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What a beautiful colour.


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My Juno is your typical black and white but when the sun shines a certain way on her coat she turns a beautiful reddy black, almost like the coals of a fire. The first time I noticed the colour change it was in the car. I looked over and to my surprise she was just glowing. She never ceases to surprise me. Her father was black and white and her mother was pure brown yet almost all of the puppies were black and white. I had wondered where the brown went.

Bill

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My 4+ month old is from a very traditional looking black and white father who was small (36 pounds) and a very traditional looking (markings) red and white mother who was also small(32 pounds). ANother story for another day but I pestered her parents' owners to produce a puppy for me in hopes they would reproduce puppies of similar size.

 

Ha.

 

Yesterday, at 4 months + 1 week she weighed 30.5 pounds. She also has almost no white on her face, her collar is very thin and only on one side. She does have the full bib, 3 white toes and one white stocking - otherwise she is all "black".

 

Except that, like yours, she shows a LOT of red in the sun and around her eyes, edges of ears, undercoat and tail. Black Cherry, if you will. Dark Chocolate and Cherries. Very beautiful, anyway :)

 

I am adding a picture I just took now (forgive quality - I'm using a tablet) as she's laying at my feet with the "playing will make everything better, just trust me" look - you can see the red highlight on the ear in the sun.

 

Most of our working dogs are black and white - but almost all of them have a lot of ticking. We do have two black/blue merles and two red and whites but all our breeding males are black and white rough coats. They tend to produce true.

post-16487-0-87582800-1409400861_thumb.jpg

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..Coat colour genetics is pretty complicated. It has mainly been studied in mice where I think it's been shown that there although there are 5 major genes controlling colour there are in fact well over 100 different genetic determinants which effect coat colour pattern and well as coat colour itself.

 

In regard to dogs..I think that brown is recessive to black ( no doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong here), this means that if Juno inherited the black copy ( allele) of the gene from her father that it would effectively mask the brown copy of the gene from her mother.

 

But science aside, I too love the purplish glow in the black of my dogs too.

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The genetic variations in this breed are pretty astounding - what other breed has so many coat color possibilities? None of which I am aware. I sort of chuckle to think of the apopolectic fits that must have given the KC crowd when they were adopting a conformation standard :)

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..Coat colour genetics is pretty complicated. It has mainly been studied in mice where I think it's been shown that there although there are 5 major genes controlling colour there are in fact well over 100 different genetic determinants which effect coat colour pattern and well as coat colour itself.

 

In regard to dogs..I think that brown is recessive to black ( no doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong here), this means that if Juno inherited the black copy ( allele) of the gene from her father that it would effectively mask the brown copy of the gene from her mother.

 

But science aside, I too love the purplish glow in the black of my dogs too.

 

Red is recessive to black.

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Dear Doggers,

 

I have come to believe there is one "best" coat color for working sheepdogs: mostly black with big white patches/streaks on the sides are much, much easier to spot half a mile out in sagebrush. I owned one once. Unfortunately he wouldn't work sheep.

 

Donald McCaig

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Or the white tail top. I have one who likes to make unauthorized visits right out to the end of each neighbouring cottage dock up north when I'm not looking. from my dock I can see the white tip progressing counter-clockwise away from me, which I find annoying. When I call her name, the tail tip stops, does a slow 360, and hustles back my way.

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If by "brown" you mean what working folks call blue and conformation folks call lilac (I think!), then it's a standard black and white dog who received two recessive copies of a dilute gene. The "blue" is a diluted black. In horses, buckskin is a diluted bay, although I think horses have incomplete dominance for dilute. This is NOT Merle blue. That's a totally different gene. My older blue dog looks grayish brown... at the very dusty 2009 USBCHA Finals, people thought he was just an amazingly dirty black & white :)

 

The red highlights in the black coloration is generally due to sun bleaching. Horse people go to all sorts of measures to keep their black horses from fading.

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Yeah, my dad always said he didn't care what color they were as long as he could see them in the dawn/dusk. The preference here, based on unscientific observation, seems to be for as much white as possible - at least that's how the breeding works out :/

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If by "brown" you mean what working folks call blue and conformation folks call lilac (I think!), then it's a standard black and white dog who received two recessive copies of a dilute gene. The "blue" is a diluted black. In horses, buckskin is a diluted bay, although I think horses have incomplete dominance for dilute. This is NOT Merle blue. That's a totally different gene. My older blue dog looks grayish brown... at the very dusty 2009 USBCHA Finals, people thought he was just an amazingly dirty black & white :)

The red highlights in the black coloration is generally due to sun bleaching. Horse people go to all sorts of measures to keep their black horses from fading.

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Isn't "brown" usually called "red" - or are there two distinct colors? I do not know.

 

The reddish tint in my BC is not from sun fading - it has been coming out as she gets her adult coat and looks to be more properly considered a part of her undercoat than her top/color coat. You can see it if you back comb her hair, for instance.

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Isn't "brown" usually called "red" - or are there two distinct colors? I do not know.

 

Well I thought so, I was just using the same description that the ourwully used... But I kinda knew I,d be picked up on it.

 

As I said in my first post, coat colour genetics is fascinating but somewhat complex. However, without getting too distracted by genetic interactions, the outcome is that the pigment along each individual hair often varies along it's length. So that is why on some dogs in some light (or when it is brushed a certain way) a black coat often looks reddish.

 

And yes..CMP just to agree with your father's comment about seeing your dog at dawn & dusk... I'm,always grateful for my dogs' white bits when we're out in the dark..they seem to glow slightly in the the moonlight.

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Your black dog is also brown and gold, but the black color prevents you from seeing them. The gene that makes a red/chocolate/brown Border Collie doesn't change the color of the dog so much as prevent the production of black pigment, which reveals the brown pigment that was already there. Yellow/gold/Aussie red Border Collies are that color because production of both black and brown pigment have been suppressed in the coat.

 

In other words, Border Collies that don't carry chocolate can look very reddish in the sun.

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Your black dog is also brown and gold, but the black color prevents you from seeing them. The gene that makes a red/chocolate/brown Border Collie doesn't change the color of the dog so much as prevent the production of black pigment, which reveals the brown pigment that was already there. Yellow/gold/Aussie red Border Collies are that color because production of both black and brown pigment have been suppressed in the coat.

 

In other words, Border Collies that don't carry chocolate can look very reddish in the sun.

Cool! Good to know, thanks.

 

Whatever it is, I have never seen it before up close and I really like it. Some days it is like she has "highlights". Very beautiful (says the unbiased owner - heh).

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In horses, heterozygous blacks get the red faded looking hair, but homozygous blacks don't. My heterozygous black mare turned brown as the coat aged, before shedding, and keeping her out of the sun and feeding coat supplements had very little effect on that.

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