Pippa Mattinson is training a new Labrador to work on her shoot.
Her name is Rachael.
And she’s a chocolate.
Chocolate Labradors are generally not well regarded in the British gun dog culture. That’s probably because most chocolates are found in lines that produce primarily conformation dogs.
The decision to use a chocolate Lab as a gun dog was met with polite skepticism:
I passed a member of our shoot on my way down to the meadow the other day and signalled to him that I had something of interest in the car.
“Oooooh!” says he with interest
“is it a new puppy??” says he with enthusiasm as he climbs out of his landrover
“is it a Labrador?” he asks excitedly as he crosses the road and peers in through the window of my truck
“Oh”. he says, as his voice trails away with disappointment. “What a pity” he sighs.
“Its chocolate…”
And he was only half joking.
It’s also somewhat unusual to find a chocolate Lab as a gun dog over here. Most chocolate Labs are in English conformation lines, but there are also found in the giant pet Labrador lines that are very common in this country. I’ve seen many chocolate Labs that look very much like smooth-coated bronze Newfoundlands.
Rachael doesn’t look very much like Tess, Pippa’s working-bred fox red Labrador.
To be fair, fox red is my favorite color in Labradors, but it’s almost entirely found in working bloodlines from the United Kingdom.
It’s virtually unknown over here, where most yellow Labs tend toward the paler end of the yellow to red spectrum. (Golden retrievers tend to be quite the opposite. Darker colors are still more common over here.)
Chocolates, though, are fairly popular in the United States.
There aren’t as many of them as blacks and yellows, but they aren’t exactly rare.
However, for whatever reason, the chocolate dogs are not normally found in any lines that are used for gun dog work.
Or anything else that Labradors are typically used for.
Why chocolates are so underrepresented is a fairly good question.
Could it simply be that the lines that produce chocolates tend not to be those that produce working retrievers, as I am suggesting here?
Or is there something intrinsic to the chocolate color that makes the dogs inferior?
I doubt that the latter hypothesis is correct. The German HPR’s are commonly liver in color, and they have generally been selected for that color over the black (with the exception of the large Munsterlander, of course.) And let’s not forget that Chesapeake Bay retrievers were always selected for the brown skin gene, including both brown-skinned yellow to red and true liver.
British gun dog culture has had a strong preference for black coloration in retrievers. Rawdon Lee had nothing but contempt for “common brown retrievers” in his A History and Description of Modern Dogs of Great Britain and Ireland (Sporting Division) (1894):
The common brown retriever that we see running about the streets, neither curled nor wavy, nor smooth, is a sort of nondescript animal we can well do without. He is usually snappish and ill-natured, and, when not looking in the gutters for a living, may be found chained up to a kennel in somebody’s back yard. Those who own a dog of this kind are recommended to exchange it for a nice little terrier, which will not only cost the owner less in the way of food, but be not so liable to bite his neighbour, his wife, or his children. When anyone is bitten by a dog the odds are two to one that the injury was caused by one of these common brown dogs (pg. 201-202).
It may be that decades of that particular prejudice has had some influence on the bloodlines, and that it may have started a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy through genetics.
But people are trying to breed chocolates into working lines, and they are trying produce decent animals.
Maybe someday, the decades of prejudice against chocolate Labradors in working lines will disappear.
But within Labradors, there are many subcultures, and many different ideas about what is an excellent example of this breed.
It is very difficult to get people to change their minds, especially when tradition says that it’s always been this way.
Tradition can be the worst enemy of dogs.
This one is one of the toughest to overcome.
I have heard that they are not as trainable, sharp or intelligent as their black cousins. I’ve also heard this about their liver Flatcoated relatives. I have no idea whether this can be borne out scientifically, but my very limited experience of chocolate/livers does seem to bear out this prejudice. What do you think?
Many Cocker Field Trial champions in the UK are liver (the past 3 years have been liver dogs and the legendary Danderw Druid was a liver). Liver and black are the most common colors for working Cockers and there is no prejudice against one color over the other, except that one might be more difficult to see vs the other. One of my English Cockers is liver and he’s the most driven, biddable, and intelligent of all my dogs.
I think it’s the lines that dictate just how suitable a dog is for working instead of color. If a kennel is breeding for biddable and intelligent dogs with lots of drive, they will produce such dogs regardless of color. If a kennel is more interested in breeding strictly for coat color, which many conformation and pet breeders have been doing for years with chocolate Labs, then other aspects of the breed are going to be lost along the way.
