Daydreaming - Wednesday, January 24, 2018

An Icelandic Sheepdog puppy born in Switzerland recently looks to me like it could be a rare reverse-pied* pup. Keep in mind that I'm not sure there is even a thing called reverse-pied. Or how it's inherited. Or if it is indeed "rare". I suspect that the gene is recessive to "normal" pied which, in turn, is recessive top "normal" (non-spotted) coloring.

I have seen reverse-pied dogs in the tan shade but few that are tricolor. In Icelandic Sheepdogs tricolor dogs are black & tan with white, they have three colors. That Swiss puppy is a tricolor (black & tan with white) reverse-pied female. I tried to buy her from Ruth, but she is going to keep her - I would too!

Queen's Kinna Lazy River of Jurassic Valley

That got me thinking about tricolor reverse-pied dogs here in the states. I believe that Runestone Gammur bred by Elaine Mozur in 2011 is a tricolor reverse-pied male: -

Runestone Gammur

Hidow Stassa's First Try

I also believe that Hidow Stassa's First Try bred by Veronica Dowling and Jennifer Sanders in 2014 is a tricolor reverse-pied female.

* - reverse pieds, in my opinion, have a color pattern which is the opposite of regular pieds. A regular pied is mostly white with spots, some large, some smaller, of color (red, gold, tan, yellow, cream, black, etc.) on their bodies. Reverses are mostly a solid color (red, gold, tan, yellow, cream, black& tan) with some patches of white. There is often a stripe of white starting on the lower abdomen and going up the side to the upper surface (back) of the dog.

I know the logistics seem daunting, one dog lives in the mid-west and the other lives on the east coast, but to me it would be very interesting to see what offspring between these two dogs would look like. Would they all be tricolor reverse-pieds?

They are not closely related; there are no repeated ancestors through the Great-Great Grandparents in those dogs. The inbreeding coefficient score, a calculation of the rate of inbreeding, is 1.123%