brookcove
Posted : 2/5/2009 6:02:27 PM
And we have a winner! Though I'm not sure I should count Gina's somewhat desperate final guesses. LOL
By close I meant in the same vague family and also as you say geographically close AND the breed looks like a Mal (ish) and is often misstaken for one.
Drumroll please:
Lynn is . . .
Half Golden (of course).
One quarter Border Collie (I practically gave that one away - there's no way anyone could have guessed that - she was here for nine months before *I* figured it out). And. . . . .
One quarter Dutch Shepherd!
I know the "breeder" of her mother, it turned out. And I've met the grandsire and grandmother, and amazingly, saw the mother when she was still in the whelping box.
The Golden is pretty much a guess but it's kind of a duh. I'll explain in a second.
So, Lynn came from a shelter "down east" - she was turned in with a few littermates and identified as a "Belgian mix." Lynn came to us, as some of you know, when a transport turned into a protracted stay after she came down with parvo, and then she just stayed.
Fast forward about nine months. Someone sent me a link to that same rescue, which had puppies that looked just like Lynn! Only this time there was a whole litter. This time they were listed as "Belgian/BC mixes."
Some of the puppies looked very familiar. They were classic tri looking, but with really big floppy ears and lots of hair, and a couple were brindled. Others were black brindle. Then there were the ones that looked just like Lynn, but some with even more black and realy obvious brindling. I couldn't put my finger on it for a while, and then I remembered where I'd seen a litter that looked like many of those pups.
A few years ago, a friend who lives in that same county, had an imported Border Collie female who was every breeder's nightmare. My friend owned her for two years and she got bred every heat, and never to anything planned, or in any way desirable, because she could get out of anything. Meanwhile, my friend purchased a Dutch Shepherd youngster. And come next heat, she found her female in her Dutch Shepherd's kennel.
Most of the pups went to a drug dog trainer out of state, but she kept one female, and sold another one locally.
I called my friend and grilled her, and yes, she'd lost contact with the person but had been contacted by a local rescuer who knew where the female came from and wanted her to pressure that person to spay her female - they were getting tired of bailing these puppies out of the pound. So she knew what was going on and felt pretty sure that yes, Lynn was her old female's grandpup.
The female BC was a tri, smooth coated, dog with big upright ears. Besides the escaping thing she was bonkers in many other ways too.
The Dutch Shepherd was a smaller type and very light colored. He had a very good temperament for work - he was sent off to Sch training and they really liked him - but he had one quirk - he was violently aggressive towards small dogs and he ended up being put to sleep for this. Lynn's never showed any sign of this (whew). He had one other funny thing - he had a purple spotted tongue, which he passed on to all his pups. So my mention of her purple spotted tongue was a red herring. LOL!