Labrador Retriever Colors

Labrador Retrievers come in a number of different colors, from black and tan to brindle and almost anything in between, but there are only three colors that are recognized by the kennel unions around the world. These are black, chocolate and yellow.
That sounds very simple, but is it? Let’s start with the yellow Labrador Retriever, you would expect this dog to be yellow wouldn’t you? Sometimes it is yellow, but quite often it is not. The color range for yellow starts with an almost white or cream dog, it does have a bit of shading on its ears, tail and saddle of its back, but you have to look carefully to see it. From there the range gets progressively darker until you have a fox red color (really beautiful). All of these colors are lovely to my eye, but I do feel that this range is way too big to be encompassed by a simple yellow.
When the very first yellow Lab was born in 1899 (Ben of Hyde), his color was a lot closer to the red color that we see today than the lighter and more common yellow ones. In fact just to complicate things a little bit more, they were not originally called yellow, they were golden. The UK Kennel Club forced this to be changed on the grounds that gold was not a color, so they settled on yellow. This color stayed relatively unchanged up until the middle of the 20th century when lighter shades started to become more popular. This trend kept pace until in the 1980’s a specific line started to produce darker pups once again. This re-emergence of red Labs has gained a reasonable following, and you now have some kennels specializing in this color.
Next you get chocolate Labs, this color also has a fairly wide range, going from a very dark chocolate (looks almost black out of the sunlight) to a fairly light brown. This is seems reasonable except that you also get a silver grey color, and a slightly darker blue grey shade. These according to the kennel unions are in fact shades of chocolate. You would need to be completely color blind not to notice that there is absolutely no chocolate or brown involved in this dog’s make-up. These dogs are registered as chocolate and may be shown as chocolate.
To my mind this is a slightly nonsensical concept, the breed would lose nothing by calling the color what it is. There is a controversy surrounding this subject in the USA, and for the life of me I cannot understand why, if the dog can be registered, then it is by all accounts a pedigreed dog, and if it is silver surely it should be registered as such.
Lastly is the black Lab, I am very pleased to say that a black Lab is exactly that, very black, no exceptions, simple and easy to understand.