Red Factor

[AerBear26]

Is there any way to tell from the outside if a black and white border collie is red factored?

 

My BC has red on both sides but not his direct parents. He is black and white but has like a brownish undercoat in the sun and brownish feathering on his butt and very light gold eyes.

 

 

[Liz P]

No. I believe the AKC people use a genetic test.

[AerBear26]

aw darn ok.

[Debbie Meier]

Can't tell from the outside, but where any of his littermates red?

[Lozzibear]

When you say 'red factored', do you mean carrying the red gene?

 

It all depends on his family... it is difficult with yours though because neither parent were red, unless other pups were red. If other pups are red, then there is a high chance that your pup will carry red because both parents must be carrying it. Although, your pup carrying red can never be a guarantee. When were the last red dogs in your dogs lines?

 

My BC has a mum who was a blue merle and red dad. Obviously his dad has to have two red genes. His mum would be hard to tell though, if it hadn't been for the breeding knowing her parents... one of which was a red. So, the breeder knew she HAD to carry the red gene, even if she doesn't express it herself. There were some black pups in my dogs litter, so they all HAVE to carry the red gene because of their dad.

 

Knowing the colours in your dogs line can help you work out roughly what chance there is, but you can't know for sure unless you were to actually breed him to find out (or do a genetic test but that seems a bit extreme).

[AerBear26]

Can't tell from the outside, but where any of his littermates red?

 

no they weren't.

[AerBear26]

When you say 'red factored', do you mean carrying the red gene?

 

 

Knowing the colours in your dogs line can help you work out roughly what chance there is, but you can't know for sure unless you were to actually breed him to find out (or do a genetic test but that seems a bit extreme).

 

Yes I mean red gene. I dont know which dogs in his line had red but I was told he "had it on both sides". Yea im not overly concerned I just saw the reddish undertone to his coat and got excited thinking he MUST be red factored! lol.

[juliepoudrier]

The reddish undertone is common in black and white dogs. It's the result of the black pigment fading in "older" hairs and allowing the red pigment to show through. (Red dogs are red because they don't produce the black pigment that normally masks the red; in B&W dogs as the black pigment fades in aging or sun-bleached hair, then the red can show through.)

 

Red stil appears with some regularity in working dogs because it does skip generations. It can remain hidden, and just because a dog has red littermates or red back in its lines doesn't mean it will carry the red gene itself. The only way to tell would be to breed to a red dog, and even then, there's no guarantee that the red-factored bitch would "donate" the red gene to any of the pups. What you would end up with, though, is pups that had to carry the red gene, since a red parent could give nothing else to the cross.

 

That's the reasoning behind folks who breed double merles, except of course that merle is dominant. The result is that the double merle can only ever donate a merle gene to the cross, which means that all pups resulting from any breeding of a double merle to any color opposite-gender dog should be merle (because the gene is dominant). Because red is recessive, you don't get the same result when you breed a red dog to a black and white dog who either does or doesn't "carry" red. But as I said above, all the pups would then carry the red gene.

 

I like red dogs, but I can't imagine deliberately breeding for one.

 

J.

[ObeytheBC]

VetGen (vetgen.com) offers DNA color and coat testing aka ChromaGene! You can test for just one or several colors. To test for red, the cost is $55 to sate your curiousity on if your dog carries a red gene.

 

http://www.vetgen.com/ordertests.aspx?id=Border Collie

 

Yeah, I was told the whole if it looks red in sunlight, it carries red. I have a dog that carries red, he is blue black as can be in the sun.

[AerBear26]

 

 

I like red dogs, but I can't imagine deliberately breeding for one.

 

J.

 

Yea i LOVE red dogs but I would NEVER breed based on color. My pup is from working stock and I would only breed him way in the future if he proves exceptional on stock and only with the breeders guidance. I really want to dedicate my life to protecting the working border collie lines and also BC rescue. But i do love dem red dawgs!! lol

[Kian's Mom]

My female is a red tri. Her mom was a red and her dad a blue merle. Grandmother was red and Grandfather was black. Grandparents are on mothers side. Not sure on fathers side.

The litter she is from had all 3 colors in it.

[juliepoudrier]

Hmmmm...sounds like your breeder was breeding for color...

 

J.

[Kian's Mom]

Julie,

Not saying she was or wasn't because I don't know and I'm new at this but what tells you she was breeding for color?

Is there a way to find out what colors are in the bloodline if all you know is the color of the parents or littermates?

