Merle-to-merle breedings
It seems like an epidemic lately of people talking about breeding merles to other merles. The latest entry is my second-place winner of the “most likely to talk about dog-related issues despite complete and total lack of experience with said issues or in fact ever having seen or touched the dogs he’s talking about,” retrieverman (the winner and perpetual champion, of course, is terrierman). He passes along a complete myth that for some reason has endless legs on the Internet when someone is looking to attack a breeder of merle dogs.
The myth is some variation on “They breed merle to merle to make money” or “These breeders do merle-to-merle breedings because it creates more merle puppies” or “These breeders only care about flashy markings and money.”
While it’s absolutely true that careless or money-oriented breeders tend to focus on superficial traits like color and markings (as do buyers – everyone seems to want a merle bitch!), it’s a ridiculous accusation when it comes to merle-to-merle breedings.
1) Merle to merle does not create more merle dogs than merle to black (by “black” I mean true black, tri, tri/brindle, or in fact any non-merle color. Substitute “brindle” or “red” or “chocolate” or “fawn” or whatever you’d like).
Merle to black makes (statistically – individual litters can certainly be on one end or the other of the spectrum) half merle puppies and half black.
Merle to merle makes (statistically) half merle, one-quarter black, one-quarter double-merle (white). (In fact, most litters have fewer than a quarter white, so there’s some evidence that fewer white puppies make it to term, but we’ll leave that alone for now).
In other words, both breedings give you half merles. There is no advantage to breeding merle to merle in terms of creating those merle bitches that everybody wants.
2) Merle to merle does not create more saleable puppies than merle to black.
In fact, it creates fewer. Since the white puppies are almost always placed for free or, if they have eye issues (thankfully rare) are euthanized, a breeder doing a merle-to-merle pairing actually has fewer saleable puppies than one doing merle to black.
2a) Merle to merle does not give you flashier (more desirable) markings.
What people usually mean by “flashier” is “more white markings,” which has nothing to do with merle. You’re just as likely to get a super-plain mouse-grey dog by breeding two merles together as you are by breeding a black and a merle, and if you are really only concerned with “flash” you going to have the best results by simply watching which dogs are producing a lot of chrome on their puppies, regardless of their color.
The only breed that I am aware of that tries to control not just the white markings but the spacing and the color of the merle patches is the Great Dane. Every other breed just calls the patches random and doesn’t penalize a dog with variations on that random pattern. In harlequin Danes, by contrast, the spacing and the size and the saturation of the patches are very important. So if you’re a show breeder of harlequin Danes, you may have a slightly different definition of “flashy” and you may choose breeding partners very specifically because of that. HOWEVER, if you succeed in getting that perfect harlequin puppy with the hand-sized patches completely surrounded by pure white, you’ve succeeded only for yourself. If the perfectly colored dog has pet conformation, you’re not going to be able to sell that puppy for more than you sell your other pet harlequin puppies who have some flecking between the patches, and your buyers are not going to see the difference (or care) any more than they can tell the difference between a Dalmatian with “hand-painted” spotting and a Dalmatian with normal spotting. In no way is it an equation for making more money from your dogs.
3) Very few – if any – money-oriented breeders do merle-to-merle breedings.
Why? Because of the above. They’re left with white puppies that they can’t sell. I’ve seen white puppies coming from two groups of breeders: The truly clueless, who either had an accidental litter or who barely understand what breed their dog is and who certainly aren’t devising any grand scheme to make maximum profits; and reputable show breeders.
Show breeders do these breedings – relatively rarely in some breeds and extremely commonly in others – because they are NOT looking to make money. They’re willing to take an even bigger financial hit on the litter than usual in order to make the best breeding for their bitch.
Breeding merle to merle is a tradeoff. You know you’re taking a risk of getting puppies who will never be showable and who may be deaf. I don’t know any breeder of any breed who makes that decision lightly. The reason they do it, if they do decide to do it, is that they feel that the benefits they can bring to the entire litter are worth it. For example, if they have a merle bitch they may be looking at a black dog who they’re pretty sure will give them a very forward-set front assembly, or a merle dog who has the long upper arm they want. If they choose the black dog, they don’t get any deaf puppies but they certainly may get half a litter who can’t jump up on beds past the age of three because their shoulders don’t unfold enough to carry the heavy body up. If they go with the merle dog they may have one deaf puppy, but the entire litter is athletic and sound. For me, personally, that’s a no-brainer; I’m going to go with sound construction every single time.
