Thank you.
And yes, the passion of care is definitely equal.
Personally I would rather I use what I know about my dogs and you use what you know on genetics, to unite to further the fight against poor breeding rather than be at loggerheads on a personal level :smt001

Yes that's what I was referring to, ee red and australian red are the same and I am guessing in your original post when you mentioned "red" merle BC's it was in fact this colour you were referring to and not the chocolate/brown merle that I though you were referring to like the one I have here at my feet? Confused yet? There is also a problem with some people breeding sable and merle together as sable also masks the merle markings. One well known merle agility dog was put to a sable bitch, I can only assume that people either did not know or did not care what they may be producing

Sorry, yes, I forget to differentiate when talking to an already collie savvy person, you knew what I meant about red red but non-collie people probably would`nt, lots of browns are commonly called reds when they are really browns :smt101

I just don`t understand why anyone would deliberately breed from merles full stop, its a minefield imo and if people are not 100% sure what they are doing, [ any breed, any color ], they should`nt do it all

Do I know of the agility dog you refer to ? [ You`ll know if its anyone I`ll also know from elsewhere ]

Hi Patch, have PM'd you

I notice in this weeks Our Dogs that The KC has taken the decision not to register merle as a colour in either smoothcoat or longcoat Chihuahuas, after a meeting with various Chihuahua Clubs through out the UK.

Merle x Solid matings are perfectly acceptable, why should they stop this particular type of mating? It does not hold any more health problems that what would normally crop up in the line.

An interesting point this. There was some evidence published that indicated that even single merles could have pleitrophic effects. This was in Dachshunds in Germany I think. Perhaps Becky knows more on this. But later it was thought that these were in fact homozygous merles. As the Dachshunds usually has no white spotting, the effects of double merles is much reduced and they appear as normal merle ie without the large extent of white patching.

Not sure I would agree with stopping the breeding of merles completely. It would though remove all possibilty of double merles but there are far more serious matters than merle that the KC could be addressing.

I've not heard of single merles having any problems. However, white dachshunds have been around since the beginning of the breed but I can understand, with the merle, why they aren't accepted in the breed standard as it may well encourage people to produce whites from douple dapples, although if the KC had a blanket ban on merle to merle breeding then this wouldn't happen.
Becky

I'll have a search round for this. Which breed standard are you referring to... merle not accepted?

Not merle, white!
Becky