Suwannee Cockers
The Place for Natural Merles and Sables
SUNCATCHER'S FIERY SPARKLE
Sparkle is a very important dog in the foundation of our kennel, as over the years we have kept six of her Cocker girls, and two of her granddaughters. Sparkle's deep red color was the first thing that most people commented about when they first saw her, but Sparkle is a marvelous little Cocker in every way, and we have always been quite smitten with her.
In addition to being a great pet--as Sparkle is quite loving and very obedient--she is also a great "MaMa-Dog," paying lots of attention to her litters, and seeming to have a grand time doing so. Dogs enjoy having puppies, just as humans enjoy having children, but the time involved for them is very short--eight weeks for gestation, and up to four to five weeks of nursing--and after that the dam gradually withdraws from her puppies, prefering to keep watch from nearby, but not actually with the puppies. And by the time that the puppies are eight weeks old, the dam is not usually sorry to see them go.
Sparkle has given us some really pretty puppies, in all sorts of colors and markings, and some of them have turned out to have very near show quality conformation. We say "very near" because every dog has a conformation "fault" for the show ring, and there is no such thing as a dog that perfectly meets its standard, as the standard is an ideal.
Sparkle does come from a long line of show dogs on her sire's side, with many very well known Cocker kennels in her pedigree, but on her dam's side there is an extraordinary number of red dogs listed, so it is obvious that there was quite a bit of "color breeding" going on for her deep red color, as that red hue has been practically lost in American Cockers over the years, especially in solids. This is probably due to the fact that of all of the colors, in any breed, solid deep reds have 30% more "white spots" on them, due to unknown color modifiers, than any of the other colors, and these white spots on an otherwise solid colored dog are disqualifiers in the Cocker show ring.
So no breeder who shows their dogs wants to have these white spots show up on their otherwise solid puppies, and thus many red dogs with "white mis-marks," as they are called, have been eliminated from the breeding pool. But when the writer was a child this deep red color was quite prevalent and popular in Cockers, especially in solid dogs, and we searched for a long time for a deep red dog before we found Sparkle. At the time that we bought her we thought that she was a red and white because she had a lot more white on her, but over time these white spots gradually disappeared, and her blonde feathering replaced it.
We have been accused of being "color breeders," as if that were something very undesirable, but many Cocker breeders specialize in just a few colors--such as blacks and black and tans, or chocolates, or all solids or all partis--as there are just so many beautiful Cocker colors, but one can only have so many dogs. But we do not show dogs anymore, so we feel free to specialize in the "outlaw" Cocker colors and markings--as Sable and Merle Cockers are not allowed into the AKC Cocker show ring--because we love these colors and markings, and we are very keen on exploring and understanding the genetics involved.
But about half of our puppies are "regular" colors, like Sparkle, and we have to have regularly colored dogs to breed to our Merles, as we do not breed Merles to Merles. And we really have quite a rainbow of colors in our puppies, considering that they come from so few dogs. And we do hope that in time we will be able to perpetuate Sparkle's deep red color, if only in partis.
This is a litter of six puppies from our Max, but as Max does not carry a Buff gene, none of the puppies were Buffs or Reds. In this litter, from left to right, there were a black and white; a Blue Sable and white; a Blue Merle, white and tan; a black and tan; a Blue Merle and tan; and a solid Blue Merle with white markings.
Interestingly we did not want to acquire a solid dog when we bought Sparkle, as we wanted a red and white parti girl. And when Sparkle was born--the only girl in a litter of five, and the deepest red color of the litter--she looked as if she had more than 10% white spotting, which would qualify her as a red and white parti, so that is what we registered her markings as with the AKC. But over the next few months most of her white areas that were originally quite prominent, especially on the top of her head, gradually grew into blonde feathering instead, and when she is clipped one can see that these white spots have almost disappeared, except for some small white areas on her muzzle, her neck and her chest--and her four white feet--but the blonde feathering grows out when her coat is allowed to grow long.
So Sparkle is technically a solid red with white mis-markings instead of a red and white parti as we originally thought when we bought her. But she carries parti from her tri sire, and she has about half parti pups when bred with a parti male. And she has thrown some solid dogs with hardly any white spotting at all--small white spots on the chest are acceptable in solids, as they are practically impossible to get rid of--and she has thrown just a few solid pups mis-marked with white spots--mostly Merles--all of which had really interesting and quite unusual markings. Sparkle is also carrying a "blue dilute" gene, as she has had some blue dilute puppies, including a blue Sable and white girl.
