A liver and white coat like the one worn by this Braque Francais can blend into snowy cover a little too well.

The color of our hunting partners is a matter of some importance. Of course I am referring to our canine partners, but the color of other kinds of partners matters as well, and I shall discuss that briefly (and carefully) before I am finished.

Whenever the subject of dog color comes up, visibility is usually the instigating factor in the conversation. Certainly, some dogs are harder to see in some kinds of terrain, and there probably is no dog that is perfectly visible in all kinds of terrain. The problem is worsened by the fact that many of us, especially among the male population, do not have acute powers of color discrimination.

As evidence of this fact, my wife will quickly point out my relative ineptitude in matching shirts to pants. Moreover, we once argued for a week about whether a certain backpack of mine was gray or “light olive, kind of a ‘sagey’ color.” I said gray, until her side was vindicated by a panel of friends. Of course, the panel was all female.

However, there is more to this story than mere gender stereotypes; it is scientifically true that most women are optically better equipped than men to discern subtle differences in color. Chalk that up as one reason, among many, why women make excellent hunters. So maybe the color of a dog doesn’t matter as much to ladies, at least from a practical hunting perspective.

But few things distract this fellow more in the field than being unable to see the dog clearly. Most people will argue that a dog with a preponderance of white in its coat is the most highly visible. This, of course, is true only if the background is not white, as it often is where I live. In the patchy snow so common in Midwestern hunting, a white-and-brown dog can be virtually invisible for much of the season.

In South Dakota one year, I lost a Brittany in plain view. He went on point 100 yards away, among scattered clumps of snow-matted cattails. He was not wearing a collar--my dogs seldom do--and I had been looking up at a passing flock of snow geese when I looked back down and suddenly sensed that the earth had swallowed my dog. I did find him eventually, and shot the wild rooster pheasant that he had pinned. The dog would have held his point until the Second Coming but it’s pretty unusual for a pheasant to be that patient, even in South Dakota.

If I lived where snow was rare, I would most certainly own a white dog, and not only for practical reasons. Is there anything more beautiful than a ghostly white dog flowing across a brown hillside? (That was a rhetorical question.)

The coat colors of some breeds vary widely within the breed. German shorthairs and Small Munsterlanders especially come to mind, as well as the Braque Francais. These dogs can vary from nearly all white to heavily ticked and roan specimens. If these dogs work at some distance, as pointing dogs should, the ticked and roan dogs would be very difficult to spot against, say, an Idaho chukar mountain. In that case, white dogs would surely get the nod, until you want to hide one beside a duck pond.