Today is Robert Burns Day, and to celebrate the Bard of Ayshire, I’m going to embed my favorite poem of his, a beautiful exposition of Enlightenment virtues:
Archive for January, 2010
Robert Burns Day
Posted in Absolute Piffle, tagged Robert Burns on January 25, 2010 | 22 Comments »
Yellow flat-coated retriever
Posted in Flat-coated retriever, golden retriever, golden retriever history, working retrievers, tagged Flat-coated retriever, golden retriever, yellow flat-coated retriever on January 25, 2010 | 7 Comments »
This one is a bit darker in color than the yellow flat-coats I’ve seen, and he looks a lot like a golden retriever.
(The black dog is a curly/Labrador cross.)
The yellow pup looks a lot like this working strain golden:
The similarities exist because golden and flat-coated retrievers both descend from the old wavy-coated retriever. Until 1908, goldens were considered liver flat-coats. Then a special color variety was made for them called “Flat-coats (yellow).” However, this variety failed to be popular at shows, so the yellow and red retriever lovers moved to separate the breed from the black dogs. However, in order to do that, they had to make up a fanciful story about how the yellow dogs came from Russian circus dogs and were in no way related to those black ones. Never mind that the yellow dogs all had the best black flat-coat bloodlines behind them, and never mind that the one of the early top trial retrievers (Don of Gerwn) was a liver flat-coat with a golden retriever father. And also never mind that the three founding lines of golden retriever all were heavily interbred with black flat-coats. In the literature of the day, it is very hard to find any mention that these two breeds are close relatives.
I’d be the first to admit that the two breeds are different today, but they aren’t as different form each other as much as they are a theme and variation of a similar type. There are still blocky flat-coats and lithe goldens. It’s just that now the gene pools of both breeds have a tendency towards one form or the other.