Thanks for this. Very interesting. I’ve always wondered why chocolate labradors aren’t supposed to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. All down to breeding.
Wasn’t one of the top scoring derby dogs’ in recent times in the US a chocolate lab by the name of ‘ Ammo’ ?
I actually don’t know.
I really don’t follow US trials very closely. UK and European trials seem far more interesting to me.
If I remember correctly, it was not many years ago that a brown Labrador won the Retriever National Championship Trial. Sorry, can’t remember the name!
Have ANY behavioral traits been proven to have a color link genetically?
Rage syndrome in English cockers is more common in red ones, but it also occurs in English springers, which are never red.
The fox farm experiment that everyone likes to talk about claims that spots are associated with tameness in foxes, but spots have occurred in farmed fox populations for decades before and since that. And none of these spotted foxes are predisposed toward tameness.
A little fact that’s largely been overlooked.
This was interesting to me because for the entire first half of the year when I was trying to find Luka, I felt that for every litter of black pups there were always at least 2 of yellow or chocolate. There were sooooo many chocolates that at one point I became aggravated because for certain reasons regarding temperament observed in 12 years working at veterinary hospitals I really did not want one. The first few breeders we spoke to all had field lines and they were breeding for whole litters of chocolates – between the 3 breeders they had 4 litters of chocolate exclusively (the fourth only bred for yellow and black). When we decided to go with the show type we did find that most were yellow or black (but chocolates did pop up everywhere), with yellow being far more common, and beyond that yellow females being what everyone seemed to want from the breeders. The day we went to pick Luka up from his breeder she showed us a chocolate pup from show lines that she had recently acquired for her breeding program.
Getting chocos only requires going for homozygous recessive on the B locous and avoiding homozygous recessive in the E locus. As color genes are so obvious it’s very easy to breed for color. There are good working chocolate lines out there. Google chocolate master hunter and see what you get. When hunters decide they want chocolates, they’ll have no trouble breeding them. A few months back someone on PDE noted that many of the leading Labbies in obedience in the UK are chocolate.
The fad for chocos may have resulted in bumper crops of badly bred chocolate labs over the last decade or so. But that has much to do with fashions in the dog world and little to do with the color. The problems will fade in time. . . as they have with yellows.
While all of the choc Labs I know personally are unsuited for hunting, either by temperament or conformation, I’m certain it’s because all of them came from “pet lines”, aka puppymills and backyard breeders. Yellows and blacks from that kind of breeding tend to be a bit off too- the choc color is correlative, not causative for unsuitable working Labs… If the liver/chocolate/red mutation caused poor performance, how could it be so common in so many breeds?
What do you think of this chocolate, though?
http://www.duckdog.com/mergansers_ferris_bueller.htm
He seems to be a lovely chocolate dog, that can actually hunt (both of his parents were blacks). So there does seem to be a market in the US for hunting choc Labs… his pups are selling like hotcakes.
Another question is, what does “working” mean? Where field trials involve running long distances, a leggy dog is advantaged and a blocky dog is disadvantaged. If they put a higher priority on swimming, blocky, big chested dogs would do better. I don’t think Lassie, the St. John’s water dog featured in previous posts, could have won top honors in retrieving trials; he’s not built for speed. But his kind were notable as working dogs.
Here’s a chocolate show dog (got BIS in NZ national show . . .sired lots of titled dogs) who has fantastic drive and retrieving instincts, and great temperament, and does great in the water . . . but who might not be competitive in field trials. He’s home schooled . . . much of his retrieving skills come naturally, not by specialized training.
Most of the Labbies in Australia and New Zealand are from show stock. Some of them do quite well as ‘dual purpose’ Labs, or as working dogs for policework, search and rescue, assistance dogs, guide dogs, etc., and some dogs with top bench confirmation do quite well in field trials. Including a few chocolates.
The really blocky ones aren’t as fast in the water, but they probably have more endurance. The fastest swimming goldens I’ve seen are all longer limbed, as are all Chesapeakes.
Blocky dogs are less likely to lose heat in the water because of Allen’s Rule.
I think the real reason why the St. John’s were so blocky is because they were also used to haul carts and loads.
We see a lot of hunting dogs here at the clinic, and, of the labradors, easily half are chocolate. This color is definitely more popular than yellow.
Then again, it seems here in Eastern OR that most working dogs are for “casual” hunting uses, so people don’t really care which lines they come from. A lot of the working dogs I see are from AKC lines or not even registered.
The trial lines are mostly black dogs.