"Breeders targeting this color may therefore be more likely to breed only Labradors carrying the chocolate coat gene," McGreevy said. (If the gene was dominant, the puppy would need only one gene to have the trait). A gene can either be "recessive" or "dominant." The chocolate color in Labs is coded by recessive genes this means that the puppies must receive one gene from each parent that codes for the chocolate color in order for the puppy to have chocolate-colored fur. "The relationships between coat color and disease may reflect an inadvertent consequence of breeding" dogs to be certain colors, lead author Paul McGreevy, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Sydney and chair of board of VetCompass, said in a statement.Ī trait like a dog's fur color is dictated by the combination of two genes: one from the mother and one from the father. However, genetics plays a role, the researchers said. Indeed, the finding "merits further investigation," the authors wrote in the study. The researchers noted that the reason for these links - between fur color and dog health - are still unknown.
The researchers found that non-chocolate Labs lived, on average, 12 years in the U.K., whereas chocolate Labs lived, on average, 10.7 years, a drop of more than 10 percent. Dobermann Pinschers were the shortest lived, dying at an average age of 7.6 years.A Lab's fur color even seemed to be associated with how long the dog lived. The results found that West Highland Terriers were, overall, the longest lived breed, with an average age at death of 12.7 years. Using data from the UK Kennel Club a team of researchers set out to map the longevity of all dog breeds. According to another paper published in the same journal the average lifespan of their pets is one of the longest in the dog world. Owners of black and yellow Labs, however, can take heart. Non-chocolate-coloured Labradors lived for an average of 12.1, while chocolate ones tended to peg out at 10.7 years. They key finding, however, related to lifespan. “Skin and ear disease were significantly more common in chocolate dogs than in black or yellow dogs,” McGreevy and his colleagues write in a paper published in the journal Canine Genetics and Epidemiology. The condition was recorded in 12.8% of black animals, 17% of yellow ones, and 23.4% of brown ones.ĭermatitis was another condition that was colour-coded, being almost four times more prevalent in chocolate Labs. Getting fat was a colour neural condition – affecting almost 9% of the dogs – but the ear condition was considerably more common in those with chocolate coats.
Just over 61% of the sampled dogs had at least one disorder recorded on the vet database, the most common of which was a form of ear infection called otitis externa, followed by obesity and degenerative joint disease. The brown variety accounts for just over 23% of Britain’s Lab cohort. The results showed a consistent pattern: chocolate Labs performed more poorly than yellow or black ones on almost every measure. The study, led by Paul McGreevy from the University of Sydney in Australia, tracked demographic information for all the Labs registered on the UK branch of a registry called VetCompass in 2013, and then drilled down into disorder and mortality data for a random sample of 2074 of them. That’s the surprising finding arising from a study of more than 33,000 Labrador retrievers registered on a UK veterinary database. Chocolate-coloured Labradors might have a certain high street cachet, but they tend to die younger and get sicker than their yellow or black peers.
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