How common is it for Great Dane breeders to breed harlequin to harlequin?
Very. It turns out.
Harlequin Danes are the result of two lethal genes that are in some way dominant in their inheritance. Although homzygous merles are born and survive, they often wish they were dead.
However, the harlequin is just like merle, but a dog has to have one copy of both alleles before it produces the desired harlequin characteristics, but because no dogs with that are homozygous harlequin are ever born, it is very difficult to produce these dogs.
So it is a common practice to breed harlequin to harlequin. This produces double merles. A double merle with the harlequin gene will be mostly white.
White Great Danes are not uncommon, so these breedings are much more common than with other merle breeds.
It may be that Great Danes, for whatever reason, produce fewer blind and deaf dogs when double merles are bred than one gets with other breeds.
But they are still produced.
Check out the post at Border Wars for more analysis.
Wow. How sad…I’ve seen similar pictures of double dapple dachsunds. Amazing what people will do to make money, isn’t it?
When I was in university, I had a room mate who’s family bred Great Danes…most puppies were sold for $1000, but harlequins sold for $2500. Huh.
Wow! I hadn’t realized… wow.
It’s very unfortunate that so many of these dogs are born and defective that several rescues exist to just handle blind and deaf Danes.
Also, the double merle seems to be controversial in Collies, at least there’s a debate. Breeding Harley x Harley in Danes is par for the course. No wonder they seem to produce so many more of these dogs than the Aussies and Collies.
To bias!
Dogs don’t need eyes to live!
They don’t, but do you think it’s fair to breed them so they have no eyes in the first place.
Are you sure you have your priorities straight?
And You don’t really exist. You are just retrieverman’s imagination.
My grandparents bred great danes, and did strive to produce harlequins. However, they never bred two harles together, ever. It was always blacks to harlequins. They told me they ended up with white puppies occasionally, but none ever lived past a week. After they discovered this, they would euthanize any white puppies shortly after birth to prevent suffering and make the litter size smaller. Considering these instances, there must be some other way to produce lethal whites other than harle to harle.
Harl x Merle will create lethal whites. Merle can be cryptic, meaning a dog might carry it and you can’t really tell… it’s rare but possible.