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OK I'm confused, somehow I am getting blue shepherds in my breeding, now since as far as I am concerned that makes them unshowable and unbreedable from in real life (unless you are a puppy farmer aiming for "rare expensive colours".

Sooo, are these dilutes accepted in the show ring in the States, or is it a Show Dog game thing and the breed has a different standard in the game??

In the AKC blues are accepted but considered serious faults. Basically you will not be disqualified (as with a white dog) but still not considered the standard so not show quality really.
https://images.akc.org/pdf/breeds/standards/GermanShepherdDog.pdf

That being said showdogs is it’s own world! A lovely world where no genetic health concerns are present and therefore all colors are accepted even the in real life unhealthy double Merle’s! In the game as these are not real dogs with no actual health concerns you can just have fun with the colors of you want, no stress! Though many people still like to avoid them it’s totally your preference!

I've been tending this account for some time - not sure if/when the owner is going to come back but it is still renewing so . . .

Anyway it was started with Shepherds (and Belgians) and the first thing I did was try to breed out the blues and livers. Although we have colours they do not play into the results, for better or worse.

Personally, I don't really like blue dilute regardless of the breed. Liver/brown I'm on the fence about. I have nothing personal against white shepherds with dark nose and eyes though.

That said, I'm not a big Shepherd fan anyway but more because of the extreme conformation we see so much of.

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posted by DetroitKennel
In the AKC blues are accepted but considered serious faults. Basically you will not be disqualified (as with a white dog) but still not considered the standard so not show quality really.
https://images.akc.org/pdf/breeds/standards/GermanShepherdDog.pdf

That being said showdogs is it’s own world! A lovely world where no genetic health concerns are present and therefore all colors are accepted even the in real life unhealthy double Merle’s! In the game as these are not real dogs with no actual health concerns you can just have fun with the colors of you want, no stress! Though many people still like to avoid them it’s totally your preference!

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While blues and livers are "serious faults" in the AKC show ring they are actually DQ for not having a nose that is predominantly black (their nose color is also blue or liver) so no they are not showable. I am still unsure why they were included in the color genetic composition of the game while whites were not (considering they are also naturally occurring in the breed) but that's moot. They are showable and breedable in the game. They do pop up in litters now and again from reputable breeders in real life but they are placed as pets on S/N contracts.

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Last edited by Badlands Kennels on 5/25/2023 12:19:40 PM

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posted by Badlands Kennels

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posted by DetroitKennel
In the AKC blues are accepted but considered serious faults. Basically you will not be disqualified (as with a white dog) but still not considered the standard so not show quality really.
https://images.akc.org/pdf/breeds/standards/GermanShepherdDog.pdf

That being said showdogs is it’s own world! A lovely world where no genetic health concerns are present and therefore all colors are accepted even the in real life unhealthy double Merle’s! In the game as these are not real dogs with no actual health concerns you can just have fun with the colors of you want, no stress! Though many people still like to avoid them it’s totally your preference!

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While blues and livers are "serious faults" in the AKC show ring they are actually DQ for not having a nose that is predominantly black (their nose color is also blue or liver) so no they are not showable. I am still unsure why they were included in the genetic competition of the game while whites were not (considering they are also naturally occurring in the breed) but that's moot. They are showable and breedable in the game. They do pop up in litters now and again from reputable breeders in real life but they are placed as pets on S/N contracts.

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Great point about the black nose! I didn’t even think about that that genetically dogs with liver or blues wouldn’t have the black nose, and that would in fact be a disqualification.

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posted by Badlands Kennels
I am still unsure why they were included in the color genetic composition of the game while whites were not (considering they are also naturally occurring in the breed) but that's moot.

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If memory serves it was up to the players to put colors and color genetics together? I was only focused on Collies and didn't really get involved in the discussions happening in the GSD forums, but I do remember we had to do a lot of leg work with regard to coming up with colors, hereditary, and genes. I even emailed someone from the AKC to get stats regarding how common certain colors were in registries to get the initial % for what colors were most likely to be generated for foundations.

I do sort of remember there being a lot of limitations with regard to what colors can be coded, and the white coloration wasn't as well understood back in the day (we now know it's a combination of recessive red and pheomelanin dilution which is still being mapped/discovered by geneticists). So it might not have been for any malicious reason, simply a lack of ability and knowledge. There is actually a ridiculous amount of variation in GSD colors that couldn't have realistically been implemented here I think.

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posted by Sunwing
If memory serves it was up to the players to put colors and color genetics together? I was only focused on Collies and didn't really get involved in the discussions happening in the GSD forums, but I do remember we had to do a lot of leg work with regard to coming up with colors, hereditary, and genes. I even emailed someone from the AKC to get stats regarding how common certain colors were in registries to get the initial % for what colors were most likely to be generated for foundations.

