welfare consequences. There is a lot of ignorance about this color.
If you’d like to learn more about merle, check out these posts on Border Wars.
I have no problem with an F-1 cross to produce these dogs as assistance dogs.
It’s when people decide to use this cross to produce a merle retriever breed that makes me concerned.
Pretty dogs! Did you find these photos from someone who was just doing the first generation outcross or was the intention to develop a new breed?
Dogbreedinfo:
http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/a/aussieflat.htm
Absolutely beautiful animals. However, quite aside from the complications of breeding merles…..isn’t the beauty of the merle colour kinda lost on the blind person, rendering the whole exercise rather pointless?
You win the internet today.
I find it a little odd that they are risking eye issues in dogs that are helping the blind.
“A blind guide dog is of no use to a blind person.”
That!
LOL @ “Win the internet today”
But why use a merle Aussie? Why not a tri or bi colored dog? yes the color is striking (reminds me of “tiger” Altdeuchers), but KNOWING the detriments of merle, like iris columbas and other eye defects which occur sometimes even in the single gene form (heterozygous), why do it? I keep thinking someday someone is going to find the gene that causes the “tie dye” coloration in African Wild dogs and try it as a replacement for Merle. Merle appears to be a fairly old gene (like the leopard spotting in horses) even despite it’s negatives. Obviously human selection for the interesting color has played a part, but why did ancient horses have appy colors?
Peggy Richter
They are gorgeous, their color is amazing!
That’s interesting… I work for a guide dog school and have never seen or heard of this cross. We do cross labradors and goldens, and previously did some shepherd-collie crosses. We stopped using australian shepherds due to the length of the coat and persistence of the herding instinct; we stopped our brief use of flat coats due to the cancer incidence.
That’s quite a gorgeous mix though; I wonder how they are at work.
I’ve worked with/spoken with many guide dog and assistance dog organizations. None of them advertise on “dogbreedinfo.com” The successful guide/assistance dog organizations usually have waiting lists for dogs that don’t work out. They would never need to place advertisements to place puppies. And the only assistance fcrs that I am aware of are not guide dogs, but rather assistance dogs with mobility or therapy
issues. Seems like just another boutique designer dog ad, hoping to cash in on the labradoodle cash cow.
My guess is this dog belongs to a puppy raiser. The bitch was chosen as a brood bitch, and the association did the outcross.
The private individual who did the puppy raising sent DogBreedInfo the photos.
I don’t think this is necessarily a designer breed, but it could whet the appetite for designer dogs. I don’t have issues with doodles, but when you’re messing around with merle, you can have problems.
We don’t have a good handle on merles in the breeds that already have it, and i don’t think people breeding crosses fully appreciate how many problems are associated with the color.
gee, why not just go to the nearest shelter and select some dogs that display suitable temperament and trainability? I’ve never understood the obsession with using only a few breeds (and paying breeders $$$$$$$) for guide dog purposes.
It’s pretty hard to breed and raise guide dogs.
They have to be socialized just right, and they do have breeding for temperament down to a science.
If it was that easy, do you think they wouldn’tve been doing that since the beginning?
There’s a reason people purposely breed dogs. Because that is the only way to get a certain level of ability consistantly across generations. It’s not some anti-shelter dog conspiracy.
That has been tried: the success rate using shelter dogs was so low as to be abysmal. Dogs with the qualities that make good guides aren’t often given up to shelters. However, the Disaster Search Dog Foundation has used shelter dogs successfully (dogs given up because of their high energy levels and “drive” that pet owners won’t/can’t deal with).
As to breeders making money breeding guide dogs, Nope. No way. The breeders that I know have been selfless in donating pups, andin donating stud service and brood bitches to the organizations that have their own breeding programs. Then there are the dedicated puppy raisers that bring up and give proper experience to potential guides, Money is the least of their concerns.
Using purpose-bred dogs has raised the success rate for working dog guides from less than 30% (maybe even less) in the past to at least 90 – 95%. Seeing Eye, as one example, has a breeding program considering structure, soundness, temperament, working aptitude, hip/eye/elbow exams, (by their own veterinarians) and so on, utilizing all the advances such as Estimated Breeding Values, databases, and capabilities unknown and unavailable to private breeders.
Not of a fan of the color, but there’s something very attractive about the structure of these dogs. I think Flatties are too long, to extended and I think Aussies are too compact and boxy. This F1 mix is just a stunning and powerful, solid looking dog.
The dogs are closer in type to some old flat-coats. I love this photo of some flat-coats sitting next to a pile of rabbits:
http://retrieverman.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/rabbit-retrievers.jpg
Flatcoats are certainly a breed that could benefit from a judicious outcross, but I’m not convinced that Aussies are the way to go. And I’m VERY skeptical of an Aussie/Flatcoat cross being a good choice for a guide dog. I wouldn’t consider either breed to have the ideal temperament for that task, and you’d have to hope that the blind person who got the dog was really, really active.
They certainly could, but I don’t think they ever will. Flat-coats are genetically within the golden retriever breed, and that breed could be an outcross, as could the Labrador. All three of these breeds share common ancestors within the past hundred years. Goldens and flat-coats share foundational sires, and Labradors and wavy/flat-coats used to regularly appear in the same litters.
