I would agrue that breeding for color has had a negative effect on the BMCs as well, not just catahoula and lacy dogs. Dogs with yellow and black masks hung the moon as far as some peope are concerned and you can bet that "the look" gets priority when breeding allot of times, and ability takes a back seat. They forgot all about the other colors they come in; brindle, black, black and tan, red ect.
Waylon
Though I am not nearly as experienced with BMC or Cats as I am with Lacys and Mutts, I made a comment a couple of weeks ago to a Cat breeder stating in essence that "I liked the fact that she had a majority solid color and B&T breeding stock instead of painted up dogs with blue eyes". When she asked why, I replied that with no basis for proving my opinion, I thought I had noticed that lines of Cat and BMC which produced a high number of off color (B&T, solid color or brindle) dogs also produced better working stock on average.
I was surprised that she agreed with me 100%. She said that when she built her yard, she purposely chose dogs from working lines that threw off color and even though she started with a lot of painted dogs, the end result is that her yard is dominated by solids and her pups are near 50/50 solid/painted.
All of that means not a hill of beans really but I thought it an interesting comparison to your comment.
Steve