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Yes, a lot of work was done by a handful of players helping people at the time in 2008 when this was getting worked on. Fun times - and a historical thread on the Brussels Griffon people that got some of it done, for fun
https://www.showdog.com/forum/read.aspx?id=260604

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Last edited by Comet Poodles on 5/26/2023 9:42:57 AM

Some very interesting answers, thank you everyone!
Sadly the dilutes and whites are bred here by puppy farmers and marketed as rare colours - they are only bothered about colour, not such minor details as soundness or temperament!

The whites were mass bred back in the 60/70s, especially by a couple of huge commercial kennels, in order to continue to get whites, they were strongly inbred, thus cementing the epilepsy gene in the lines. Even today, i would go through a potential stud pedigree with a fine tooth comb to check what might be lurking several generations back. Then of all things, an American lady descided to start breeding whites again, moved to Switzerland and rechristened them Swiss Shepherds! We now have them over here as such, and you literallyonly have to go back about half a dozen generations to find those whites from the big commercial kennels of the past!!

It happens in many breeds though I know, in labs first we had the whole Weimeraner crosses registered as silver labradors, now the latest is mass crossing to Viszlas to get so called red labs, resulting in a lot of fine coated, long legged long eared and whippet tailed labs. Thankfully we now have dilute testing for the breed.

I also showed guinea pigs and could not get my head around the breed standards there, as so many of them could be any colour they liked!!

I was involved in the great color design, for malamutes. I did include white and blue and of COURSE liver (ha ha, I'll get to why), but only because they ARE accepted as show quality. They are few and not necessarily well accepted by breeders and exhibitors (who then try to influence judges) but they are definitely not DQ'd in malamutes. In shepherds, given that it does say black nose and then does not delineate any difference for liver in particular, means that liver is absolutely DQ'd and IMO should NOT have been put in the color program here since we ARE breeding show dogs. I guess it may have been included because they "can" happen but the color program in this game does not work in an exact format like RL. For instance, in malamutes, blues and reds permeate the breed and that is NOT the case in RL. Blue is VERY rare and reds (liver) are actually looked down upon. My most successful RL show mal was in fact, a red (liver) and boy he stirred the waters. LOL But red IS accepted in mals as the standard states pointedly that reds have liver pigment (nose, eye rims, lips, paws, skin and lighter eyes. The lighter eye is not "desired" but in RL fact, light eyes are not just in reds and IMO should be faulted if NOT on a red more than if actually ON a red. Anyway, I don't know why some breeds here chose to include DQ colros, but I suspect it was because they "can" happen and perhaps it was assumed the program would work as in RL with very few of those colors occurring. We could not write perfect color programs as it would eat up massive space in the games design. We had to minimize. In malamutes, as it happened, the game turned every dog white because the program failed to work the way it was supposed to. So to solve this, we removed all the white possibilites from the color program. Which is why you see no white mals here anymore even though they do happen and are acceptable.

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Last edited by Kimoko on 5/30/2023 1:45:40 PM

I feel like if the game delved into DQ colors things would get complicated. It's very straightforward for GSD's with the black nose thing (that automatically nixes dilution) and with white being undesirable (even if it was implemented, easy to DQ the color). But some breeds like Cardigans are more nuanced. One Tricolor Cardi can be DQ while another Tricolor Cardi can be show quality simply based on the coverage around their eyes. White around the eyes is DQ in Cardigans, and I can't think of a simple way to include that in game. So it would probably get really messy to implement DQ's on colors when something as simple as the size of a white blaze can DQ a dog lol.

Exactly. It is impossible to write a program for every breed, that works as in RL. I knew people wanted colors, not just white dogs and the way it was working, there were ONLY white dogs so they all had to go. Imagine the program , if we had to make it perfect! Things like Berners amount of white, coat length and texture, bites, ears, tailsets. OMG. Simple, is what we needed.

I was playing the game and heavy in GSDs in several of my family accounts from 2006 to 2008. After being gone for 15 years and come back, I bred my first GSD litter and I got a solid black and red. HOW can you get a solid in two colors at the same time???? This makes beyond zero sense to me!!!

I found myself working with GSD sort of by chance through managing someone else's account.

I sort of took a double-take with the solid whatever and whatever - still not sure what this means. I sort of assume it is a solid, say black with little bits of tan/whatever too small to show in the picture but giving a clue about the genetics behind the dog. Don't know if that is even in the ballpark.

Maybe some real-life Shepherd folks can give us an explanation?

As for the DQ colours, I think the thought was that if the gene was found in the breed even if very rare and undesirable, it was included - it gives you something to breed-out.

The unfortunate part is that it seems certain colours (often the more recessive ones) are associated with higher SOP's. In some breeds this has resulted in the loss of certain colours which in real life would be the more desirable standard colours and being dominant, got lost. Some of this is the result of some breeders being "colour-blind" and breeding only for SOP. (I got involved in Dachshunds because of this! This breed has "tons" of colour variants plus 3 coat types. When I started virtually every Daxie was a chocolate and tan wire hair!)

I actually am a GSD breeder IRL for over 20 years and there is no such thing as a solid black and red. There is solid black and solid white. If there are others like solid blue or something like that I have zero consideration for that since it would be 100% against the standard and IMO should never have been bred. Just stumped.