Sometimes a dog's color is not obvious on casual inspection and it is necessary to look a little deeper. The following pix are situations where the dog's true color was not obvious at first, or it looked a little tricky for classification purposes.
This question comes up from time to time with people adopting adult red dogs. Is this a merle? She has two definite shades of red in a somewhat irregular shape. Actually, this dog is bleaching and shedding in the late summer. Reds are especially prone to sunbleaching, and this dog's color lightened to a marked degree. Her true color shows on her hip where the winter coat has all fallen out. Her true color is a deep liver red, not bright flame red. Once all the dead stuff fell out she was a gorgeous dark red tricolor. Sometimes puppies can have puppy fluff that suggests a different color than the pup turns out to be once he has shed the fluff around age one.
This is also a common source of confusion. Is this a blue merle? Actually, Gypsy is half Australian cattle dog and half Aussie. ACDs are never merles, but they do have very very heavy ticking/roaning in the white areas. It is so heavy that it resembles blue merle as it does in Gypsy here. Because Gypsy is half Aussie, she could have inherited merling from her blue merle Aussie mom. But notice that the "blue" areas are limited to the location of the Irish spotting pattern. Merling is randomly distributed and would not be expected to conform to a regular pattern like this. This pup is a black tri with very heavy ticking.
Leo is a blue merle with heavy ticking on his white areas. It's not as heavy as the roaning effect seen in the ACD cross above, but it is heavy enough and the merled areas light enough that ticking can be mistaken for merling. If he were a black tri, the ticked areas might be mistakenly identified as merling and result in him being registered as a merle. The merling is strongest on his hip and face. His muzzle is white and he has a white left foreleg and white collar. Notice that the ticking on his leg follows the location of his tan points. The ticks are black until they reach his wrist, at which point they are tan.
Is this pup on the left a brindle? He does have black marks on his tan points. But notice that the black areas are indistinct smudges. They do not form distinct tiger striping as is seen in a true brindle (closeup of foot to the right of pup). The female on the right has distinct vertical black stripes on her tan points. She is a brindle. The pup has "smutty tan points". On a red dog the smutty areas would be red instead of black.
This is a black tri pup with a tiny white spot on his back. Is he a pattern white? Well, technically, he is. The white spot is out of the prescribed area. However, such small white spots often disappear totally as the puppy grows. By the time he is a year old there's no trace of it and he looks like a perfectly marked black tri. But the spot should be noted and the buyer informed it was there. In order to produce a litter with correct amounts of white this pup will need a mate with no such spots.
This pup is also discussed in the cryptic merles section. With just a blue tail is he really a blue merle? Yes, if he has even one blue hair he is a blue merle. Once the tail is docked the evidence of merling will be gone, but he must still be registered as a merle rather than the black tricolor he appears to be. Mated to another merle he would produce some homozygous merle pups, even though his amount of merling is very minimal.
What about these little guys? Are the two dark ones an off color, or is the light one the one that is off? Actually, the shade of red or blue on a merle can vary considerably. Some dogs have such light merling it looks almost white, and some have a much bluer (or redder) shade. These are normal red merle pups. Two have darker merling than the one in the middle. The middle pup also has a dilute spot in the middle of his back.
This is a case where a newborn puppy could easily have been misidentified as a dilute, had she not had an experienced breeder. At this age, she does resemble a dilute. She appears to be a uniform shade of gray. You can hardly see the tiny clusters of black hairs at this point. But here she is at approximately 3 months old. Now it is clear that she is a a gorgeous blue merle, not a dilute. Her spots are tiny and cheetah-like, rather than the heavy marbling you often see in merles. But both types are equally correct.
© 2004 Lisa McDonald Feedback