Double Merle Breeders Don’t Want You to See This


Double Merle Collie breeders have no problem with their dogs being blind, and they have no problem pulling the wool over your eyes either. My exposé of Wyndlair Avalanche has gone viral and now the breeders who support this practice are closing ranks and covering their tracks.

Funny, they didn’t have any problem advertising and lauding these dogs before when I explained just how bad double merle breeding really is. I guess they took your silence as tacit approval of their breeding ethics. Perhaps they mistook those ribbons for universal acclaim.

But now it appears as though they are embarrassed!  Why else would they start taking down their websites that used to advertise these dogs?

Meet Alfenloch A Beautiful Starlet, affectionately known as Nadia: as in she can’t see nadia because she’s totally blind.  If you can name any albino, blind, and deaf starlets, you’ll win a prize. I can’t think of one who even has two of the three.

Watch where you are going, dear. Oh wait, you can't watch anything, you're blind and probably deaf too. Don't worry, we'll put a Helen Keller quote on your advertising page.

Nadia used to have her own webpage where she was advertised for her ability to produce entire litters of merle puppies. It was located here: http://www.alfenlochcollies.com/nadia.html, but now it’s been removed.  Good thing google keeps a cache!

You can take down the webpage, you can't unbreed the dogs.

Sired by AM.CAN.CH.TALIESIN ALFENLOCH ANTARCTIC (CCA AOM) ex Wyndlair A Beautiful Sunrise
Bred/Owned by Alfenloch Collies

Alfenloch A Beautiful Starlet …. this elegant double merle girl has a long, lean, light headpiece with exquisite head detail, a huge coat and long, arched neck.

She is very reminiscent of her exceptional grandsire, Wyndlair Avalanche.

Nadia is very special to us, and our plans for her include breeding her to the exceptional tricolor, Countryview The Magic Marker in 2011, for an entire litter of blue merles!

It’s really amazing why anyone would want to remove that webpage. Is there anything factually inaccurate on it? Did Nadia succumb to her genetic disease and the breeder wants to make sure no eager puppy buyers might get confused on where they can get their next blue merle collie from?  Or do you think that they are unwilling to take the heat regarding the morality of what they are doing?

Many "starlets" have a good side. You'll never see the right side of Nadia's face where her coloration doesn't obscure the extent of atrophy and disease in her eyes.

Poor Nadia doesn’t appear to even have eyes, and it’s clear that her breeder cares more about taping up her ears to make a nice picture than if she can actually hear anything out of them.  I wonder if Diane Fitzpatrick, her breeder, even realizes that this is a living creature and not some inanimate object like a painting, a cake or a dress.  This is a living organism that never needed to exist with the dysfunctions it has to accomplish any goals.  No one needs to create double merles to get merle puppies.

What is certain is that Nadia’s webpage was not taken down because Diane Fitzpatrick had a change of heart about Merle x Merle breeding.  Just this Saturday, Diane announced on the Alfenloch Collies facebook page that her Blue Merle bitch Alfenloch Silver Carrera had a litter of “5 flashy babies” with Taliesin Alfenloch Antarctic, another blue merle with Collie Eye Anomaly.  He won the Award of Merit at the 2010 Collie Club of America National Specialty and the Best of Breed/Best In Specialty at the 2010 Collie Club of Canada National Specialty.  These are not unknown dogs by some rogue breeders.  Antarctic has sired 3 different litters this year at Alfenloch collies.

I wonder if any of the double merle puppies survived birth.

Antarctic is Wyndlair Avalanche’s son.  Since Collie Eye Anomaly is a simple recessive disease and Antarcitc has it, this means that Wyndlair Avalanche is at least a carrier of CEA if not affected himself (who would know, he might not even have eyes that you could look through to diagnose it), it also guarantees that Nadia is at minimum a carrier of CEA as well.  So here we have the son of a blind double merle producing more double merles himself and winning top honors in two different countries while doing so.

This is the actual website advertisement of the Merle x Merle litter that was born on June 16th, 2011.

Any notion that these dogs are “oops, we didn’t know better” or “we didn’t know both parents were merle” should be laid to rest now.  They’re doing this on purpose knowing full well what can happen.

update: In response to appearing in my Who’s Your Double Merle Daddy? post, one of the breeders in question who advertised her use of Wyndlair Avalanche as a stud with “Wyndlair Avalanche (“Aiden”) x Mainstay Back of the Moon (“Stella”) … An all blue merle litter is due mid-March!,” has removed the original page from their website. Here is a screen cap of the entire page before it was removed.

Apparently a little scrutiny was enough for the breeder of this litter to become embarrassed and take the page down to hide her tracks.

She has yet to remove the pedigree of the litter, however. It’s rather sad because this breeder did not breed the double merle, and she used Avalanche with a non-merle bitch. But the allure of an all merle litter was the one and only selling point.

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About Christopher

Christopher Landauer is a fifth generation Colorado native and second generation Border Collie enthusiast. Border Collies have been the Landauer family dogs since the 1960s and Christopher got his first one as a toddler. He began his own modest breeding program with the purchase of Dublin and Celeste in 2006 and currently shares his home with their children Mercury and Gemma as well. His interest in genetics began in AP Chemistry and AP Biology and was honed at Stanford University.