Ethical exotic Frenchies
& Frenchtons

Mouse is what happens when four independent recessives land in the same dog on purpose. He tests as New Shade Isabella tan-point — dilute expressed, both traditional chocolate and testable cocoa expressed, tan-pointed at the A locus, with silver-blue eyes that read platinum in natural light. He’s furnished — a dominant trait, visible in his face and expression. And he carries a specific long-coat allele that makes his story more interesting than the short-form Embark call first suggested. Any one of those calls is uncommon in a French Bulldog. All of them in the same dog is what most exotic programs spend a decade trying to build toward.

His compact frame is the other half of the story. Twenty pounds at a year old, extreme short-back structure, tight to the ground — the small-body genetics families ask for and preservation programs need.

The part I said I would publish either way: his coat is currently three times as long as my visual-fluffy dam Isabel’s. Isabel is LhLh at the common Lh1 marker. Mouse’s expanded Embark panel resolved his FGF5 across all four subloci and returned ShLh at Lh4 — the French-Bulldog-documented rare long-hair variant. He carries a different, uncommon fluffy copy than Isabel. That’s why his coat behaves the way it does. Not a testing gap. The paperwork now supports what my eyes were telling me.

And the curl I’ve been talking about isn’t the Poodle mechanism. His KRT71 came back CC — no ancestral curl allele. Embark’s own KRT71 write-up says the F allele at RSPO2 (furnishings) can produce a curly coat on its own. Mouse is FI. Combined with Lh4 long-hair, that’s the mechanism producing his wave. Real. Documented. Different than I first framed it. Read the full curl breakdown →