Here is a sample of Black Boxer history from the book," My Life With Boxers"
   The Black Boxers

The history of the black Boxer reaches back to the first stud book begun in 1904.
Among other entries, there was one for the black Boxer dog, Graf Blitz von Graudenz,
whelped 8 August 1899. Parents were Michel’s Max and Lore von Eisleben. Blitz
was shown and won trophies. That the dog became controversial was probably to be
expected.
I met black Boxers through their originator, Mr. Schachtner. He had bred them well, but
knew little about good sportsmanship and stirred up opposition just by his personality.
The extinction of black Boxers has to be laid at his feet. When I met him, I had not
been in the sport long and had just purchased Rolf von Vogelsberg. Mr. Schachtner
asked if I would be willing to breed Rolf to two of the black Blitz’s daughters, Biola
and Aster von Graudenz. That was something new, and I eagerly agreed to do it.

When I later met my friend from the Boxer Club, Mr. Schmöger, I mentioned the black
Boxers. He advised me to keep my fingers out of it. In his opinion, there were no
blacks, because if you took them out into bright sunlight you could see they were
either dark brindles or brown. But I told him that Biola and especially Asta were indeed
an intensive black. Schmöger claimed, however, that neither one was then a real
Boxer. I disagreed.

But I had to admit that neither one of the black bitches was a quality animal, yet I was
still intrigued by the idea of breeding to them. And I told Schmöger that. Whereupon
he became very angry. Finally, he told me that Lore von Eisleben, the granddam of
both black Boxer bitches, had been a Bulldog bitch. During an exhibition she came
into season and was accidentally bred by a Schnauzer. Even the breeder would not
deny that. Schmöger’s position was that black was not a color natural to the
Boxer breed, and because of that the Munich Boxer Club would not recognize it.

With that, he had thrown down the gauntlet. I would have picked it up, even if it werenâ
€™t my best friend who threw it at my feet. They were going to find out I could finish a
job that others might have broken their teeth on. Of course, I was taking on some
things that I was not quite up to yet.

A little later, I purchased a bitch from one of Schachtner’s black litters. She was
not cheap, and her quality was so poor that I could not use her in my breeding
program. Since the bitch was alert and courageous, Schmöger helped me find a
good home for her, but breeding her was out of the question. Her cost had to be
counted as a loss. Schmöger was smart enough not to give me any more orders, so
the matter of breeding black Boxers in Bavaria seemed to be closed.

I was not the only one who liked the black color. Edmund Halter, a breeder from AllgÃ
¤u, also had a black bitch bred to Rolf. The result was a litter of beautiful black
animals, better than ever shown before. From that litter, the best was Flock von der
Adeleck. Flock had a successful show career. And it was Flock who revived my old
desire to breed to a black Boxer.

A special Boxer show had been scheduled to take place at the Nymphenburg Castle in
Munich. Exhibitors were coming from distant places, and it was very difficult then to
find any housing in Munich. Mr. Halter wrote to me and asked if I could put up Flock for
a few days. I agreed, and that put me to thinking. Up to now, black bitches of terrible
quality were mated with the best stud dogs. How would it work, I thought, if a high
quality bitch—such as Rassel vom Dom—were mated with the very nice Flock? And
Rassel was in heat right then. My old ambition came alive, and besides, I wanted to
show Schmöger a little stubbornness, come what may!

I had promised to bring Flock to the show. He was going to look as beautiful as
possible, so I trimmed his long nails and brushed him. But the result did not satisfy me.
Schmöger was not entirely wrong, the coloring on Flock’s flanks was not as deep
as it ought to be. What could I do about it? Next thing I knew, there was a can of black
shoe polish in my hand. I began brushing some of the polish into his coat, more for fun
than anything, but the more I did it the more it pleased me. Flock looked brilliant,
brilliant in the true sense of the word. He actually glittered. I was positive everyone
would be astounded.

When I arrived at the show the next day, the first one to run up to me was Flock’s
owner. He was just speechless over the appearance of his dog. His wife, he told me in
an almost regrettable way, had never been able to do such a wonderful job grooming
Flock as I had.

I was in a really good mood. Spring was here, and I was wearing my only nice dress. It
was made of cream-colored Russian silk. I knew the black Boxer would have twice the
impact beside me. And he walked right beside me, as I paraded him around to meet all
the Munich Boxer prominences.

Flock’s owner was supposed to take him into the ring. But when the owner
approached me, he was horrified to see the left side of my nice silk dress had black
smeared all over it. My sins had come back: it was the black shoe polish! I had no
choice but to turn Flock over to his master, and I asked Mr. Halter to loan me his coat,
which I then draped over my left arm. All I could do was stand quietly off to the side.

I have no idea if anyone else had noticed my blunder. It probably would not have hurt
me even if they had noticed. Coloring a dog usually made no difference anyway. It
would have probably all gone under the category of "make up," as the Americans call
it. But it bothered me a lot, and in fact it was the first and last time I ever tried such a
thing.

Actually, it all seemed to go as I had planned. I only wanted three puppies, no more. A
brindle had already been promised to a buyer. For myself, I wanted to keep a pair. I
thought a lot about which one should have the white markings, decided on the male,
and the girl for my breeding would have to be coal black.

When the sixty-third day came, Rassel actually delivered two boys, a brindle and a
black one with white markings. Exactly as I had dreamed, only the little girl was
missing. But on the next day, even that came true. As long as I have been breeding, I
have never been so accurate in predicting a litter. Shouldn’t that have been a
good omen for my black Boxers? Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.

