Here’s a video of golden retriever-border collie cross named “Napoleon”:
This dog is available for adoption at PetRescuebyJudy.com. Napoleon is a nearly solid black dog, which is what I would expect from crossing a solid colored golden retriever with black skin pigment with a black and white border collie. According to his foster home, he is a very trainable dog, learning his commands in less than a week.
I put this video on here to begin a discussion of collie types in the ancestry of retrievers
As I have said before, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a dog could be considered a retriever if it retrieved game from water. Lots of breeds can exhibit this behavior. I’ve even seen it in miniature dachshunds, even though I know fully well that this dog could never be a good water dog.
Sir Francis Grant’s “The Shooting Party” depicts a collie-type retriever in the lower left hand corner. This painting is dated to 1840.
It is possible that collie types were among the dogs that came with the first settlers of Newfoundland and were part of the St. John’s Water Dog Breed. My evidence for this theory is a painting by Sir Edwin Landseer in which he shows a Newfoundland dog. Newfoundlands were popular in his day, and most in Europe were black and white. Many had a distinct collie appearance, as this one did. The black and white Newfs eventually became less popular than their solid colored relatives. The black and white ones are known as Landseers, and in the FCI countries, it is a separate breed from the solid-colored Newfoundland. In the Anglophone countries, it is considered a color variety of Newfoundland.
It is also known that collie-types were used in the development of the wavy-coated retriever. In the Scottish Borders, the strong-eyed collies were probably a boon for the retriever people. These dogs can greatly increase biddability in any dog stock. It is also possible that these dogs were the breed that actually introduced the yellow to red color in retrievers, although these colors also appear in setters and spaniels.
Most border collies are black and white. Some are blue merle. Some are red merle, which is more common in Australian (sic) shepherds and the German (sic) collie. (Australian shepherds are from the American West, while German collies are actually Australian!) And they come in sable. Sable is not the same color as the red to yellow in retrievers. If you crossed a sable dog with a red dog with black pigment, you would get solid black puppies.
Border collies also come in “red.” Most that are called red are actually what we gun dog people would call “liver,” also known as “chocolate” in Labradors. These dogs are black dogs with a gene for brown skin pigment that affects the color of their fur as well as their skin. Their eyes are always amber or yellow in color, with amber being far more common. If these dogs were crossed into yellow retrievers, they would probably produce black puppies.
There is another color of red in border collies, though. It is called “Australian red.” Genetically it is exactly the same color as the golden retriever. It is possible that this yellow to red coloration was entered into the wavy-coated retriever breed, and these dogs may have been used in the golden retriever’s development.
The most famous Australian red border collies is “Murray” from the TV series “Mad About You.”
So it is possible that the yellow genes were introduced into the wavy-coated breed through these dogs as well as red and cream-colored setters.
Here’s a good site on border collie coloration. This link shows the color of Australian red border collies, which does dove-tail with golden retrievers somewhat. It also has a good depiction of the many colors that make up the Border Collie breed.
Actually if one is looking for a landrace of sable “collie-type” dogs you should investigate the English Shepherd. Commonly sable, they also come in most of the other color combinations that Border Collies do (except merles) and, in many cases, are nearly impossible to distinguish from Border Collies purely by visual examination. Part of the reason for this is that both breeds are bred to do specific types of work, not to look a certain kind of way.
http://www.englishshepherd.org/archives.htm
Also, I’ve met Murray’s trainer. He’s not a purebred Border Collie, he’s a mix.
It’s pretty interesting how several names keep coming up in common between your past posts and the track I’ve been investigating recently. In this case, Landseer. In digging around some archives, I found a study of a dog head by him that could very well be a Border Collie.
And in regards to the collie heritage, I have a simple observation that while not definitive is interesting. The Nova Scotia Duck Trolling Retriever is supposedly a more modern breed than the Collies and the common Retrievers, and is supposedly made up of Cocker Spaniel, Golden Retriever, and/or Irish Setter.
And darn it if they don’t look like Australian Shepherds.
It amazes me how pervasive the “breed” mentality is… as if these tings were ordained by god in one form, and suddenly appeared just like that… and all of the their traits are exclusive… so retrievers only retrieve and herders only herd and there’s not now nor never has been a reason they’d be mixed or come from common ancestry.
It’s not that people actually believe that, it’s just that they act that way.
The Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever is of definite recent collie extraction. It is the only retriever breed to suffer from collie eye anomaly. Its ancestor the English red decoy dog was of a mixed spaniel and collie ancestry, not unlike the kooikerhondje (Dutch decoy dog). The breed is a mix of the landrace wavy-coat, the St. John’s water dog, Irish setter, and the English red decoy dog with some collie thrown in. I think that at least some golden retriever genes were added at a later date. Toll is an English word that you sometimes hear in rural parts of North America. It means to entice or draw in. The breed was designed to draw in ducks by playing on the shore. This same behavior has been seen in red foxes, which is where the breeders of the decoy dogs in all three countries got the idea.
It’s likely the collie ancestor of the old wavy-coat was not affected by collie eye anomaly, because it’s not found in any retrievers, except the one I call the Nova Scotia decoy dog. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collie_eye_anomaly
I’ve always thought that biddable gun dogs and working collies had some relationship, and for this, I’ve been laughed at. It’s well-known that the old-type collie was a common outcross for retrievers in the early part of the nineteenth century. I think that the collie’s high biddability may have made the wavy-coated landrace more competitive in a trial situation, which is why it wound up replacing the curly-coated landrace. I have a source somewhere that thinks that the red coloration that appeared in Nous, the sire of the first line of selectively bred golden wavy-coats, may have come from collies in his distant pedigree. He is thought to have had a setter of that color close in his ancestry, too. It’s also well-known that the black and tan coloration in gordon setters is definitely from a black and tan farm collie that was crossed in.
Also, the black and tan color hasn’t been bred out of the Labrador. http://www.guidingeyes-md.org/Misc%20Files/Black%20and%20Tan%20LabradorsBCWEB.htm. It used to be a common color in the wavy-coated landrace, which was used to refine the last of the imported smooth-coated St. John’s water dogs into the modern Labrador.
I looked at the Kooikerhondje wikipedia page when I was looking up the supposed ancestors of the NSDTR (Wiki is a great place for mostly unsubstantiated “common” knowledge that is politically correct). And one of the photos also looks very much like collies I have known.
That Landseer sketch I found recently on some UK gallery webpage… I found the file. Have an e-mail I can send it to?
Found the original site, but I’ve since enlarged and cleaned up the image if you want a better copy. My e-mail is on my blog.
http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/gallery/ce2d05cf.html