“But why not just find a black dog with the front you want?” is the logical question, which is a very good one. The answer is that when you look from outside a breed, from the perspective of an onlooker or potential buyer, it seems to you that there are thousands of dogs out there that are acceptable breeding partners and saying that you can’t find one is just an excuse. However, once you’re inside a breed and talking with other breeders constantly, looking at pedigrees, crossing off dogs that you know had poor temperaments, bad health, falsified pedigrees, or are worthy dogs in and of themselves but bad matches for your bitch, you find that your available pool of dogs is very, very small. Sometimes nonexistent. It’s not an exaggeration or a lie when breeders say “I can’t find a single dog to breed her to.” When the group of potential mates is shrunk even further by color requirements, you find yourself making major compromises in terms of a sound athletic body, and hoping the qualities of your bitch can carry the litter. That’s a nasty situation to find yourself in and the possibility of putting six or eight unsound puppies out there (should) cause you a lot more ethical angst than the question of whether you’ll have to find a home for a white one.
4) If your breeder is charging different prices based on color, run away.
The only exceptions to this rule are where color determines whether a dog can be shown, though in that case the breeder is really pricing based on show/pet (which is acceptable) and not on color. If a breeder is charging more for merle, for blue, for gold, for cream, for white, for silver, for “golden with caribbean sand highlights” (I did see exactly that phrasing once), RUN AWAY. Good breeders breed for body and for soul, not for color. They do not see the lighter (it’s always lighter colors that get attention, never darker, for some reason) puppies as worth more because they know that what you’re paying for has nothing to do with color.
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Could you explain the ‘hand-painted’ dalmations? I’d never heard that term before, and all google is giving me is a bunch of results about figurines.
“Hand-painted” spots on a Dal is the most desirable marking pattern, where each spot (really a “tick”) is round and separate from the other spots. In most (very worthy and lovely and finishable) Dals there are at least some areas where the spots run together, and the dog can have thousands of spots rather than hundreds. The “hand-painted” dog has fewer, extremely well-defined spots.
There’s a top producting DD merle in roughs right now (Winlair Avalanche) who is not only producing only blues when bred back to a tri (obviously) BUT who have GREAT confirmation. He’s absolutely gorgeous and is well accepted by *most* of the collie world but yah… people talk. And point fingers. And he was bred by some of the best and most experienced breeders in the states right now. I can tell you that if I had a tri bitch I’d move heaven and earth to breed to that boy and not only so I could get more blue puppies… but because his confirmation is STELLAR!!!
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My awesome Dal friend sent me this link to illustrate hand-painted spots: http://www.patchmountaindalmatians.com/ghost.jpg
His claim is that a double merle will always throw merle pups no matter what they’re bred to, so people who want to sell lots of merles will do MM breedings to be able to get that 100% chance.
Is that not true?
100% chance in the second generation, not the first, I mean. The initial Merle to Merle of course doesn’t do that, but it’s the pups with MM that can result than have the 100% chance.
Whites will produce nothing but merle (when they are bred to the solid colors) the overwhelming majority of the time (not all the time; Kodak, who is a white and Bronte’s grandfather, has a few black and white children), but whites are rarely kept for breeding. They are only used if they are truly spectacular, as would be the case if they were any color, honestly. This is not only because they cannot be shown and we really don’t like to breed the dogs who are unshowable; the double dose of the merle gene blanks out ALL the color on the dog. You don’t know what color the dog would have been if the merle hadn’t taken over. The dog might be piebald or be entirely solid with no white at all; he could be something odd like a brindle merle or a blue dilute or a chocolate. Since virtually all the breeds that have merle as an acceptable color also care very much about the white spotting on the dog and the base color on the dog, using a white dog is a big risk. I can think of only a very few that have become influential sires. You’d also have to have an endless supply of solid-colored (usually black) bitches to produce those merles with your black dog, which are hard to find. Again, I’ve just simply never seen a trend of money-oriented breeders doing merle-to-merle breedings or keeping a stable of black bitches to make merle puppies with their white dog. It seems to be a bogeyman that doesn’t actually exist except to excoriate breeders who are making decisions responsibly.
Because I’m new to the breed and showing them.. what would occur if a white (product of a double merle breeding) cardi were bred .. to a black & white/tri? What would the outcome be? And if the White were totally healthy etc, would it produce puppies with health problems?
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If a double-merle white were to be bred to a black or tri, you’d get merle puppies. The most influential white sire in Cardis I know of is Kodak, who is behind all my dogs and a host of other good American cardi lines. Casper, a white Carbon son, has had one litter at this point. I don’t know if there were big-name whites decades back. White sires are notable for their rarity and not the other way around. They are very, very rarely kept intact. White breeding bitches are even less common, due to a belief that a deaf bitch would be less fit as a mom in the whelping box. However, historically there have been a few really good ones if you dig deep into pedigrees and get people to tell you the truth of their color. They’re usually named ironically, like So and So’s Blackberry Cobbler, and they’ll be registered as merles or as harlequins or whatever (since the breeds do not have any codes for white), so you have to tease them out of the pedigree.
And no, there are no health problems associated with having a white mom or dad.