#dog genetics

I have been staring at the Small Puff and wondering, well, why isn’t she a puff???

There were very fluffy pups in her litter of purebred Great Pyrenees that were indeed little round puffs of fluff and I dug up the puppy pictures of Puff Senior to verify that I remebered right.

I am very curious now why she isn’t fluffy. I did feel certain we left with the runt of the litter, the last puppy available after a mere 48 hours since they were listed on Craigslist (livestock guardian dogs from *working* lines seem to go fast) but I wanted another LGD and knew she was the right pup. She’s very healthy, sweet, and mercifully not the constant barker that our older LGD is. I don’t know if we stumbled on a genetic oddity but if a “smooth Pyrenees” is linked to the polite-barker gene, I’ll take it. She was definitely from the same litter and her parents and siblings looked like full pyrenees so I don’t know if this is a mutation of a pure breed or something buried so far down the line that it wasn’t obvious until it popped up.

July 5, 2017