Shamrock is a key lime cutie pie of a puppy with a distinct green tinge, born to a Florida family in March.
Carole and Greg DeBruler from Pensacola have been breeding dogs for 17 years and say they have never seen a fully key lime-green puppy until this little one came along, whom they fittingly dubbed Shamrock.
Almost all of their golden retriever puppies have been born cream-colored, like Shamrock’s siblings, though occasionally a few do exhibit some green splotches.
“It’s not unusual to have some minor green tinting or green spots that the mother cleans up right away or we wash right away, and it comes right off,” Ms. DeBruler, 59, told The Epoch Times. “But Shamrock wasn’t like that.
“She was deeply stained all over with the green pigment.”
Shamrock was born on March 3. From day one, she stood out from her cream-colored siblings.
“We were shocked when we saw it,” said Ms. DeBruler, who runs Golden Treasures Kennels alongside her husband.
Upon seeing her, their first reaction was to “make sure that she was healthy and that she was going to be okay,” she said. Though soon “it was obvious that she was eating, and she was doing all the puppy stuff that the normal newborns do.”
Ms. DeBruler’s worries were eased further when they brought Shamrock to the vet for her standard first checkup. They too had never seen anything like it, the dog owner said.
She is a “feisty,” “very healthy,” and “very, very sweet little girl,” Ms. DeBruler said, adding that she is smaller than her brothers and sisters but likes to wrestle and is expected to grow to their size.
The cause of the green tinge? Exposure to a type of bile salt in the womb called biliverdin sometimes leaves a green stain on a puppy’s fur, though only very rarely does it stain the whole body as it did Shamrock’s.
Once all her health worries were brushed aside, the couple were thrilled.
“We were just delighted,” Ms. DeBruler said. “It was so unique.”
After a few weeks, they shared videos of Shamrock squirming beside her siblings and their mother in a dog bed. The green pup soon went viral, garnering comments calling her a counterpart to Clifford the Big Red Dog and referencing Taylor Swift’s song about a lime-green dog.
Although the key lime color didn’t wash off as green spotting normally tends to, Shamrock’s green birthday garb isn’t going to last. She has almost completely outgrown most of it.
“Shamrock is now almost 8 weeks old, and she still has very, very light staining at the tips of her hair,” Ms. DeBruler said. “When we let them play in the pool and in the water and her fur gets wet, then you can see a light green tint to her still.
“But it’s almost gone.”