I have seen on web sites different herding breeders with different color dogs in their pack. Is that bad when looking for a new puppy? I know most trial dogs are bl/wh. What is or is there a difference between stock dogs and herding dogs?

Thanks for your input.

Jan

[GentleLake]

Kinda sad that no one answered your questions, Jan, when you're trying to learn and figure all of this out.

 

 

My female is a red tri. Her mom was a red and her dad a blue merle. Grandmother was red and Grandfather was black. Grandparents are on mothers side. Not sure on fathers side.

The litter she is from had all 3 colors in it.

 

 

Not saying she was or wasn't because I don't know and I'm new at this but what tells you she was breeding for color?

 

The parents themselves and the variety of colors in the litter tells you that the breeder was breeding for color. As you pointed out in a later post, most working and trial bred dogs are black and white. Because if this, the pool of colored dogs that are good enough for breeding -- by this I mean that they're outstanding working dogs either on the farm or on the open trial fields -- is so exceptionally limited as to be virtually nonexisitent. Therefore, this red tri bitch and blue merle sire were selected to be bred for some reason other than their superior working ability. Care to guess what the selection criterion was? You got it, color.

 

You say you don't know the colors of the sire's parents . . . at least one of them had to have been a merle for him to be a merle. If it was a blue merle, the other one could have been another color, as blue merles are genetically black, or it could have been a black and white dog. For that litter to have had all three colors, I strongly suspect that the sire's parents were either a blue merle and a red, or a red merle and a black & white (any of which could have been tris) .

 

 

I have seen on web sites different herding breeders with different color dogs in their pack. Is that bad when looking for a new puppy? I know most trial dogs are bl/wh.

 

You answered your own question. If most trial dogs are black & white there are, as mentioned above, ridiculously few proven working dogs of other colors to choose from for responsible breeding. Maybe a few reds, and one blue merle that I know of in Maine (though I'm not sure he's still living), but still, very, very few candy colored dogs to choose from. Therefore, if a breeder's advertising all sorts of candy colors, they're not choosing the very best working dogs for their breeding programs; they're choosing their breeders based on color. And you'll notice that these breeders aren't trialing their dogs to prove that they're breeding good working stockdogs. There's a reason for that. Breeding for anything other than working ability ends up in a weakening of working ability. So, yes, that's bad when looking for a puppy.

 

 

What is or is there a difference between stock dogs and herding dogs?

 

Nothing. Synonyms. Stock = livestock, which are herded.

 

I hope this has helped you to understand what's going on w/the whole color breeding thing.

 

roxanne

 

ETA: That blue merle open trial dog in Maine can't possibly still be alive. That was 20+ years ago. He may have progeny that work, though I haven't heard of any of them. But Dick & Cheryl Jagger Williams have a merle who was running open. I believe they've bred him. Again, dunno anything about his offspring.

[Liz P]

Mirk, the merle dog owned by Dick, has not sired any litters. I believe Mirk goes back to that trial dog from Maine that lived 20+ years ago. Some of his close relatives have been bred. There are a few merle trial dogs in the northeast. Basically though, all the trial dogs around here are black or black tri.

[GentleLake]

Mirk, the merle dog owned by Dick, has not sired any litters.

 

Interesting. I'd inquired about a pup from him several years back. They must have changed their minds.

[Sue R]

Interesting. I'd inquired about a pup from him several years back. They must have changed their minds.

 

Or maybe they tried and he was not successful. I don't know either way. I do know someone with an Open level merle (retired now) and can't imagine her breeding him without the greatest of care, particularly to avoid producing any merle pups that might fall into a color breeder's hands somehow. And I'm pretty sure she had been asked many times by people who were interested in just that, that color in an Open dog.

[Liz P]

I believe mother nature made up her mind.

[juliepoudrier]

If this post is kind of messed up I apologize. I've been trying to post comments on and off for several hours but can't get a post to go through unless I quote another post. So that's what I did....

 

Roxanne,

 

Well, you know, sometimes stuff gets buried, especially when you don't get here more than once a day, usually. And though it's no fault of the OP, after being on this forum for more than a decade, sometimes a person like me just doesn't feel like repeating stuff I've said many times before. It's always nice when someone else steps in....

