Touched on this a bti in another thread, but thought I'd start a new one.

Does anyone know anything about colour genetics in Goldens? Has it even been researched? It seems from the other thread that cream seems to be dominant in some way, as several (me included) have felt that a cream to gold mating leads to mainly cream or paler pups.

Any thoughts?

http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/esm018v1

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17485734

These are the only 2 links I could find - and are a bit technical. :-)

It seems to me that years ago most of the top dogs were mid to dark gold, and I suppose those dogs being mated produced more of the same. Now it seems the trend is towards the lighter colours so with more of those being bred they will dominate. I don't know how it is that the gold to cream mating produces more pale pups - I suppose if there are more pales in the line they will come out in the resulting pups and vice versa, but I really don't know.

When i first had goldens 30yrs ago mine were all quite dark..but these days they seem to breed alot of pale cream, they do seem to be more show types in cream rather than working dogs.                                                                                                                               mine are both mid range colour now,but i would like a pale cream one but hubby wont let me have 3.