Bleed Through - Page 2

The bleedthroughs I have seen look very different from bicolors. I don't think they have anything to do with each other. My dog's sire was a black with bleedthrough, but my dog is completly solid black.

Recessive black is not bleed thru. I have had about 60 blacks and have never seen this so called bleed thru. Black with brown as pictured or described is bicolor which is a color pattern. It is possible to have an apparent solid black which is in fact bicolor.  Many bicolor pups are misidentified as black at birth or early puppyhood. Blacks can fade due to sun exposure in high intensity sunlight but in winter they turn back to black. Blacks can have dilution as some black pups will appear red or brown ( even bluish ) at birth both leather and puppy coat but will darken to black by 4 - 6 months.  Dilution can affect any color or coat pattern.  A bicolor with recessive black bred to a black or another dog with recessive black will often produce some bicolor and blacks some of which will be very much black in appearance as juveniles.  Even recessive black sables can produce blacks and bicolor when bred to bicolor and blacks. GSD get their adult coat and color at 12-15 months.

Would you like to have it described to you, Bubba, as you have never seen "this so-called bleed through." ? It definitely exists, although I for one do not claim to know exactly WHY it exists. Examples I have seen of the 'bleeding through' of colour always seem to go like this:

Someone (this, as ever, is in the UK) acquires a pedigreed GSD puppy; this is almost always of known "pet breeding lines", rather than distinct SL or WL (here); at 12 weeks when they start to take it out and about, it seems solid black all over. This is usually the 'reddish black' animals, although I have seen ONE (I thought to be) 'blue-black' dog with which this occurred.

By the time the pup has grown to say 5 months, [a little younger than when you would have expected a black & red coat to be reaching its general distribution of gold bits] the pup starts to get bits of mottled brown coming through the black - does not seem to matter if it is a long coat or standard - almost always confined exclusively to feet and bottom of the legs, i.e. the pasterns and hocks and maybe a little higher. IME that's always about as far as it spreads. To respond to Jenn's query, I have never noticed any marks in the under-tail vent; but I have seen colour-paling in the trousers of some of the long coated examples, though that turns the ends of the coat greyish, rather than mottled brown.

Definitely not what I'd expect in a bi-colour B&R dog.

Coat color or pattern is not called at birth ... usually at 6-8 months it can be called. Black is a color based on genetics while bicolor is a pattern.

I've seen some bleed through on working lines, Hundmutter.

Yeah I'm sure you will have, R. That much is obvious through reports on here. I am just saying that in the UK these cases all seem to be from 'pet' breeding. We do not have the sheer volume of purely working bred dogs that you have in the States; most of our 'working' dogs have been SL, or SL crosses, and our SL are based on WGSL, and as you would expect there aren't that many all-blacks in those. A lot of pet breeding goes back aways, to earlier roots when more grey and black dogs came here from Germany, than they do since the B&Rs took real prominence in German SL. I do not know of any of the WGSL (or those [Czech/DDR etc] WL dogs we do have here now) that carry this in their all-black dogs; that is not to say it does not occur in them, just that I haven't come across it yet. [Incidentally, I have had a 'pet-bred' "all-black" dog in the last few years who DID NOT have bleed-through (though he did have some white toes and chest patch !).]

@Bubba: so, your point is ?  All Kennel Clubs that ask for colour to be specified do so when Registering, shortly after birth.  In GSD this has always been a bit of a problem esp. with regard to bi-colours, as you have to declare 'Black & Gold' or 'Sable' at that point;  you cannot declare what you do not know, so how dark the Sable is, or how much Gold (Red/Tan/Brown) you end up with on your sub-adult dog is down to time (and genetics, of course).  Likewise, a black dog with mottled legs ... and I would Register a black puppy with early white markings as a 'Black' anyway, not as a 'Black & White' LOL.


 

Humans want dog biology to be simple and predictable! Dogs and nature don't care how unpredictable or complex dog biology actually is. Kennel clubs can want adult coat colors and patterns determined soon after birth but nature will not change to accommodate their wants. Kennel clubs collect money for registrations and the accuracy of the registrations is seldom questioned. Color designations in the GSD is based on human definitions and thus livers, whites, blues and other color variants are deemed inferior despite no biological reason for this discrimination. Any definition of black for a GSD will suit the dogs and their biology.

Of course; but if we want to do any pedigree investigations to check for the genetics that might make such colour variations possible, or to predict what could come, in time, then most people need more than a 3 or 5 generation pedigree they get from their pup's breeder and the Registration agencies can (theoretically) be helpful in doing such research. Most dog owners do not have the opportunity to have known a whole string of their dogs ancestors in the flesh. Many dog owners do not know they can use PDB, or have not been able to use it as a resource until recent years, and for many breeds the existence of PDB is fairly irrelevant since no one has entered all the dogs on; and for other than American-owned GSDs the PDB records are still far from complete too. So if you want to check out questions like this one posed by Reliya, its not always easy to get total answers. And genetic studies only go so far, most tend to look into more common problems/issues in a breed.

I may be old fashioned, but for me there only is

black
black and tan
sable
off colors like blue, white, liver

I never cared much about colors, for me Sentinel`s dog looks like a pretty dark black/tan, or bicolor...like Jen I`d like to see a pic of the tail ( 6 - 8 weeks ). That´s the point where you can see the difference between black and black/tan.

All of us know in German Shepherd Dogs the color changes from birth to adulthood, in black/tans almost always the % of black becomes less, whereas the percentage of tan ( brown, red = tan ) becomes more.
That said a very dark black/tan may look like a black dog, but later on there may be some tan visible ( "bleed through" ?)

A honest question ( cause I really never cared... only looked at the ancestors in case I was interested in a dog... ):
What is the genetic difference between black/tan and bicolor besides the % of black color? Is there even a difference?

Clueless regards
Susie

True bicolors are supposed to be At/At or At/A.

Saddle backs are supposed to be As/As, As/At, or As/A.

(I believe.)