 

 

Kian's Mom,

 

It looks like your questions have been answered adequately by Roxanne, though I would disagree with the "few reds" comment, largely because there are lines of dogs that go back to some well-known and well-respected working dogs who carried red. So red does pop up in litters unexpectedly at times. Granted they don't appear in the numbers that one finds b/w or black tri dogs, but I rarely go to a trial where there isn't at least one red (or red tri) dog running.

 

 

Unlike red, which is recessive and can be hidden and then pop out after more than one generation, if one breeds merle one gets (at least some) merle (assuming that one isn't breeding a double merle, in which case, you'd get all merle). As others have noted there are a few merles running in open, but personally none of them has made me think "wow, I need a pup out of that dog." Of course there may be others who would feel otherwise. But because the numbers are so small, breeding dogs of that color means not necessarily breeding the best possible working dogs to one another.

 

 

Reds, though, can and do appear fairly regularly. One of Eileen Stineman's dogs (Star?), who was run quite successfully by Alasdair MacRae, regurlarly produced red puppies when bred to b/w dogs (who obviously also carried the red gene). My own dogs go back to Henry Kuykendall's Imp. Mirk, who was b/w, but carried red, which has traveled down through those lines. I've never gotten a red pup by breeding the dogs I have from those lines, but others have. As has often been noted Wiston Cap, who carried red is present (way back) in many of the pedigrees of working border collies.

 

 

There's an article on red dogs on this site, http://www.bordercollie.org/health/kpred.html.

 

 

From that article:

 

 

 

"More importantly, the red gene is present in some of our favorite breeding lines. The first recorded red Border Collie was a bitch named Wylie, grandmother of the famous Dickson's Hemp (153). The recessive gene passed through the generations to J. M. Wilson's Cap (3036) who appears in the pedigree of Wiston Cap at least 16 times! Wiston Cap carried the red gene and passed it to many of his sons and daughters. Our current Border Collies tend to have many crosses of Wiston Cap in their background; each one increases the chances of receiving that e gene. Crosses on both sides of the family, likewise, increase the chances of a double dose and the appearance of more and more red dogs. These dogs are beginning to convince even the traditionalist that a red dog can do the job."

 

As you can see from Roxanne's and my comments, once you start getting into other (candy) colors: red merle, lilac, lilac merle, etc., clearly color is an important criterion in the breeding choices, especially when you consider that few or no such dogs are running in open and so most that are being bred, with a few rare notable exceptions, are not being bred for their superior working ability.

 

 

J.

 

Kinda sad that no one answered your questions, Jan, when you're trying to learn and figure all of this out.

 

Maybe a few reds, and one blue merle that I know of in Maine (though I'm not sure he's still living), but still, very, very few candy colored dogs to choose from.

[Kian's Mom]

Thank you for your answers. I know that you guys get tired of answering basically the same questions over and over usually for new members. I have went back and read some older post but there are over 3 thousand. Too much to read all of them. A lot of you guys same the same thing ( nothing wrong with that ) but once in a while someone can say the same thing in a different way an a light goes on, hey I get it now. Guess that's me. I have had several nice private conversations from people on this board. There are things I still don't understand an possibly never will ( just don't get it ). When you do post a question and no one or only a few respond makes you feel like no one really cares. But I realize people do have a life outside of this board.

But there is so much out there on the net that looks and sounds good or logical so how does one know what is true and what is not? Yes I have learned some of those red flags as you guys call them. Which when I got my girl I wasn't aware of exactly. Some I knew from reading other breeders what to ask questions on their web sights.

Here are a couple of the ones I just haven't got yet.

1. If all BC's came from the majority of b/w dogs and an occasional red, then where did the as you call them the candy colors come from?

2. I know from you guys that the trial dogs are also they same as far as color but why? Are the candy color not smart enough .

3. I'm assuming the sports dogs as you call them started out from the working bred but were wash outs for herding ( not having the particular traits that the working breeders wanted in their dogs).

Thanks Again

Jan

[Gideon's girl]

I'm relatively new to the breed myself, but I've been into dogs and herding dogs for many years so I've done a ton of reading. Somethings you will neer hear until you finally say the right thing at the right time and the right person was in the right mood to enlighten you. Or you just randomly run across it.

 

As far as BC colors go, the BC as a breed is not about color. When the breed was being developed, a bunch of people didn't get together and say "Let's create a new breed and this is what it should look like." Shepherds from a particular area had particular needs in a dog, so when they saw that a dog was really good for the kind of work they were doing, they bred it to another dog that did the work with excellence. They bred mutts that work well, whatever dog of whatever color as long as it did the work. So BCs are all different colors, coats, and sizes. It was much later that they became a breed, but still based on the ability to do the work, nothing else.

