Did you know…
…that except for one breed, the color pink is a fault in every breed in the Herding Group as of this writing?
Our topic is inspired by a photograph we saw of a football locker room that had been painted pink. We wondered why a room typically associated with brawn and aggression would be painted what is traditionally a feminine color.
A locker room at Kinnick Stadium, University of Iowa
The room in the photo is the visiting team’s locker room at Kinnick Stadium, University of Iowa, painted pink in 1979 by coach Hayden Fry. His reasoning, in his own words: pink is a “passive” color, and some people considered it a “sissy color” — exactly the psychological edge he wanted working against his opponents before kickoff. England’s Norwich City did the same to their visitors’ dressing room decades later, in 2018, citing the same testosterone-lowering theory. That theory traced back to a single, since-disputed 1979 study on “Baker-Miller pink,” discredited after later controlled studies failed to replicate the original results — most researchers today regard the color’s calming effect as unproven. The irony is that the popular story runs the other way: well into the twentieth century, pink was often considered the sturdier, more masculine color, while blue was thought the daintier one for girls.
Which brings us — by way of locker rooms — to the actual subject of today’s post, which we’ve managed to circle for three paragraphs without touching the topic of dogs, and specifically, the Herding Group. In that group, pink isn’t a bold fashion statement or a psychological tactic — it’s a fault in all but one breed, the faults having to do with eyes, lips, and nose. Even in that one breed, acceptable pink is limited to merles — and even then it should not exceed 25 percent of the nose on dogs over one year of age, beyond which it is a serious fault. That breed is the Australian Shepherd.
From the AKC standard: On the merles it is permissible to have small pink spots; however, they should not exceed 25 percent of the nose on dogs over one year of age, which is a serious fault.
The reason for this one exception is genetic, not aesthetic. Merle isn’t a color — it’s a pattern caused by a mobile piece of DNA that inserts itself into a gene called PMEL17, which normally helps pigment cells build the structures that store melanin. That insertion doesn’t shut pigment production off — it makes it unreliable. In some patches of skin the gene still works normally and lays down full black or liver pigment; in other patches it doesn’t, and the color washes out to the classic mottled, marbled look. This happens across the whole animal — coat, eye color, and, crucially, the nose leather and lips — because those tissues develop from the same pigment-producing cells (melanocytes) as the coat.
Our crude drawing of what we think 25 percent pink spotting on a nose looks like
A solid black or red Aussie has no merle insertion, so its pigment production is uniform and reliable — solid black or liver nose, no exception needed. A merle Aussie inherently has patchy pigment expression, so the standard reasonably allows some of that patchiness to appear on the nose too, up to a point (25 percent) — beyond that, it’s judged to look more like a lack of pigmentation than normal merle mottling, which is why it’s a serious fault past that threshold. Note: double merles (two copies of the gene) often have disrupted pigment in the inner ear and eyes too, causing higher rates of deafness and eye defects — which is why responsible breeders avoid merle-to-merle pairings.
Image of a young Australian Shepherd running by Ksuksann/DepositPhoto