Bluetick Coonhound

Your “blue” dog probably doesn’t have the intensity of a George Rodrigue “blue dog,” but your dog’s “blue-ness” doesn’t come out of a tube, either.  In reality (and that would be Mother Nature), there are four distinct canine colors referred to as “blue,” and each is inherited differently.

Dogs that are born a solid gun metal gray are a “blue dilute,” and they always have a gray nose and paw pads.  Chow Chows and Great Danes, for example, can be dilute blues. Then there’s graying/silvery blue that starts out black and fades to a blue-grey in adulthood, and these dogs always have a black nose (think Kerry Blue Terrier). A third blue is blue ticking that’s created by black roaning on white, and this, too, always has a black nose (as seen on the Bluetick Coonhound).  Finally, there is the blue merle color, a marbled gray on black, always with a black nose, and sometimes with blue eyes. In some breeds, this is called mottled or harlequin. This is a random dilution gene that works, figuratively speaking, like a toothbrush dipped in paint. Running one’s thumb against the bristles of the brush results in a splatter that’s random and never the same design twice.

If you have a blue dog, share their picture below!

Image of George Rodrigue at work from Wikicommons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.  Bluetick Coonhound image found on Pinterest and happily credited upon receipt of information.