[juliepoudrier]

I've probably responded to many of those 3,000 posts!

 

What you need to remember is that the border collie as a breed, like any breed, was developed over time by selecting useful dogs from a somewhat general population of dogs. Whatever colors appeared in the proto-border collie (for lack of a better term) could then possibly continue to appear as the breed was selectively molded (through breeding) into what we know today (or let's say a couple of generations ago) as the border collie. So it's likely no one selected for a particular color, but if shepherd A had a good working dog for his purposes, and farmer B had a dog who had some qualities that seemed to complement shepherd A's dog's but that also had some qualities shepherd A's dog lacked, then A might have bred his dog to B's dog. If B's dog was, say, a merle, it might not have mattered to A at the point as he simply wanted to gain the qualities that dog possessed. If there were any merle pups in the litter he may or may not have chosen to keep them. So colors could be introduced into a breed for reasons of creating the working characteristics of the breed and not out of consideration for color.

 

After all, working sheepdogs were a mishmash until certain working characteristics were found consistently within the breed as a whole (though you have to remember that at this point breeding was probably pretty local so similar types of dogs were being bred throughout the larger region). Those similar types might have had some similar progenitors and some that were not. In this manner the genetics for various colors, coat types, ear sets, etc., could have been introduced into the foundation stock for what eventually became the border collie as we know it (or folks a couple of generations ago knew it, before rampant breeding for something other than work).

 

But then you have farmers/shepherds who have their own personal prejudices, just like all of us do. If they were producing litters and then choosing pups out of those litters to keep, train, work, and breed from, the type they kept and bred from would become the predominant type. But as has been noted with red, especially, recessive traits can stay "silent" for several generations and then reappear.

 

As was noted in the link I posted earlier, more recently people have come into the border collie world who don't have the same prejudices that old time shepherds and farmers might have had. Many working folk are still prejudiced against red dogs, mostly white dogs, and certainly any candy colored dog. They would not deliberately breed for any of these colors, but as new people enter the ranks of sheepdog trialers, and they come from different backgrounds, they don't follow traditions the same way.

 

Regarding your question of whether candy colored dogs are smart enough, that's not the issue. The point is that if you have a population of dogs in which the main colors are black (mostly), B&W, and black tri, with the occasional red or red tri, then those are the colors that are going to be produced. If the occasional merle appears, then its genetics are still a very tiny proportion of the entire gene pool in the first place. If the dog is a great worker and he's bred from, statistically he/she can't produce but so many puppies, and unless the dog is super exceptional, people aren't going to be lining up for pup (again, statistics, because there are lots of "normal" colored pups from the crosses of two excellent workers) or ultimately breeding from those pups (and even if exceptional many shepherds, being rather conservative, wouldn't in general choose the "odd" colored pups). If someone comes along and really wants to breed a merle but the merle in question isn't an exceptional worker, then that breeder has already compromised by selecting for color at the expense of exceptional working ability.

 

So IMO it's more about statistics, the relative low numbers of merles in the general working population (at least until very recently). Now, more colorful dogs are being bred, but to get those colors the breeder is choosing mainly on the basis of color without regard for working ability. As more such folks breed candy colored dogs, those dogs increase in numbers and their genetics increase proportionally in the border collie population as a whole. But those candy colored dogs are dogs whose breeding was based on color choices and not working ability, so while intelligence isn't at issue, the working ability is.

 

Denise Wall has written about this in the past, and she may even have an article or two on the parent site of this board (if you go to the top of the forum you'll find links to sites on the main bordercollie.org website, the host of this forum). The genetics of working ability are complex and must be selected for in every generation or the genetics begin to drift and before long you start losing parts of the whole package. Once lost, we can't get that back. So the vehemence against candy colors is that the people selecting for those colors are pretty much actively selecting against the best working traits.

 

I can't say where the first border collies for sports came from. It may be that they started in AKC, coming from the obedience side of things. I'm sure some people might have gotten dogs from working breeders, but it's more likely they got them from folks they associated with, AKC obdience folks and the like. IIRC the border collie was recognized for purposes of participating in AKC performance events well before it was officially recognized as a breed. People lament the difficulty of finding good working breeders even in our very connected world, so I don't think people who started with border collies in agility were getting working dog washouts, but I have no data to actually support that.