I agree that I don’t think they will, I was just very struck by a friend who has Flatcoats telling me that the average life expectancy is 8 years because of cancer. To me, that would be a crisis and a reason to outcross. (I’m not a big fan of deliberate crossbreeding, but there are times when it’s the right choice). Golden would be the obvious choice, it’s barely a different breed, but Goldens have a lot of cancer in the breed too. That would be a concern for me. Labs just have so MUCH going on. But I suppose the point is moot, since nobody will do it.
I would suspect Flat-coateds and Goldens have different immune-related haplotypes.
So even if both breeds are cancer-bombs, if the haplotypes are distinct, then you can still get a vigour from the project.
They’re so closely related though. Goldens started out as a variety of Flatcoats. I think further out would be more successful.
Actually both started out as wavy-coats, became flat-coats, then flat-coats almost became extinct after they were split into two breeds.
Goldens are much more genetically diverse than flat-coats. They likely have more MHC/DLA haplotypes, and most studies on golden health use only dogs that have been bred for show or trials. As a breed, they are likely quite genetically diverse and healthier once you look at the generic pet bred goldens.
I want to add that one of the most severely dysplastic dogs I’ve encountered (hip dysplasia diagnosed at 3 months) was a Lab/Golden cross, so I wouldn’t consider a cross of related breeds to be over-likely to avoid health issues.
That can happen.
But I can tell you that one of the things that we think shot golden cancer rates up is a strict selection for tight hips. It reduced the number of dogs being bred rather dramatically.
Not that hip dysplasia is something to laugh at, but it shows the limitations of trying to solve health problems using a closed registry system.
Well, I think what it shows is the dangers of focusing overstrongly on any one health issue. Hip health IS important, but you have to look at the whole dog.
We have a couple issues in my breed (Staffordshire Bull Terriers) which have been a point of interest lately. Juvenile cataracts, and a particularly nasty neurological condition (L-2-hydroxyglutaric aciduria, abbreviated L2HGA). Both proved to be simple recessives, and a genetic test was discovered for both. Which is great. A simple cheek swab or a blood sample and you can know if your dog carries one of these conditions. Thing is, as soon as these tests were discovered, many fanciers (particularly in the UK) were proclaiming that we should only breed clear to clear, and criticizing anyone that chose to breed carriers.
Thing is… as long as you’re willing to test, and never breed carrier to carrier, you will never produce an affected dog. So is it WORTH limiting the gene pool that way? What about other conditions? They won’t screen hips in the UK, and the number of dogs clinically affected by HD seems to be small, but in countries where we X-ray, the rate is moderately high. There are also some other eye conditions. Not really serious ones, but they shouldn’t be ignored. And other stuff, not necessarily exclusive to the breed, but signs of a less than healthy dog that maybe should be eliminated as a breeding prospect. By focusing on the conditions we can test, it would be easy to breed unhealthier dogs.
Now as it happens, it looks as though the gene pool for genetically clear dogs is still quite large, though the lines carrying the condition are diverse, it hasn’t permeated the breed too thoroughly, so eliminating carriers probably wouldn’t be the worst thing. But it’s still putting too much focus on something easy to avoid, and not looking at the whole picture. And if it had turned out that a larger proportion of the breed was carrying the faulty gene, and the “clear to clear” crowd had had their way, we could easily have bred ourselves into a corner very quickly.
Hips make that particularly easy, because the mode of inheritance is unclear, it’s probably polygenic, and there are likely to be environmental factors as well. So while I wouldn’t breed a dog with bad hips, relentlessly focusing on the best possible hips isn’t a great idea either.
>>Merle is stunning, but attempts to create entire breeds that consist of only merles are doomed to failure.<<
Mostly a lurker here, but love your blog. I've been following the merle-merle discussion with interest and wanted to ask… what about breeds that ONLY come in merle? I was thinking of Australian Cattle Dogs. Or are their colors not considered "true" merle–?
Jen
Australian cattle dogs are not merles. If they were gun dogs, we would call them roans. Here’s a blue roan English cocker for comparison: http://www.bestdogbreeds.info/wp-content/uploads/cocker%20spaniel%20pictures%20blue%20roan.jpg
Like all roan dogs, they are born with spots of solid color over a white background. Over time, ticking appears on the coat, and in these breeds, it gets very dense. This color is very common in border collies. The Dalmatian coloration is closely related.
Australian cattle dogs also come in red roan, but a lot of people call them red heelers.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/AustrCattleDogRed_wb.jpg/120px-AustrCattleDogRed_wb.jpg
They are born with red spots, instead of black ones. And the ticking is red.
Merle is an entirely different color. It is inherited via a dominant gene, and if it is homozygous, there are very real problems with the dogs. Even heterozygous merles can have issues with deafness.
Ahhhhhhhh! Thank you Retrieverman. I erroneously assumed that any speckled/spotted color was a merle. I didn’t think about roan at all- I assumed that was a “horse thing.”
You learn a new thing every day. Thanks!
Jen :)
Wow, stunning dogs, but you are so right; “A blind guide dog is of no use to a blind person.”
You actually make it seem so easy with your presentation however I to find this topic to be really one thing that I think I might by no means understand. It seems too complicated and extremely broad for me. I am looking ahead for your subsequent put up, I’ll try to get the cling of it!