I saw that the beautiful (and now famous) Shippo got to appear on the corgi visa card, how cool it that!? They picked a winner I think, he is such a "Corgi" and quite fit to represent fluffies.

Congratulations on Shippos Mycorgi Visa Card! Love that action shot of him!

Hi there Cheetah, I know you from gocorgi. Shippo has some beautiful pictures here.

I love fluffies!

I love his "fur mutation"!!! haha He is a very beautiful dog!

I love your photos. Some of the action shots are particularly good.

I loooooooooooove your fluffy!!!

No worries! The next one is going to be on 3/7 at Wynetka dog park off of Bowles. You can check out the details on meetup.com. It's a pretty new group called the Littleton Corgi meetup. I'm sure Shippo would have fun!

Wow you have such a beautiful corgi and you take such good pic of shippo!

Tell me about it. We just got a whole bunch of foster puppies from Kansas, all of which are on medications, and are not allowed to be around our other dogs, and make messes in their kennels all the time. I used to like puppies before these guys came along. haha. and the clashing of opinions at Golden is really everyone's opinion against our boss's, therefore our opinion pretty much doesn't even count. so, shippo is pretty much the most adorable fluffy ever (and the pics you took of him are excellent by the way)! does he like going to camp with you? daxter tends to be either the boss of the yard, or the clown. haha

no way! you work at a camp bow wow? i work at the one in Golden. how do you like it there???

I want to invite you and Shippo to the corgi meetup tomorrow! It's at Chatfield Reservoir tomorrow (7/7) at noon. There were lots of corgis at the last one and it was great!

ooo they look so nice in the snow... =)

Thank you Cheetah! You and Shippo have an awesome day too :)

thanks for the link. Most interesting. I am AMAZED that they can do that for $50. It is a LOT of work to map a gene, although it's more and more automated these days. The wealth of pedigree info helps a lot. I'm still curious: a real cheap test like that is good for one KNOWN mutation -- like, for cystic fibrosis, maybe 2/3 of all cases are cause by one single mutation descended from one single founder, very simple to detect -- but recessive genes are usually ANY code damage that inactivates the gene -- often a stop codon that truncates the protein prematurely -- so to find all of them you have to sequence the whole gene, a lot of work, and even that doesn't find them all.

I think they're working on other things in dogs like the spinal neurodegeneration thing, too.

Sounds like Fluffy is a standard Mendelian recessive. Since fluffies are so common, I'd wondered if it wasn't something that cannot be bred out. Like in whippets, there are "bully" whippets, homozygous for the gene, too muscular to be good races, and "wimpy" whippets, homozygous for the other allele, too weak. Only the heterozygotes are the best racers, so you can't breed out the bullies and wimpies. Breed a bully to a wimpy, and all the pups should be good racers.

There was a cover photo on the journal SCIENCE not long ago -- a great Dane next to a Chihuahua -- the size variation is 50x, greater than in any other known species. Somebody found out why: it's a growth inhibitor receptor highly active in dwarf breeds and downgraded or deleted in big breeds.

We sometime visit our breeder, just to squeeze some puppies. There usually are a few fluffies, and I have to make sure I'm heavily sedated so I don't take one home.... hooray for fluffies and dwarf dogs.

Nice action shots of Shippo.

Shippo is beautiful, looks like a mini-Shelty. He must feel positively decadent when he's combed-out. Not sure I'd want to do the extra grooming -- Al & Gwynnie come home from a wet day on the trail with their belly-fur full of sand -- Shippo must look like the happiest dog in the world when he's been digging in the dirt, huh? :)
The links you posted re. the fluffy gene don't work. I'd be interested -- idle professional curiosity, I work in a medical genetics lab -- I know people don't usually breed fluffies, so I've wondered why it hasn't been bred-out, even though it's recessive presumably. I asked our breeder about this, and I think she said they now have a DNA test for the fluffy variant(!) Such tests can be simple -- when you know exactly what you're looking for -- but discovering what to look for is a huge job, and I'd be surprised if somebody did all that work.
I believe they were sequencing the entire canine genome here at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center here in Seattle because dogs have the same genes we do, and there's this huge wealth of pedigree information (our lab worked on a hereditary blood disease that also shows up in grey collies).

Combing Al & Gwynn is enough of a job for me, but fluffies sure are beautiful... and if Al & Gwynn were fluffs, my wife could spin their fur into yarn -- I could have a corgi-fur sweater and smell like a wet dog! :)

Happy Birthday Shippo!!! Have a great Day!

Shippo is absolutely gorgeous!

Shippo is beautiful! Congrats on getting him in the 2009 calendar.