 

I apologize if any of this is disjointed, I'm doing several things at once. If it's unclear, just ask for specific clarification.

 

J.

 

Thank you for your answers. I know that you guys get tired of answering basically the same questions over and over usually for new members. I have went back and read some older post but there are over 3 thousand. Too much to read all of them. A lot of you guys same the same thing ( nothing wrong with that ) but once in a while someone can say the same thing in a different way an a light goes on, hey I get it now. Guess that's me. I have had several nice private conversations from people on this board. There are things I still don't understand an possibly never will ( just don't get it ). When you do post a question and no one or only a few respond makes you feel like no one really cares. But I realize people do have a life outside of this board.

But there is so much out there on the net that looks and sounds good or logical so how does one know what is true and what is not? Yes I have learned some of those red flags as you guys call them. Which when I got my girl I wasn't aware of exactly. Some I knew from reading other breeders what to ask questions on their web sights.

Here are a couple of the ones I just haven't got yet.

1. If all BC's came from the majority of b/w dogs and an occasional red, then where did the as you call them the candy colors come from?

2. I know from you guys that the trial dogs are also they same as far as color but why? Are the candy color not smart enough .

3. I'm assuming the sports dogs as you call them started out from the working bred but were wash outs for herding ( not having the particular traits that the working breeders wanted in their dogs).

Thanks Again

Jan

[Kian's Mom]

J thank you very much for the nice explanation. I understand the breeding for work ability but if the majority of dogs were an are as stated black, red or tri's where did the merles and the blues and lilac's come from? Thinking a cross of BC and Aussie for the merles but what about the others. So I guess I'm saying if say 100 yrs ago the only colors were the blacks and so on how did the other colors come in an still be registered as a BC. I think I'm correct in the lilac and blues both parents have to have the dilute gene in order for the pups to be that color.

Jan

[Gideon's girl]

Aussie might have got it's merle from a BC. Aussies aren't that old as a breed.

[GentleLake]

I understand the breeding for work ability but if the majority of dogs were an are as stated black, red or tri's where did the merles and the blues and lilac's come from?

 

 

I think there have always been merles in the breed, just rarely selected for. I've never understood what the prejudice against them is, but it's definitely there.

 

20 odd years ago, Glyn Jones told me that there are working merles in Wales. He didn't know why they seemed to be frowned upon, but he said he had no interest in having one.

 

The difference between merle and the other colors is that the other colors are recessive. Since they so rarely showed up, they could be easily culled or just not bred from if people didn't want or like the color. But now that candy colors have become desirable among some people, when that odd, unexpected differently colored dog showed up in a litter it was prized, bred regardless of any ability or training based solely on its color, and in fact, line- and inbred just to be able to increase the liklihood of getting those colors. And this, of course, is why it's not a good idea to breed for color, since it's not selecting for the most important BC trait, working ability.

 

One thing I've found interesting in BC colors is that sable, pretty rare now, was once much more common in working collies. It's the foundation of the color in rough collies. I've often wondered if the drift away from sables wasn't in fact to make a disctinction between the working border collies and the emerging show rough collie. Pure speculation on my part, of course.

 

The other thing we have to remember is that a closed stud book for working sheepdogs is a pretty recent thing. Old Hemp, the dog generally recognized as the foundation of the border collie as a breed, was born in 1893. Before that time, any good sheepdog may be bred to any other good sheepdog, irrelevant of its type or color. In fact, in many areas of Britain this is still common practice, with people producing purpose bred crosses. I have a friend in Wales who's working sheepdogs are a Welsh collie x Kelpie and a 3/4 border collie (which they just refer to as a collie), 1/4 Belgian shepherd, both specifically bred for a certain working style. They also have a lurcher, border collie x greyhound, which the son is raising to use in his work as a gameskeeper.

 

And in Britain, the registry is the International Sheep Dog Society, not the International Border Collie Society. IIRC, some of the early dogs registered weren't border collies. And any kind of sheepdog, border collie or not, can still be registerd on merit (ROM), get an ISDS registry, and be bred to any other ISDS dog (which is almost exclusively BCs) and the pups can be registered. Jack Knox bought and imported a little working Bearded Collie (can't remember her name) 20some years ago that had recently been ROMed into the ISDS. I don't believe she was ever bred, but she could have been mated to any registered BC and their pups, though technically mixes, could have been registered. It would certainly have produced some dogs that a lot of people would have had a hard time believing were registered.