while we are in the "reputable" subject, I heard of a breeder that bred two merles and got a double merle and that product won best of BREED at Wesmister this year, so it depends on every persons opinion of what reputable means to their lines... so I take "REPUTABLE" with a grain of salt lately, when it comes to dog breeding...
in order to breed small or tiny you must breed small risking the life of the dam, which in my opinion is as bad as breeding two merles..
just my humble opinion on the subject of Reputable breeders.. I rather call myself an experience HOnesT breeder..
hugs,
a brief explanation of BLue merle.. (wikipedia)
Merle is actually a
heterozygote of an
incompletely dominant gene.
[7] If two such dogs are mated, on the average one quarter of the puppies will be "double merles", which is the common term for dogs homozygous for merle,
[8] and a high percentage of these double merle puppies could have eye defects and/or be deaf. Knowledgeable breeders who want to produce merle puppies mate a merle with a non-merle dog; roughly half the puppies will be merles without the risk of vision or hearing defects associated with double merle dogs.
[9]
In January 2006 scientists at
Texas A&M University announced the discovery of a mobile genetic unit called a
retrotransposon, responsible for the merle mutation in dogs.