What Kind Of Dogs Have Blue Eyes?
10. Labrador retriever – Labrador retrievers consistently top out as one of the most popular dog breeds—and for good reason. They have an inherently sweet and loyal disposition, are easy to train, and are known for being one of the smartest dog breeds,
Why are blue eyes rare in dogs?
Dog breeds that naturally have blue eyes – No doubt about it, dogs with blue eyes belong to a unique club. Scientists say only 5% of dogs have the blue-eye variant as part of their DNA. The blue-eyed trait is recessive and most often related to coat color, specifically in those with merle (mottled patches of color) or piebald (white coat with spots of color).
Siberian husky Border collie Australian shepherd Dachshund Weimaraner Cardigan Welsh corgi Great Dane Catahoula leopard dog Alaskan klee kai Pit bull
Ironically, blue eyes don’t actually have any blue pigment. In fact, blue eyes indicate a lack of pigment. Additionally, if the fur around your dog’s eyes is white, his chances of having blue eyes (along with a pink nose and skin) are increased.
Are all dogs born with blue eyes?
All puppies are born with blue eyes. Puppies can be born with pure blue eyes, or bluish eyes that have flecks of grey, green or brown in them. While some puppies will retain their blue eyes throughout their lifetime, other puppies will experience a change in eye color.
- Adult dogs can have blue, green, hazel or brown eyes.
- Some dogs can also have one eye that is one color, and the other eye a differing color.
- This is common for Huskies.
- Around 10 weeks of age, a puppies eyes will start to turn darker.
- Most puppies’ eyes will turn to brown around this age.
- However, a few puppies will keep their blue eye color.
Retaining the blue eye color is fairly rare among dogs. Because of this, a dog with blue eyes is thought to be more unique than a dog with brown eyes. Some dog breeds retain the blue eye gene more than others. The blue eye gene is also fairly random, so just because a sire and a dam both have blue eyes, it does not mean that the puppy will have blue eyes.
Can dogs with blue eyes see?
Blue eyes in dogs are a rare physical trait that make for a very striking appearance. – When’s the last time you saw a dog with blue eyes? Considering the fact that only 5 percent of all dogs are born with baby blues, we’d wager it’s been a minute! “Blue eyes can mean a number of things,” says Laura Robinson, DVM and medical advisor at Pawp.
- Sometimes, it’s a genetic variant that causes blue eyes, like in huskies, while there is another gene that causes blue eyes in dogs who are ‘piebald’ or in dogs that are mostly white.” She adds that there’s yet another gene that causes the blue eyes associated with merle-colored dogs.
- Merle refers to a genetic pattern in a dog’s coat and on their skin that creates spotted patches of pigmentation.
It’s common in Australian shepherds. You may have also noticed these black spots on dogs’ tongue,) “When a dog inherits two copies of the merle gene, that is when problems arise,” she says. “These ‘double-merle’ pups are often completely white, born blind and deaf, and may have abnormally small eyes or abnormal irises.
For these reasons, it’s widely considered bad practice to breed two merle carriers.” Dr. Link Welborn, the North American Chief Veterinary (NACV) Officer at Covetrus, adds that albinism is another reason dogs have blue eyes. While dogs with blue eyes may be more sensitive to light than dogs with green eyes or brown eyes, Dr.
Robinson says that unless they are a “double-merle” carrier, these pups can almost always see just fine. However, you should be concerned if your dog exhibits signs of poor vision, or if they had dark eyes that turned pale, cloudy, or blue-ish. “Sometimes as dogs age, their eyes can appear to turn a ‘blue-ish color,’ which can be indicative of eye health problems such as cataracts or glaucoma, which may affect the dog’s vision quality,” says Dr.
Are dogs with blue eyes healthy?
Are Blue Eyes In A Dog Bad? – Blue eyes in dogs are completely normal and aren’t linked with any health problems. Certain breeds, such as Siberian husky, carry a gene for blue eyes and don’t experience any vision defects because of it. However, eye diseases such as cataracts and glaucoma can change a dog’s eye color to blue gradually.
How long will a puppies eyes stay blue?
Mature Eye Coloration – Around 3 or 4 weeks in age, puppies’ final eye color slowly starts to become visible. The most common eye color on dogs is deep brown, so you might notice the chocolatey tones making their way through around this time. However, the process occurs slowly and doesn’t happen overnight.
What makes blue eyes special?
Your eyes aren’t blue (or green) because they contain pigmented cells. As Paul Van Slembrouck writes for Medium, their colour is actually structural – and it involves some pretty interesting physics. The coloured part of your eye is called the iris, and it’s made up of two layers – the epithelium at the back and the stroma at the front.
The epithelium is only two cells thick and contains black-brown pigments – the dark specks that some people have in their eye is, in fact, the epithelium peeking through. The stroma, in contrast, is made up of colourless collagen fibres. Sometimes the stroma contains a dark pigment called melanin, and sometimes it contains excess collagen deposits.
These Are 10 Blue Eyed Dog Breeds
And, fascinatingly, it’s these two factors that control your eye colour. Brown eyes, for example, contain a high concentration of melanin in their stroma, which absorbs most of the light entering the eye regardless of collagen deposits, giving them their dark colour.
Green eyes don’t have much melanin in them, but they also have no collagen deposits. This means that while some of the light entering them is absorbed by the pigment, the particles in the stroma also scatter light as a result of something called the Tyndall effect, which creates a blue hue (it’s similar to Rayleigh scattering which makes the sky look blue ).
Combined with the brown melanin, this results in the eyes appearing green. Blue eyes are potentially the most fascinating, as their colour is entirely structural. People with blue eyes have a completely colourless stroma with no pigment at all, and it also contains no excess collagen deposits.
- This means that all the light that enters it is scattered back into the atmosphere and as a result of the Tyndall effect, creates a blue hue.
- Interestingly, this means that blue eyes don’t actually have a set colour – it all depends on the amount of light available when you look at them.
- Structural colouration also gives colour to butterflies, beef and berries,
It’s pretty mind-blowing stuff. Van Slembrouck writes for Medium : “Imagine that you could shrink yourself to a microscopic size and then climb through the mesh of fibres in the stroma. That’s where structural colouration is coming from and in the mesh are also strands of smooth muscle tissue that contract to dilate (expand) the pupil, pulling the inner edge of the iris toward the outer edge.
- When this happens, the stroma fibres slacken and may become wiggly as tension is released.
- This makes me wonder, does that slightly alter the colour of your eye as well?” Check out Van Slembrouck’s great story to find out how hazel and grey eyes get their colour, and also to check out his beautiful diagrams that explain structural colouring.
Source: Medium
Can dogs have green eyes?
Is it rare for a dog to have green eyes? – It is! Although there are no official statistics about the number of dogs with green eyes, only two breeds tend to have them: the American pit bull terrier and the pomeranian husky. Green eyes are somewhat more common in puppies. MarioDias/Getty Images