Archived Message

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:
by Janis

Our little Angel has very good black points except for her paw pads she has several that are spoted with pink. Is this acceptable in show lines? We don't want to show her but if we breed her I want to know how she measures up. Also when we bath her we can see that a very large part of her body is black. In other words she has very large black spots on most of her body. Is this normal or even good?

DISCUSSION:

My little Maltese also has pink on his paw pads and from what I take on here they may or may not change later on. If it does not change than I dont think you can show them at all. Also, the black spots on your dog should be checked, could be allergies. My dog also has a bad underbite and I talked to the breeder about these problems but its not much you can do about it.
-kenny jarels

The black spots on the body of your Maltese are just pigment markings--nothing to worry about. You will discover that they are more intense (darker) in the summer and less intense, maybe even disappearing in the winter. Temperature and amount of sunshine affect the intensity of the pigment. A pink toepad or two is not a disqualification for showing your Maltese and the pigment may continue to come in, especially if your dog is a puppy. It would not necesarrily affect breeding, so long as you bred to a dog with intense, complete pigment; HOWEVER, the undershot bite is a very important consideration. An undershot Maltese would be very hard/impossible??? to finish as a conformation champion and the bite is hereditary. You would NOT want to breed an undershot dog.
-Linda (Snow Angel)

In our standard it calls for black toepads. All of the toepads do not have to be black in order to show the dog. If a judge has two dogs that are equal quality in every which way they will look at the toepads as a final judgement call, and I have seen this done, but very few times. There are quite a few Maltese that have black on the skin, this should be a sign of very good pigmentation. The two things that are important and desirable though are that the nose be completely black and filled in and eye rims be black. some Maltese handlers and breeders will put their dogs outside to get some pigmentation from the sun, if you do this though you have to be very careful, as little dogs can die of heatstroke very quickly. I hope this helped?
-taram

I was wondering - what exactly are black points? I just bought a Maltese and the papers say it has them, but the only black I see are its eyes, nose, and toe pads. Thanks.
-shae

The eyes (eyes and rims), the toepads, the nose and the lips being black are the black points.
-Becky