When breeding Labs do you get better colour blacks by using all black breeding? Would the colour not be as good if there were yellow or chocolate in the breeding, or doesn't it matter?

I’ve heard this question come up lots recently, in fact someone looking for a black pup from me enquired and wanted both parents to be black as someone had told him that a black from a chocolate looks more like a dark chocolate…I would disagree completely. I’ve never seen this and experienced this. In fact I would say the majority of black pups I know come from a yellow parent and a black parent but you cannot tell the difference if put in amongst a black dog whose parents were both black. I’m wondering if it’s becoming a bit of hearsay that is being used as a marketing ploy to get people to buy from their litters (similar to how ‘champagne’‘charcoal’ and ‘silver’ labs started)

Not sure if anyone has experienced anything different…I find it odd that this is becoming more of a ‘thing’ as up until last year I’d never heard anyone say this but like I said I’ve heard it quite a number of times now. It’s also worth noting that, like with a lot of double coated black dogs, if a black dog is shedding it’s coat then parts of it can have a brown/grey tinge to it for a short period of time due to dead coat that is being shed and the light refracting differently - but again I’ve seen this happen with the majority of black dogs, different coloured parents have not made a difference to this.

From a genetics perspective, it shouldn’t matter at all. A lab is either black, or it’s not. It’s chocolate, or it’s not. There’s no mixing of colours in terms of dark eumelanin pigment, a dog either has black, brown, blue, or lilac/isabella pigment.

Yellow/red is different because although there’s only one gene to determine whether a lab is yellow or not yellow (either black or chocolate), there’s also at least 4 modifier genes (and probably more that are untestable right now) which control the intensity of red phaeomelanin pigments.

That’s why yellow in labs can vary from almost white to a the fox red that’s so popular recently. And with this you’re going to see a kind of blending effect because it’s multiple genes, so if you wanted dark pups you’d need dark parents. A fox red bred with a cream would most likely give all medium-ish pups.

(True red can actually range from white like a Westie or Sammoyed to a deep mahogany like an Irish setter. Both these extremes are technically yellow like a yellow lab, but the intensity genes vary the actual red pigment they produce.)

I’ve heard a few papillon breeders talk about not breeding two animals that are very dissimilar in colour together, eg. a black and white with a clear lemon sable, because they think you end up with “bleed though” where you can see the sable or tri markings faintly through the black. (Often called seal or ghost tri).

That’s not how it works, but I think it’s a fairly common misconception that colours mix like paint, or human skin tones. Some traits are all-or-nothing, some do mix a little bit, and sometimes you get weirdness like my own papillon who is registered as black and white (and his coat colour DNA tests back that up) but you can see faint lemon sabling on his face and ears when you get close up. His dad was tricolour with medium red pigment, and mum was black and white.

River’s black and white half sister (same dam) has very similar faint sabling and her dad is black and white with no bleed.

> some do mix a little bit

I've heard people say in pugs never to breed black to fawn as you get 'muddy fawns' and to be fair you rarely see a poor quality, puppy farm pug that is a lovely clear fawn with black mask that you see all the time in well bred pugs so maybe there's something in that?

Fawn with mask is essentially 3 genes working together and they all have very distinctive “forms”, so I don’t think mixing is possible.

* It’s either black, OR brindle, OR not black. (K locus, not sure if brindle exists in pugs)
And
* Fawn OR tan points OR possibly recessive black (A locus, I’m not sure exactly which options are available to pugs but I’ve never seen a tanpoint one so I suspect they don’t normally have it. Fawn is the same as sable in other breeds, it looks different on a longer coat but it’s the same genetically). A dog can only show fawn or tanpoint if it’s not black.
And
* No mask OR mask OR recessive red (like a yellow lab, no dark pigment in coat). (E locus) Obviously you’re not going to see a mask on a black coat. I suspect mask is fixed in pugs because I’ve never seen a fawn with no mask or a solid red in any shade.

Since fawn in pugs is the same as sable, I expect there are other genes that modify how “clear” the fawn is. Some sable papillons have a lot of black hair mixed with the red giving a shaded effect, and some are like my friend’s dog who is so clear he only has a couple of black hairs in his fringes, and if you didn’t spot them you’d say he’s recessive red. Pugs must vary in the same way, the nice sharp ones will be clear fawns and the “muddy” ones are shaded like shaded red dachshunds.

The important bit here is that all black pugs are also patterned, but it’s kind of covered up by black. I think of it as dogs are all wearing a T-shirt that’s either agouti (like wolf boar in wire dachshunds), sable/fawn, or tanpointed, or black. But some dogs are also wearing a black jumper which completely hides the T-shirt.

So every black pug probably has a fawn T-shirt on under its black jumper, and of course you can’t see that T-shirt. So you also can’t see if the fawn T-shirt is clear or shaded. If you mate that dog to a fawn and get fawn puppies, they might also be shaded because the black dog is shaded but you can’t see it.

I’m making an educated guess of course, I know nothing about pugs really. But it makes sense to me. It’s not colours mixing, it’s that black dogs are hiding what type of fawn they are underneath.