paddington labrador retrievers

On June 11^th of 2007 we whelped a healthy litter of five puppies, two yellow boys, one yellow girl, one black girl and one black boy, a product of breeding Light (Paddington's Let There Be Light CGC) and Buddy (Paddington's Because the Knight, CGC). At about three weeks of age we started to notice something different about the two yellow boys. They started to develop curly hair on their ears--then on their legs.  And as they grew they became more and more “fluffy”—and grow they did, quickly outstripping their siblings in size and bone. By the time the litter was five weeks old it was clear that these puppies were very different from any I had whelped before.

By now I was concerned that perhaps some other dog had entered the picture as well, and yet I was confident Light had not been with any other dog. Nonetheless, I sent away to the Veterinary Diagnostics Center, DDC Veterinary, in Ohio for a parentage test.  It came back quite clear—Buddy and Light were certainly the only parents of this litter. 

Armed with this information, I still didn’t have an answer as to why these puppies were so different. I approached DDC again, this time with a request for a DNA test on the litter for a long-hair gene. At the time no such test existed for Labrador Retrievers, although a protocol had been developed for other breeds. Apparently the gene exists in dogs as diverse as Rottweilers, Weimaraners, Mastiffs, Pembroke Welsh Corgies and Dalmations! Randy Smith at the laboratory agreed to develop a protocol for the long-hair gene in Labradors.

The wait was brief, and very quickly Dr. Smith reported that in my litter of five, two puppies carried the recessive long-hair gene (they call it a “fluffy” gene at the lab), two of course had it, and one did not carry it at all. Obviously, the parents both carried the gene and it appears to be a simple recessive much like gene for the color yellow. The question now remained—where did it come from? One more DNA test confirmed my suspicion, that the gene was carried to Buddy by his mother, Kiara (Paddington’s Majestx Kiara), who got it from her auspicious father. 

Some more research has uncovered that long-haired Labradors are fairly common in Europe, where indeed the long-haired Weimaraner is generally accepted by breeders. There have been several reports of the gene showing up in European-imported Labradors. The problem for us as breeders is that these puppies really do not look the way we expect Labradors to look. We are used to the incorrect short/shiny coat, but not the equally incorrect but much less common long fluffy one. In addition, there are other characteristics that appear to be consistent with the longer coat, such as larger size and denser bone. The extrapolation is that perhaps this gene is a throwback to the ancestral St. John’s dogs, or the Lesser Newfoundland, which these puppies deeply resemble as adults.