This is obviously a tricky topic though it shouldn't.
First let's go back to the standard and its consequences : the non confirmable points.
Standard : Any shade of gold or cream, the coat can be neither red nor mahogany. A few white hairs are permissible but only on the chest.
Non confirmable points : mahogany or white.
It all sounds logical and even though the Irish Setter has played an important part in the creation of the breed (see History, crossing), the Golden Retriever must respect the name it got around 1910.
Moreover it must also respect its main role which is to retrieve wounded or dead birds. Imagine you're hunting at the hide with a white dog. You're more than likely to go back home with an empty game bag and it won't be your fault nor your dog's !
The thing is to determine what is a white or a mahogany dog.
There are two other possibilities:
1. Pay no attention whatsoever to white and turn gold into mahogany.
2. Refuse to determine any colour and let things go.
As pure white doesn't exist it's very easy to explain that a Golden Retriever is cream,
even if its colour is closer to an artificial whipped cream than to a real home-made cream.
There are many different shades of red or mahogany.
The best marker we all know is the colour of the Irish Setter.
In her remarkable book
"Golden Retriever,
the illustrated standard of the breed",
which we advise you to get,
Wendy Andrews shows
the two unacceptable extreme colours :
the white of the Samoyed
and the mahogany of the Irish Setter.
See photograph on the left.
We can notice the great palette of colours.
This other picture clearly shows the range of accepted colours, the two ends being forbidden.
The frontier between permissible and forbidden is quite tight.
When we have a look at Wendy Andrews' palette, it is easy to define if the colour of a dog conforms or not to the standard.
However it's important to remain watchful if we don't want to end up with "white Retrievers" because some international judges may consider that a Golden Retriever having the colour of the fourth (from the left hand-side) is already too dark and thus does not match the standard (sic).
More information is available on the first downhills of colours when the standard was written in 1936 : www.thegoldenretrieverclub.co.uk/histgrc.html .
