Puzzled about colours

[DawnLou]

This may seem a really stuuuupid questions to all of you who know cockers well, but this has been puzzling me....  I imagined that for blue roan puppies you put two blue roans together, but then I discovered that there is an orange roan somewhere in Jarvis's background that came from a blue roan.  Now, I studied genetics so know how the gene thing works and recently heard of a blue roan and golden cocker from a working line who produced blue roans, goldens and a chocolate.  So I guess my ultimate question is can you put any colour cocker with any other, for example blue roan with black and tan - I am not contemplating breeding, but this whole thing has got me wondering?  Can anyone shed any light on this for me???                    

[LindaW]

Nowadays breeders tend to keep the particolours separate from the solid colours but in the old days they were frequently mixed.  If you breed a solid coloured cocker with a particolour you can get mismarked puppies (solids with white flashes).  A blue roan bitch of mine was mated to a blue roan dog and produced a large litter containing - orange roans, blue roans, liver roans and tricolours. If you have studied genetics you will know that this is because the parents both carry the gene for these colours.   Her daughter, an orange roan was mated to another orange roan and had a litter of all orange roan puppies.  I mated her again to a blue roan dog and she had all blues! What I am trying to say really is that anything is possible with cockers though not necessarily desirable for various reasons!   Linda                    

[DawnLou]

Thanks for that Linda - it's been one of those things that after taking Jarvis out for is wee in the early hours I have been thinking about before drifting back to sleep (Very Sad, I know!!!).  

So they are really a bit like people - it doesn't matter what colour hair or eyes - the children turn out a mish mash of mum and dad with bits of grands and granddads.

Cheers.                    

[Jane S]

As Linda says, the solids & particolours are kept mainly separate by show breeders in the UK but Working Cocker breeders do not separate the colour groups & you will often find inexperienced breeders/commercial breeders mixing the colours up too. A blue roan could breed with a black & tan & what colours you would get would depend entirely on what genes are carried by the parents - if the blue roan did not carry any other colour genes & the black & tan did not carry the particolour gene, then all the resulting puppies would be solid black. But other results are possible if other genes were carried by both parents                    

[Jenny_930]

Ok, keeping on the colours topic, you can breed blue roan to blue roan, but somebody told me if you breed orange roan to orange roan you get a washed out version.........is that correct?

These colour genetics certainly confuse me.........lol.                      

[Mike]

I cant answer that question Jenny  

But colour genetics crops up quite often on the forum, and I thought you might be interested in one of the first discussions we had some time ago. There's also a link Jane provided in one of her posts in the thread which helps to explain how colour genetics works... once you get into it, it does seem mostly common sense, mind you, those division tables got me mightily confused at the time, so good luck!  

http://www.cockersonline.co.uk/forum/viewtopic . php?t=482;start=0                    

[Jane S]

Ok, keeping on the colours topic, you can breed blue roan to blue roan, but somebody told me if you breed orange roan to orange roan you get a washed out version.........is that correct?

These colour genetics certainly confuse me.........lol.  

A lot of breeders believe that if you want to keep rich pigmentation in the recessive colours like orange & liver (chocolate) then you shouldn't breed orange to orange or liver to liver repeatedly as there is a tendency for the colour to be diluted. When we decide to mate our orange girl, colour will be the least of our priorities but if we were looking to produce orange pups, then we would choose a blue roan or black & white stud dog proven to carry the orange gene.                    

[DawnLou]

:)Hi everyone

Thanks for all the info, this is very interesting and I will have a look at the previous thread.  Am I right in thinking that the only way of telling if a blue roan male has orange roan in his genes is if he has fathered a litter with orange roan in it?                    

[Jane S]

Sometimes you can only tell if a dog carries orange by what he produces, but if one of his parents is orange, then he will definitely carry the orange gene.

HTH

Jane