What a Labrador's colour actually tells you

People ring us about colour more than anything else. Chocolate, usually, because that is what we mostly have — but the question underneath it is almost always the same one, and it is a better question than the asker realises: does the colour tell me anything about the dog I am going to live with for twelve years?

The short answer is that it tells you less than you would like, and the long answer is worth five minutes because it will change what you ask us next.

Three colours, two genes

Every Labrador is black, chocolate or yellow, and the Kennel Club has recognised exactly those three since the breed was first written down. There is no fourth.

Two gene pairs do nearly all the work. The first decides whether the dark pigment the dog makes is black or chocolate. Black is dominant, so a dog needs two chocolate copies — one from each parent — to be chocolate. The second gene pair decides whether that pigment reaches the coat at all. When it does not, the dog is yellow, and the shade runs from near-white cream to the deep fox red you see on some working lines. A yellow Labrador is still carrying black or chocolate underneath; you can read which from the colour of its nose and the rims of its eyes.

That is why two chocolate parents can only produce chocolate puppies, and why two black parents can surprise everybody with a yellow one. It is also why a breeder who promises you a particular colour from a pairing that cannot produce it is telling you something about themselves.

Colour does not come with a temperament

There is a persistent belief that chocolate Labradors are madder than black ones, that yellows are gentler, and that fox reds are the hard-driving working dogs. You will hear all three stated as fact in the same conversation, which should tell you something.

What is actually inherited, as far as anybody has been able to measure it, is temperament from the parents — not from the pigment. A nervous dam is a far better predictor of a nervous puppy than any colour. So is the line the dog comes from: Labradors bred for the show ring and Labradors bred to work a full day in cold water have been selected for different things for decades, and that difference is real in a way that colour is not.

Where the myth comes from is probably arithmetic. Chocolate was rarer for a long time and went through a period of being fashionable, which is exactly the condition under which dogs get bred for how they look rather than how they behave. The colour did not cause that. The demand did.

What to ask instead

If the colour is mostly decoration, the useful questions are the ones underneath it.

Ask what the parents are like to live with — not whether they are friendly, which everybody says, but what they do when the doorbell goes, how they are with a toddler pulling at them, and whether they settle in the evening or pace. Ask to meet the dam if she is on site. Ask what the breeder has chosen this pairing for, and listen for whether the answer is about temperament, structure and clearances, or about colour and markings.

And ask what the parents were cleared on, which is the part that cannot be charmed. We set ours out on the health testing page: hips, elbows, eyes and a DNA panel, what each one is, and what a pass means.

So does colour matter at all?

Yes — just not in the way it gets sold. You are going to look at this dog every day for more than a decade, and liking the look of it is a perfectly good reason to prefer one. Nobody needs to apologise for wanting a chocolate Labrador.

The mistake is letting the colour choose the dog. If you have decided on chocolate before you have decided on anything else, you have narrowed the field to whoever has chocolate available, and that is how people end up buying from the wrong place. Decide what you need in a dog first. Then take the colour you can get from somebody doing it properly.

What we have at the moment, with colours and collars, is on the puppies page. If none of them suits, say so and we will tell you what is coming rather than talk you into one that is here.