Blue eyed GSD - Page 1

Can a true Purebred GSD have blue eyes or one blue eye.  I don't have one but am just curious.

While searching for a new dam. I have seen a few ads for GSD's with blue eyes and did not know what to think of it. 

I myself would not own one as all mine are to the breed standard.

No.

Yes.  It would be a mutation... or a recessive if the original mutation didn't start with them.  I saw this once in a PURE bred, DDR litter of 10.  One pup had one eye that stayed about half blue and half changed to brown.  Do you have a pedigree for the dog you may have seen this in?  Or is it purely hypothetical?  BTW, it would not be permissable per the standard, so hopefully no one would purposely be breeding for this.

I have seen what appeared to be a purebred gsd with blue eyes. It was, however, a blue gsd. There was a phot on-line of a blue-eyed liver gsd puppy last year. It was in a litter at Kraftwerk--I don't recall the letter for the litter. But, it would have been a definite purebred. There was a thread on this forum about it and I believe the photo may have been cached on Google.

no.

I have seen pups with blue eyes that later changed to LIGHT brown, I haven't seen an ADULT with blue eyes but have only seen a few adult blues and 1 adult liver in person.  Photos are sometimes not the most acurate as far as color goes...

It's interesting that the dog with blue eyes was a DDR dog. Here's what a poster on the database has to say about them:

Back then it didnt really matter if the dog was registered or not. The registration was done at the breed survey at age 2. If you had an outstanding exemplar of noneregistered parents, it happened that either the dog was registered without parents or the dog became offspring of another registerd dog. A little money or a goody hard to get at this time got you a long way.

So, it's quite possible that DDR GSD had some NON-GSD genes somewhere in its pedigree, which would have caused the blue eyes!

However, I don't doubt that blue eyes can show up in GSD's that are of absolutely pure lineage. Panda shepherds often have blue eyes, as the white areas on the face will lack the pigment to create a normal brown eye. You see this frequently in pinto horses: often, if there is a dark splotch of coat on the face, that eye will be brown, while the other eye, which is surrounded by white, will be blue.

There have been enough threads on this database about Pandas to prove that they do occur occasionally, and are NOT the result of accidental outcrossing to other breeds.  Personally, I believe they are the result of either mutations, or very rare genes being expressed. The German Shepherd has a very mixed parentage, and I'm sure some of the dogs that went into the making of the breed had white marks on the face, and possibly blue eyes as well.  It could well be those genes are still lurking in the genome, and given the right conditions, will show themselves.

Here's a link to the thread I quoted from. The post was made by Elkoor.  www.pedigreedatabase.com/gsd/bulletins_read/256422.html#285325

There's some interesting info in that thread on the DDR dogs, especially Don v. Rolandsteich.