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There’s this:

The thought may have crossed the mind of more than one teenage Dachshund owner: They didn’t buy a dog, they bought a wolverine. Or maybe a wild boar that somehow worked its way into the gene pool.  Who really knows what (or who) early Dachshunds were into (Ed Note: Work with us here). 

This leads us to “wild boar” in the breed (like we said, work with us here).

Two-colored Dachshunds include black, chocolate, gray (blue) fawn (Isabella), and wild boar (agouti). Wild boar is a color seen in wirehaired coats and sometimes in smooths, and the name comes from the fact that from a distance, true wild boars will look they’re black and tan, which is say that they appear to have a heavy layer of black over a base coat color of red, blue, chocolate or black. Some have described wild boar as each individual hair banded at the base near the skin with the base color and black at the tip. Put another way, each hair is banded and changes color from the roots to tips. From the AKC Breed Standard: Variations include red boar and chocolate-and-tan boar. Nose, nails and eye rims are black on wild-boar and red-boar Dachshunds. On chocolate-and- tan-boar Dachshunds, nose, nails, eye rims and eyes are self-colored, the darker the better.

To our knowledge, the banded hair results from the presence of at least one aΛw allele at the Agouti gene locus. We will happily correct this next part if we’re wrong, but we’ve read that wild boar isn’t found in long-haired Dachshunds. Furthermore, we’ve also read that wild boar Dachshunds can’t be determined as true wild boars until they are at least six months old because some pups that are thought to be wild boars actually lose their coloring as they mature.

Another curious factoid we came across is one for which we need affirmation from our Dachshund experts: Is it true that while wild boar Dachshunds are uncommon in most parts of the world, they’re very popular in Nordic countries where almost all wire haired Dachshunds have this coloring?