We don't have a lot of pictures of Sparkle as a puppy, even though we had her since she was eight weeks old. But when we first got her, we were in the middle of moving onto this property, and right away the old well went dry, and we had to haul water for awhile--until we finally had a new 70 foot deep well dug--so we were just too busy to take a lot of pictures, especially with our old K-1000 film camera that we used for almost 20 years. That Winter was also the coldest Winter here in Northcentral Florida in decades, so we let our Cockers' hair grow all Winter, trying to keep them warmer, as our Florida home simply wasn't built for those low temperatures. So in the following pictures, taken when Sparkle was about six months old, she looks pretty shaggy!
But it was very interesting to see a lot of Sparkle's white spots gradually disappear before our eyes, and in the picture taken from the front, above, when she was about six months old, one can see that her white markings used to look a lot like Tan Points, and Sparkle does throw Tan Pointed puppies. But we have never seen another Cocker with white Tan Points. In the above picture one can even see the remnants of white "fuzz" sticking out on the sides of her muzzle, and when we first got her both sides of her muzzle were solid white, but then those areas gradually filled in with red.
The picture above, again taken when she was about six months old, really shows the contrast Sparkle had between her dark red coat and her very light feathering, but as an adult her feathering is now quite a bit darker than in this picture. We loved Sparkle's blonde topknot, and used to put bows in it to keep it out of her eyes, but the other puppies that we had then would pull out the bows and chew them up, so we had to finally give up and clip her head in a normal Cocker cut. But our son complains that she looked much more striking with her blonde topknot grown out, and he continually urges us to let it grow out again.
It's hard to get a picture of Sparkle with her head up because she is always so busy sniffing the ground. This is another picture of Sparkle taken when she was six months old, in which you can readily see what we thought were parti white spots on her legs and sides, but they turned out to be just very light feathering. We have read that the Blue Dilute D Locus gene "d d" can lighten red to either cream or silver, and this D Locus gene might be the cause of Sparkle's very light colored feathering, as she has thrown some blue diluted puppies.
What a fuzzy pup! This picture shows that Sparkle has the very dark ear tips that are a sign of Sable, and she has had several Sable puppies, but not enough to make us think that Sparkle is an A Locus Sable red rather than an E Locus Buff red. We think that her Sable puppies come from Sparkle throwing a Tan Pointed allele and her mate throwing a Sable allele, and the two alleles together make a Shaded Sable puppy.
Sparkle and her good friend Darlin, our now retired silvery Buff girl, used to love to sleep together. For some reason when they are lying down, dogs will often hang their heads off of a blanket or a pillow onto the hard floor, and we wonder if it might help keep them cooler.
Sparkle got darker in color with age, but she still has light feathering on her head and a small bit on her legs. This picture was taken when she was around a year and a half old.
This style is called "The Veronica Lake Cocker Cut." Sparkle loves our Shepherd-Chow-Husky girl, and when Sparkle was a puppy this girl acted as a Mother dog to Sparkle.
Sparkle is very responsive to people and very obedient, and she comes when she is called. She doesn't like to roam, and she is smart and picks up commands quickly. She is a true "wiggle butt," very merry all of the time, and she loves to be around people and to be petted, and she is not timid at all. She is a rather small Cocker, and although she has a very modern head, it is a pretty head, and not too "block" like. But she is one of the more modern "short muzzled" Cockers, and we can't imagine her as a real hunting dog, having to carry birds in her mouth.
Sparkle is extraordinarily healthy and muscular, and when she is clipped one can see her muscles move when she runs. Unfortunately her favorite thing to do is to try to dig holes to China out in the dog yard, which keeps us busy building muscles of our own by shoveling sand back into holes. We can't let holes go unfilled, so that no one, especially us, will break our necks one night by stepping into a hole. Sparkle's red coat just gleams in the sun, and it really glows under a camera flashbulb, and she is our very special red girl.
Sparkle has some very famous dogs in her pedigree, and she is only four generations down from Champion Ging's Alydar, the dog on the cover of the huge coffee table book called "The World of the Cocker Spaniel."
Sparkle is a solid carrying parti--and she has had some very open marked non-Merle puppies--pups with a lot of white on them--despite her being a solid, and those genes probably come down through Alydar's lines, through Sparkle's tri colored sire. But most of her Merle puppies have either been solids, or have had coats with "saddles" or "mantles" over their backs, with much smaller amounts of white, much like their sire, our Max. Sparkle has thrown both tan pointed and sable dogs, as well as Merles, and of course solids and partis.
The picture directly below shows Sparkle's third and last litter from Max and from left to right there were two solid sables, a black tri, a Blue Merle tri, and two Sable-Merles, including the puppy at the bottom of the picture.
Sparkle's legacy will probably remain here as long as we are breeding, and this page is a homage to a great little Cocker. Sparkle lives here with us, and with her daughters and granddaughters, and now she has great-grand puppies!
To see Sparkle's pedigree, please go to Sparkle's pedigree page.
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