Australian Kelpie Coat Colours?

[jazzygirl]

I have just seen and ad on Facebook. Someone has Purebred Kelpies for sale, but they are Tri coloured? I can't find anything about this being a coat colour, has anyone else heard of this?

BTW she is selling them for $50 so my guess would be they are not Purebred

[Blackdogs]

So is black with a smattering of white under the chin and a white chest marking acceptable?

Not in the showring, but working stock someties have white markings.

[MalteseLuna]

Red and chocolate in Kelpies are both the brown gene so they are the same colour but when the standard was written no on knew that. Sadly many standards are genetically incorrect for colour because no one had a clue about genetics when they decided what colours to include. Chocolate in a Border Collie is brown but the colour termed red in BCs is the ee gene which is called orange/gold/yellow/cream in most other breeds.

Dog pigment can only be black, brown or the dilutions of these two colours, blue/grey or fawn/lilac (Wei colour). Hair colour can also be yellow (ee) which masks the basic pigment colour in the coat or white. All other "colours" are patterns made from combinations of these colours. The shade and intensity of any colour, including black will vary from dog to dog but they can still only be one of four basic pigment colours and anything else is a coat pattern.

This would be so much easier for everyone to follow if the colours had the same name in all breeds.

More specifically there are two types of pigment which dogs can have : Phaeomelanin a melanin pigment that causes some shade of red, orange, gold or yellow coloration and Eumelanin a melanin pigment that causes some shade of black or brown coloration.

There are a number of genes - ASIP (Agouti/A series), MC1R (E locus), TYRP1 (B locus), CBD103 (K locus) then there are a whole bunch more which cause dilutions, spots etc and some of which have not been identified at the "genetic" level. All these genes act in concert to create the "coat colour" you see in a dog - some modify the colour of the pigment, some mask it and some cause certain patterns.

Agouti causes solid tan/red, sable, solid black, black & tan colouration patterns.

MC1R causes black pigment masked causing red pigment i.e. places where Eumelanain would be expressed now have Phaeomelanin. This would mean that a black and tan dog (at the Agouti locus) would phenotypically be red and tan. If the dog would otherwise be black and carries the ee genotype the dog would likely be solid white.

Tyrp1 causes the eumelanin to be brown where it would "normally" be black.

CBD103 causes dominant solid black colouration and brindle colouration.

A really fantastic website for more information is - http://homepage.usask.ca/~schmutz/dogcolors.html

That website is written/maintained by one of the main scientific researchers who works on coat colour in dogs.

The interactions between the genes causes some very complex colour patterns and it can often be hard to "know" which genotype causes the phenotype as many phenotypes look so similar.

*hope this is helpful/useful*