puppies coat colours

Can anyone enlighten me as to the likelihood of certain coat colours being produced when the sire and dam are of different colours. eg Rufus' Mum was a black Cocker Spaniel and his Dad was golden. Only two pups were black and tan, the rest were black. Could there have been any solid golden ones from that mating? Also.... why are the markings on black and tan dogs mostly uniform whether Rottie, Cavalier, Cocker ie, black body, tan eyebrows, rear, chest?

As there were no golds in the litter it would suggest that the mother doesn't carry the gold gene.
I have no idea why tan markings are the same on different breeds .

I'm going to try to answer this in as simple a way as I can in lay-mans terms. Apologies if this offends anyone who is really into their genetics and this isn't as indepth or professional as they might like to see.

Because certain genes are passed from parent to offspring, some of these genes are more dominant, some are recessive, and these will give particular coat patterns depending on which genes are passed onto their offspring.

Eg. Some black genes are known for causing a black mask on dogs, (some black genes don't), if this mask is passed on to the offspring, it would be visible on a lighter coat, it would not show up on a dark dog, but would still be present.

in the same way, the genes responsible for passing on the tan eyebrow markings would show up on a dark background but while present would not show up on a tan dog.

So, simply put, if you had a dog with tan eyebrows and another dog with the black mask genes and mated those two dogs, and the offspring had light coloured coats you would get a light coloured dog with tan eyebrows and a black mask.

In the end if you combined just the gene for a black base colour and added the tan markings in and you kept repeating the same genetic sets and the genes ran true, you would always get the same tan markings on a black background as this would be the "set" genetic make-up for the tan markings on the dogs you breed.

though this is fine on paper, mother nature isn't always so obliging, so quite often in some tri coloured dogs, they may only have one tan eyebrow or none, or even one tan leg or any variation of missing tan and any variation of too much tan.


Hope that doesn't confuse you more..

Black genes in most breeds is the strongest gene. Although saying that in my breed you can end up with any colour!! It's quite funny really and great when you have a litter because you just never know what you are going to get.

Thanks all who replied..I think I understand it now a bit better. Perrodeagua...I expect it's a bit like parents with brown and or blond hair suddenly producing a ginger nut!

in my breed, if you mate white to white you will only end up with whites but if you mate a coloured dog to a white you would only get colours and then if you mated a coloured with white markings you would end up with some whites and the rest coloured and white

We have cockers, when Poppy had her first litter she was mated to a blue roan stud dog, stud dog owner assured me we would only get blue pups as Poppy came from a very blue line and same with the dog....she produced 4 blue roan and 2 orange roan which was a lovely surprise.