Help me figure out my dog's color!
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Hello everybody! First time in this forum! I hope you can help me naming Luna's coat color! She is almost 13 years now, and I've never been able to tell her color to anybody. Plus, her long coat differs a bit to when she's clipped. Vets have told us over the years that she might be some kind of border collie mix. We adopted her from a local shelter. As a side note I would add that she was the strangest colored puppy in the litter: Her three brothers were pure white, and her sister was white and fawn spot colored (like a cocker puppy). Take a look and tell me what do you think:
Long coat: 
Just clipped: 
Some little spots going on her neck too: 
And her pretty face: 
Other thing that I discovered recently is the incredible resemblance between her color as a puppy:
And the color of this puppy, claimed to be a sable border collie:
(The image is from this site: http://www.warrenphotographic.co.uk/10526-sable-and-white-border-collie-pup-with-fawn-dutch-rabbit )
So yeah, I really hope you can help me. Would she really be an old sable border collie? Looking forward for your answers! (Also, I apologize if my English is not the best, I learned it on my own by reading :D)
I think your dog is a sable,
I think your dog is a sable, but clipped photos are not good for determining genetic color, and unfortunately, often with repeated clipping on a double coated breed the coat is damaged beyond repair and the coat that grows back will not be the same at the original coat either. The dark stripe down the back when clipped is common in sables, but other colors sometimes have it too.
"Domino"
Some sight hound breeds supposedly have a newly discovered mutation of the E gene. This mutation is called "domino" and it causes that light tan/grey with the dark grey over the shoulders. It looks a lot like a shaded sable, but its more muted. The website with the information on domino is called Dog Coat Color Genetics: www.doggenetics.co.uk
the domino information will be near the bottom of the "masks and recessive red" page
But you dog doesn't look much like a sight hound...
Very Interesting! I had a
Very Interesting! I had a dog that has the exact same dark stripe down his back. I wondered for years what color he was and finally decided he was a dark sable. I believe the same is probably true of your dog, with your dog possibly having an Intensity locus dilution that is decreasing the intensity of red in his coat.
Unfortunately I don't have a photo of him as a adult but in the puppy picture you can see that he seemed to have the same dark and light areas as your dog. With your dog being lighter overall. As he grew the darker areas receded until he has a black stripe down his back, like your dog, with darker areas on the legs and paws.
I wish I still had him as I would send some hairs off for color testing. It would be interesting to see if my guess of his being a strangely expressed sable were correct.