I named the two Ulla and Utter. Ulla was an attractive, noble, small Boxer lady with a
model head. Utter, on the other hand, was a powerful, striking dog. Because I could
not exhibit them, I spread the word about them through pictures and reports in the dog
publications. I had not planned to sell them, but the originator of the blacks,
Schachtner, sent me a very good offer for Utter, so I sold him. It seemed to me that
Schachtner would have better financial means and connections than I, and he would
be able to promote them better. It was not until much later that I learned his ruthless
manner ruined it for all the black Boxers.

                                         Another interesting aticle.


"The Mysteries of Brindle" by Cal Gruver Brindle or fawn? Most of us think of brindle as
a choice of coat color opposed to fawn. Strictly speaking, that's not really the case.
The Boxer has a basic coat color of fawn, and only fawn. Any variation on that--such
as brindling or white markings--is something applied to that fawn coat. You could
compare it to Henry Ford's Model T, all of which were black. But you could put any
decorations on that basic black that you wished. In the canine genetic scheme, basic
coat color is located at locus A, brindling at E, and white marking at S. In order of
dominance, S is over E and A, and E is over A. Thus, whatever locus S says will be the
amount of white--from none to all--will appear on both brindles and fawns. Brindling,
however, can only appear on the fawn areas and not the white. At the E locus, where
we find brindling, the genetic function is to determine how extensive and in what
manner black will be distributed over the dog's coat. There are three alleles (genetic
choices) here--E-br, E, and e--only two of which are in the Boxer genetic pool. The
order of dominance is E-br (brindle), E (normal extension of black) and e (no extension
of black). For some time there was a debate as to whether e was in the Boxer and
produced the fawn coat by restricting black pigment. An example of an e/e-dog would
be a Yellow Lab. As we can often see, the fawn Boxer's coat is not totally without black
hairs, especially around the ears. And the deer-red coat is so because of a mixture of
black pigment and hair with the fawn.That presence of black pigment has convinced
geneticists that e is not in the Boxer genetic pool. E, which extends black in the normal
amount that the basic coat color gene calls for, produces a fawn Boxer when inherited
from both parents. Now that is confusing! In a Lab, E creates an all-black dog. Why not
in the Boxer? Well, the answer is that the gene which determines the basic coat color
of the Boxer, itself greatly restricts the amount of black in that coat. Thus it gets mostly
yellow pigment, creating fawn Boxers in all their shadings. But the Lab's coat color
gene allows much black pigment in the hairs, so the E gene puts it in. When E-br is
present, however, it dominates and the black stripes are then laid into the fawn coat.
Just how intense the striping is, along with how dark the basic fawn was, determines
the shadings from "golden" to "black" brindle. As for the genetic probabilities when one
breeds a brindle, well that depends greatly on whether that brindle had one fawn
parent or two brindle parents. Since a fawn Boxer can only be so by having two E
genes (E/E), a brindle with a fawn parent has to have at least one E also. Because it is
a brindle, we know that the other gene is E-br. When such a brindle (E-br/E) is mated
with a fawn (E/E), the probability for the puppies is 50% brindle and 50% fawn,
providing that both dogs do not carry the all-white gene. The situation is somewhat
different if the brindle had two brindle parents. There is a definite possibility then that a
brindle gene may have been inherited from each parent, making a pup with Ebr/Ebr at
the E locus. A "double" brindle will always produce all brindles, even when mated to a
fawn. But if one or two of the grandparents were fawn, then there could still be a loose
E gene floating around. Some of our double brindle's brindle siblings could still whelp a
fawn puppy. Willis (1989) speculates that the darkest brindles might have two E-br
genes. He offered no proof for that, and it flies in the face of the fact that "black"
brindles are producing fawn pups regularly. Something that would not be possible with
two brindle genes. More likely, these dark brindles have genetic modifiers that intensify
the brindling. It is certainly possible to mate a fawn and a brindle and get a "golden"
brindle and a "black" brindle in the same litter. Neither would be a double brindle.
Another myth that will probably die hard is that by occasionally breeding a brindle to
your fawns you will keep future fawns from fading to a khaki tan. John Wagner had that
in his book, The Boxer, written around 1937 and reprinted into the 1950s.
Unfortunately, it appeared even in Billie McFadden's fine book, The New Boxer (1989),
when she reprinted a passage from Enno Meyer's Judging the Boxer (1945). As Willis
(1989) points out, there is no evidence at all for such an assumption. If one wants to
keep getting deep-red fawns, then one should select deep-red fawns for breeding. Or
at least keep selectively breeding for a darker hue of fawn. A better explanation might
be that dark brindles also have a dark fawn coat, and that carries over to the fawn
color of an offspring. Clarence C. Little, the great canine geneticist, put another allele
at the E locus. This was E-m, which he believed caused the black mask seen in so
many dogs, including Boxers. Amazingly, there are still books on canine genetics
coming out with that assumption (see Willis, 1989). If it were true, then a brindle dog
with one fawn parent would have to have three E-type genes (Ebr/Em/E) to have a
black mask. A genetic impossibility, but Boxers like that are everywhere. Roy Robinson
(1990) labels Little's assumption a probable error and for want of a better solution lists
a new locus, M, as the determinant for a mask. The two alleles here would be M (black
mask) and m (no mask).