My boy’s color has been a constant mystery. At first glance he is a very bright bay with plenty of chrome. Some people mistake him for chestnut (not sure how they miss the black mane and tail though).
His black stockings are not super high or dark and he has some faint striping on the backs of his knees. He has a very faint dorsal stripe. The big one is that when clipped he can be one of two colors: either the gross pumpkin/clipped chestnut look or a dark dark mousy grey.
His Argentinian breeder calls his color golden bay. He is a wb (mostly Hanoverian and Belgian lines) with a smidgen of Argentinian native horse on the dam side.
I’ve attached two pics, one showing his summer coat (and a pigeon) and the other was today while clipping him showing his true winter color, his early winter clip color, and his late winter clip color.
All I can say is that in our old riding schools decades ago we had horses of that very light bay we called mealy bay.
We also had mealy brown features that was a brown or black looking horse with mealy nose, armpits and stifles.
Those were barn names, not official colors in any stud book.
Every horse of that color as yours were wonderful school horses, best disposition of any.
We loved to handle and ride them, they just went along without issues.
We used to say, when genes add a little more red on the bay, in some horses that also added a little more difficult temperament.
Maybe if you ask about color in the breeder’s forum you will get proper current color theories?
He looks bay to me, just a really light, slightly reddish version of bay. I suppose he could be wild bay but I don’t see it in those photos. Full body, not-clipped photos in natural sunlight would be more helpful. You could always send hairs for testing and find out for sure.
Clipped colors aren’t really relevant, they can all have odd shifts when clipped.
He looks like a straight bay but the striping suggests a dun factor. A bay with dun factor usually comes out looking like a buckskin but it’s possible he’s a bay with dun factor not strongly expressed in color.
I have a chestnut Overo mare. When I turn her out with bright bays, the bays are in fact redder and brighter than she is. Her coat has yellow undertones.
I once went out and got a bunch of paint chip cards from Home Depot to see if I could match her color. I was way off the first time, everything was too red and orange!
So it’s normal for a nice bright bay to be more red than a chestnut.
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My vet asked me to make a short presentation about color to his large animal management class at lunchtime. He told the class the reason horse people get hung up on color is because they don’t know what color their horse is. I know the color, it’s the pattern that stumped me. They had a lab at the barn to learn how to draw blood, give shots, find digital pulses, etc. I have a sabino Paint gelding and I searched through pictures for years before I figured that out. He was in the group they practiced on.
There was another color thread a few months ago and JB provided some interesting information when we messaged about my horse. I posted a picture and someone said “classic overo.” He definitely has a sabino pattern. JB said he is a dominant white, which now describes various white spotting patterns that are mutations of a particular gene. I sent a tail hair sample to the Veterinary Genetics lab at UC Davis and got a color and pattern analysis. I didn’t necessarily need to do color because he is sorrel, but he has the roaning typical of sabinos.
He came back as sorrel/red (e/e). one copy of lethal white (frame) overo (N/O), No copies of Sabino 1 (N/N), and one copy of Dominant White W20 (N/W20). Also no Splashed White which I thought he might have. I think there has to be another Dominant White mutation because W20 is present in lots of breeds. There are white markings and white spotting. There would be a lot of sabinos out there if it was just overo and W20. Problem is if I can find someone who could find that mutation . Sabino is a generic name for similar patterns without the SB1 gene.
UC Davis has several color panels that start at $40 up to $160. There has been a lot of progress with color genetics in horses lately. You can put 2 horses side by side and they look identical. They have totally different genes. So my “sabino” Paint is a generic sabino Paint for the time being.
One of my current horses is an odd coloring off some dun genes.
May try testing him to see what all is there.
I know he is 5 panel N/N, but not what genes gave him his color/s mix.
I used UC Davis but there is another site called Animal Genetics that JB mentioned… I looked at it but chose UCD because I thought their test looked at more pattern options. That may or may not be true.
UC Davis’s color discussion starts with the basic coat colors and the extension and Agouti genes. Then they state that there are at least five genes that can dilute the coat color: cream, champagne, dun, pearl and silver. Then they tell you what dosages of a gene create particular colors. A single copy of Cream gives you one set. A double dosage gives you a different set. You can usually figure out the color looking at the characteristics you can see. If it is ambiguous, which is what the OP has, the testing will tell you specifically what you have. It also can tell you the possibilities if you are breeding.
If I were the OP I wouldn’t have bothered reading the rest of this post. The barn is 8 minutes from here. I asked someone to pull the sample (I’m not good at that), checked the follicles and stuffed it in an envelope. I figure I was at the PO within about 18 minutes. It was a few business days to hear back, with Christmas Day in the middle.
You’ve got to do it, OP, because we are all dying to know the results!
He’s just a lighter shade of bay. It’s not uncommon for bay horses to have what could be confused for a dorsal stripe but is actually called countershading, my friend’s bay has it and he is definitely a bay. The gray color is his skin, the lighter color when you clip is pretty typical to see when clipping winter coats.
he’s a bay, now if he has a dorsal stripe and striping along the legs he could be some variation of a dun - it all depends on how complicated you want to get. I have a friend who’s bred QH so is really into color. Other folks keep it simple. My horses sire shows his pedigree color as “brown” not bay, not chestnut, not seal bay, not sorrel. Just brown. LOL
Traditionally obviously the only way was observation and many registries still follow that. Especially registries that don’t value color variations or breed for them (like Jockey Club).
Most of the time the genetic analysis confirms the observed color. That’s true for most bay, chestnut, grey, and palomino horses.
Where it gets tricky is in some look alike colors.
A bay dun can look like a buckskin but there is a different dilutiion factor at play. A bucksin X chestnut could produce a palomino foal but a dun X chestnut could not.
Some pintos express as minimal white or just a big blaze and high stockings. You would not say pinto if you saw them in field. But they might produce a loud colored foal.
Smokey black can look like bay. Appaloosa can have few or no spots (but other breed characteristics).
Hakflingers look like palominos but are actually all flaxen chestnut.
It can be hard to tell a perlino from a cremello without knowing the pedigree.
Obviously most of this is only really important if you are breeding and care about the color or pattern.
Typically most TB and WB horses fall in a conventional range of colors and performance is valued over color. There are of course colored lines of TB and WB, but they are a smsll percentage.
However in QH world, dun, creme dilutes, and roan are very common and can be calculated for without sacrificing performance. And in the related Paint registry spots are a desired breed characteristic.
So color testing on breeding stock in those registries makes sense. And you do not want to breed two Overo pintos!
It is a close clip but definitely still some fuz! The last few mm of his winter hair is that color.
I wish I had more pics of him with his summer coat, most of the ones I have are either under saddle or covered by fly gear. I think the only decent full body shot of him I have with him not clipped is from then we had just 4 here.
And here are two more crappy pictures that sort of show his dorsal stripe and the barring on the backs of his knees. One and two
It has always been the case where people see him and ask what color he is.
It’s a pretty close clip. I have the lister star Clippers and the fine blade cuts that short. I don’t normally body clip with that blade but I do it on my one horse that has Cushing’s because he grows an incredible coat and it buys me a couple extra weeks before I have to clip him again. Plus he’s retired so it doesn’t really matter what he looks like
