The fila puppy you see in the picture to the left is something of a rarity. She is a full body piebald, that is, the white in her coat covers about 80% of her body.

Although the pied dog wasn't as rare in fila breed in the early days of the 20th century, nowadays it is not easy to find a fila brasileiro puppy with this type of marking. It is said that the early hunters prized the pied coat because it made the dogs easy to distinguish over

Although this a controversial coat pattern in the fila, she is correct in every other way...and just take a look at that U lip!

Estrela Brilhante, aka Brie, was born in September 2006, out of two solid parents from CAFIB type bloodlines with the dilute coat color known as "cinza", an acceptable fila coat color which to my eye looks like a washed out liver chestnut. Although you can't really see it in the photograph, the black on her nose and lips also has a washed out look to it.

She and one brother were two in a litter of five to have the full body piebald coat. Only one of her siblings in this litter was born with a completely solid coat. All of the pups had the cinza base coat color.

To my knowledge, outside of this litter there are no other full body piebald cinza filas in the world today. I've heard of a handful of full body pied filas in Brazil. Of course there are a fair number of minimally marked patched filas in both the USA and Brazil such as my bitch Lua, pictured below:

Lua is a reddish fawn, without the dilute factor that Estrela Brilhante carries.

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