"Light Factor"
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Anonymous wrote: Has anyone heard of "light factor" and deaf puppies. I was told that when breeding OES if the male and female have blue eyes and little or no black on their head they can produce puppies that are deaf. I don't understand what this means or if it's even true.
I think you may be thinking of white factor, which is associated with what you're referring to (blue eyes, lack of/less pigmentation). The first step in not producing a deaf puppy is to BAER test both parents to make sure they have bilateral hearing (breeding a deaf dog, even a unilaterally deaf dog, increases your risk of producing deaf puppies). Though I'm told you can breed two bilateral hearing dogs and still produce a deaf puppy. I guess if I was breeding, I'd want to know the hearing status of a lot of dogs in a given pedigree, and not just the prospective parents, before I tried to come up with a relative risk assessment. I do think you probably run a greater risk of producing deaf puppies with heavily white factored dogs. But I've also been told that there have been heavily marked dogs with great pigmentation who turned out to be deaf (but I believe that's much more rare), so that's no guarantee either. That makes me think that the mode of inheritance is probably polygenic, meaning a number of genes are involved. Probably more than you wanted to know? 
Since deafness is related to a lack of pigmentation, I would be extra careful breeding blue-eyed dogs with little pigmentation. But you have to be careful, period. Does that make any sense? Kristine & Mad - who has your more typical selective OES hearing |
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