Does colour affect size?

[chrisfsdgfom]

Silly question, but we were chatting with some friends of ours today who also have a boxer, and one of them mentioned that brindles tend to be smaller than fawns...just curious if there is merit to that statement.

Thoughts?

 

[gmacleod]

None whatsoever, I think. It's a little like saying people with blonde hair tend to be taller than those with brown hair. LOL - you'd always be able to find a few individuals to "prove" it. But there'd be just as many the other way round to disprove. The gene responsible for the brindle marking pattern has no known bearing on anything other than that.

 

[chrisfsdgfom]

Thanks for the feedback. I didn't think it was likely that there would be a correlation but I have to admit with the boxers I've seen on the street, it always seemed that the fawns were a bit bigger. But like you alluded to, it's probably just the sample I've been exposed to.

 

[kassa]

Ages ago (back in the dawn of the modern breed in the 20s-30s in Germany), good quality brindles were hard to come by, and I know there were definitely structural differences (?weak toplines, I think?) that were more common to brindles than fawns, but that was probably due to being so close to the original one or two brindle dogs who may not have been particularly good specimens. I think Frau Stockman was one of the few who really worked to create good quality brindles, because many people wrote them off as inferior.

In the past 70 years where descendents of those original dogs were bred fawn to brindle a zillion times, any differences are long since gone. You COULD see a problem locally if a top local stud dog/kennel has atypically large dogs and produces a lot of fawns, but that would just be a fluke.