[tuffydoodle]

This is interesting:

Several years ago a Paint Horse that resulted from the mating of two registered Quarter Horses was an outcast because he could not be registered in their association. The authenticity of the breeding was also questioned by some horsemen who did not understand that a few of their finest horses carried recessive paint genes, and sporadically the action of these genes was exhibited in one of the foals. The Paint crop-outs were usually gelded, sold or disposed of to avoid embarrassment to the owner and futile explanations. It made no difference what names could be found in their pedigrees; they were of little value to their owner, and their selling prices were no more than those of good-grade stock horses.

[HairOfTheDog]

That happens a lot I think with the originally rare kinds of traits. First outcasts, later to become in vogue.

Chocolate Labradors were also outcasts... many chocolate puppies out of otherwise valuable litters were quietly disposed of. They are a naturally occurring color, and can appear in litters of blacks and yellows. But early breeders looked down on them, thought they were a defect.

Of course... a many years later they became popular, possibly due to some of these breeders taking the brave step of saying "I am not going to keep killing all these brown dogs. They're legitimate Labradors, just like the others". Now there's people breeding specifically for them... Breeding color over substance hoping for an all chocolate litter and actually now creating some awfully inbred and substandard brown dogs for the sake of being brown.