reflect light with a charcoal or inky sheen, while a brown puppy can look deep cocoa, liver, or warm espresso depending on the room and the time of day. Under morning light by our dining room window, this puppy’s coat looked almost chestnut along the edges of the ears and shoulders.
- What a recessive gene actually means
“Recessive” does not mean rare in every line, and it does not mean weak, defective, or unhealthy. It simply means a puppy has to inherit the brown version of the gene from both parents for the brown coat to show. If a puppy gets only one brown copy and one black copy, the puppy will usually look black but still carry brown.
A simple way I explain it to friends is this: each parent hands over one coat-color instruction at this location in the DNA. If both instructions say brown, the coat is
