Question regarding BLACK Shepherds..... - Page 4

That is very sad about Paska.  Another dog from that kennel who I like and who is in this country (and is black) is Casch v Saltztalblick Schh3,KKl-1 - he has also been retired due to injury but very good strong dog in the work.

molly

Kaiko vom Salztalblick SCHH3, FH1, KKL1 - awesome!

Valko vom Lengener-Meer - up & coming!

I'm head over heels about both of these dogs!  Have a Kaiko son and trying to get a daughter from Valko - I love the solid blacks - they scare the heck out of people just looking at them and very few people (john q public) realize that they are GSD's - and yes, they are nearly invisible at night except for the teeth....

Black is recessive in german shepherds and a couple other breeds, in all other breeds it is dominant. 

Shelties are one of the recessive black breeds, in the only documented case of a black producing as a dominant, it was eventually traced back to a false registration several generations back in his pedigree that gave him the dominant black gene from another breed. 

Black can be carried hidden for generations though, looking at just the individual dog's pedigree does not tell you if they could carry it, to find that out you would need to look at the littermates and other pups produced by all dogs in the pedigree.  Example - you can have all black/red for the first three generations of a dog's pedigree, but that dog's sire could have been the only black/red in a litter of blacks. 

In my experience, chest white does decrease with age, although not as much as the white on their feet.  If the pup has a big white patch at birth, it wont all go away, but a small bit should be gone at maturity.  A dog that had white as a pup is very likely to produce white on his/her pups though.

check out Eurosports sires......if you like black dogs

Katjo,  In addition to Reggae's  very good point please realize  a recessive color gene is something that can stay hidden for 6,7 or 8 generations or probably even more. It "pops" out because the dog or bitch was finally bred to another who was also a carrier. Years ago I saw this with a white. The breeder claimed to have no idea where this one white puppy in the litter came from ( who also had a liver brother) and yet a look at her pedigree showed massed back in the 8th and 9th generation was a dog known to produce white and other off colors.  She had inadvertently linebred on him as distant as that was and walla out "popped" the odd colors.

So chances are that your dog is not a special case of being exceptional prepotent in the color department but that the bitch lines were carrying the recessive for a very long time and it was just never expressed.

Vixen there are several types of white and white markings in GSDs. It sounds like what you are describing is something called "Irish spotting".  If someone has one of the Willis books perhaps they could copy his explanation of this but basically this is small white patches generally on the toes, toenails, legs and sometimes the chest that do disappear with age. Large white chest marks which persistent into adulthood I believe are from a different factor.

As mentioned before, we had this almost identical discussion on the German board. I learned that there has not been a white GSD vor about 50 years. Supposedly, Horand's maternal grandfather was a white dog. VKFGSD, I would be interested to know which German lines these dogs had who produced a white puppy.

In Europe, white dogs are not GSDs, but Berger Blanc Suisse (White Swiss Shepherds) or American-Canadian Shepherds (they are the same breed):  www.berger-blanc-international.com/ or www.rws-ev.info/ Looking through these two websites, I notice that these dogs have SchH titles as well and the organization has a Bundessiegerpruefung and Bundessiegerzuchtschau. Their standard is very similar to the GSD, the size is one cm more. As the GSD, they have stock coats and longstock coats.  Both are permissable.  Here is a link to their history, if you read German: www.wsr-eifel.de/index.php To sum up, it says that they do have their origin with the GSD. In 1882, there was a white dog named Greif shown for the first time at a show in Hannover. There have been white ones on and off, but in 1933, in a big wave of discrimination they were prohibited and all white puppies were culled. Before that happened, some breeding animals came to the U.S. and Canada, and that is the reason they survived here and were re-imported into Switzerland in the 1970's, hence the name White Swiss Shepherds. The FCI recognized them under their official name Berger Blanc Suisse in 2003.

So, the gene for white spots definitely does not have anything to do with the gene for this white shepherd. Also, I learned from the German board that this white dog does not possess the agouti gene anymore, which all GSDs including the black ones still have.

Chris

Never had a problem with sun-washed out blacks, however, I have observed over the years that when my blacks (including my Labradors) got ready to cast their undercoats, that hair would turn a bit reddish or brown.  The outer guard hairs stayed jet black, but as the dead undercoat got ready to shed, it was a touch brown/black.

This has been another informative and fun thread to read.  (as was the one on tracking and starting f lags!  )

Cathy M.

Not strictly true that black x black will produce only blacks.  It won't produce any other standard colour, but can produce white, blue or liver (and so in theory, lilac).

Not true that white dogs lack the Agouti gene.... all dogs have the Agouti gene in duplicate in some form but the white gene masks its expression.  The type of white in the GSD is different from the white spotting of many other breeds and has no connection with the white chest/toe spots which are simply areas that lack melanocytes (pigment cells). 

Interesting that blacks do seems to have a higher incidence of white spotting... could be that black inhibits the melanocyte migration to some extent. This incidentally isn't 'irish spotting' but just the expression of modifing genes, or simply blips in pigment cell migration that isn't under genetic control.   

pod, this is true and why most breeders will not breed black to black.  I asked a Koermeister once why some judges will not put a black dog into the KKl-1 category - at least a few years ago it seemed very clear that most blacks were looked at with disfavor at the conformation shows.  I was at one show where there were three black dogs entered, all titled, good-looking strong-working dogs - and the judge gave two of them Sufficient (no conformation rating but able to return for another show) and one INSUFFICIENT (no conformation rating and not able to try again, ever).  The Insufficient dog was a female who was a well-known producer of Nationally-recognized working dogs.  She wasn't <that> ugly - but she was black.  Anyway the judge told me that black dogs should never be bred to another black dog, because of the possibility of producing white, liver or blue dogs.  He also said that black will not improve pigment when bred to sable or black/tan, in fact the black will wash out the red in the sable or the red in the tan.   And that was why he thought many judges did not like to give good ratings to black dogs, they considered black a poor pigment.

molly

I would just like to say how interesting and informative this has been to read.  Far more than I had anticipated, the experience and knowledge of breeding that is evident here is commendable and inspiring. 

Thank you,

Vixen