About to get a new horse who is a crossbred of some mystery. He looks gypsy vanner ish. I regret not DNA testing my last horse who was also a mystery of POA/App, maybe Arab, maybe QH, maybe Morgan.
How reliable is horse DNA testing now, and where do you get it done?
Not very reliable, more “for entertainment purposes only.” 
Many of the horse breed books are still very open or were very recently very open. Consider AQHA–a half TB can still get full QH papers if it’s fast enough. Look at APHA–both QH and TB can be admitted into the registry with full paint papers if they have enough white. Gypsy Vanners were established as a “breed” in the late 90s and are a mix of several breeds of horses relatively recently.
But hey fun to look! Texas A & M was really the first. Try Etalon, too, and see how they compare!!
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Etalon has messed up on the Tobiano test even when sent pictures of an obvious Tobiano horse that the test belonged to. Not to mention fluffing on a HYPP test on a horse that had a serious attack. I wouldn’t send them any money.
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Ah, that’s pretty bad! Okay skip them & just try the TAMU version.
While they are a new registry I wouldn’t be surprised if they are quite distinct. Most registries in Europe specifically excluded “colored” ponies and horses until very recently for what are basically class based reasons- not wanting to mix those people’s kind of horses with our nice special ones. But they have been around as cart horses and easy going lower end riding horses for all of recorded history. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are genetically a much older and less cross bred group than any other popular european breed.
I’d still only do that for entertainment purposes. Some of the tests they’ve done are pretty vague. Even for registered Arabians, who are supposed to be be pretty pure.
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Yep, no doubt it’s for entertainment purposes only!
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There are groups on Facebook that love hating on Etalon… I guess because they’re a company and not a university. Every instance that I’m aware of is unfounded, or within the standard types of errors that all the labs have. And the Facebook horse color groups are notorious for bad moderation, terrible science, and poor judgement.
White spotting in particular is absolutely fascinating because they keep finding new genes, including fresh mutations, that produce white patterns in horses. For example, the pattern that we typically call Sabino now has 42 identified distinct genes - ie any one of them can produce a pattern in that family. White is relatively easy to produce in the genetic scheme of things, and the more we test, the more new pattern genes we find.
All the labs are doing super interesting and valuable research in equine genetic testing, and we all benefit.
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they’re pretty much mutts, and breeding for/against color doesn’t change the basic breed DNA. They’ve only been around as a breed (not registry) since around the end of WW2, which isn’t long. In part, they’re made of Shires, Clydesdales, allegedly some Friesians, and supposedly Dales ponies. The Dales might offer some uniqueness, if enough of that breed is in the TAM database. But DNA testing a GV can just as easily link it to a TB or Hanoverian or Morgan
“Pure” in the horse world just means a closed stud book for long enough, but that doesn’t imply distinct genetics.
Nothing to do with company vs university, it’s the relatively high % of incorrect test results (per above, To and HYPP for example, but many more) that have been mainstream tests for a long time, and it’s about so many new tests for things that somehow nobody else can seem to find
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Etalon publishes its scientific research, where it is peer-reviewed and must stand on its merits in the community. If your information comes from the Facebook color groups, and not from scientific conferences or professional genetic researchers, just know that the moderators of those groups ban anyone who disagrees with them about Etalon. Like I personally know several reasonable, kind, knowledgable people who have been banned there.
You can’t know the percentage of their error without knowing or considering the denominator of how many tests they run.
The thing about science, and particularly this area of science, is that we are learning new things and having to appreciate that hypotheses we thought were true, or surely must be true, may not be. Etalon has been in the forefront of discovering that color genetics are more complicated than we thought, in part because they test so many individuals, and perhaps have more latitude to follow what they find than some other groups do. Sometimes this means that they contradict what some people are certain must be true.
I don’t know if you remember the story of Dunbars Gold. That the UC Davis lab produced results that made no sense wasn’t about the lab being wrong. 
Universities like UC Davis focus on tests that are related to disease and specific biological conditions, and they straight up agree that they are not particularly interested in providing, for example, comprehensive color testing. That work is pretty niche and hard to fund from the traditional sources.
TAMU did the testing on a rescue mare I bought. The results were interesting, vague, and likely inaccurate. The first “hit” was Turkoman, a breed we don’t have in the U.S. That breed is a progenitor of modern breeds, so it could be anything. Other hits were Holsteiner, Missouri Fox Trotter, and Andalusian. Others have reported warmblood results on horses that were definitely not warmblood.
I honestly have no idea what she was breeding-wise, but she was super-fancy.
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If you believe that I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Colored cobs, and cobs in general, far predate those breeds in northern Europe. They are similar to the street dog archetype of horses there in that a similar phenotype exists lots of places because a sensible minded, medium sized, hard wearing, easy keeping, light draft trotting horse is a useful horse. They’re not “mutts” anymore than any other purpose bred horse is, people bred them on purpose. They still do.
When people started creating regional based breeds more recently like Welsh cobs, Dales etc they wanted to maintain local variations on a type. They certainly had a lot of general cob dna in the local genepool when they started. But those registeries required solid colored horses for both aesthetics and to exclude horses of unknown breeding or not local which many colored horses were as they were favored by Romany and Irish. Which was also or became a class / race thing, colored horses were seen a slow class for a long time but certain types of people. Colored horse showing classes are a far more recent they used to be excluded from shows in the UK at least.
The gypsy banner is just a rebranded colored cob with recorded breeding. Every riding school is full of them.
So the GV registry is lying about where they came from?
https://vanners.org/history/
I never said otherwise. But not all colored cobs are GVs or were used to create them. “colored cob” is a phenotype, and doesn’t imply DNA origins. Any breed can change the phenotype they produce with enough generations. Just look at the QH, where the HUS horse is a VERY different animal from the modern bastardized Halter horse which is a very different animal from the purpose-bred Reiner. Yet they all use the same breeds - QH and TB - to create those phenotypes, without changing breed-specific DNA
You’re implying that “general cobs” have unique DNA markers. Show me where that’s been proven. The closest I can find is a study looking at genetic diversity (mitochondrial diversity) within some cob breeds, which has nothing to do with identifying them as a breed or “breed”. The TB has a relatively low genetic diversity these days, but widely used to create other breeds, which is why many non-TB breeds come back with TB in their ancestry, because they both share similar DNA “breed” markers.
I’m saying a lot of that is inaccurate, exaggerated or myth yes.
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I also have a “gypsy vanner looking mutt” of a pony. I had him tested through Texas A&M - mostly just for fun. Have heard extremely mixed reviews on the results so I wasn’t holding my breath.
I think it definitely had some validity! He came back 1) Garrano 2) Shire 3) Saddlebred. He is a 12.3 bay tobiano pony with full feathering on his legs. When he gets flustered he’ll pull out a bit of a gait so I always thought something deep in there was gaited.
It was definitely fun and worth the $50, but I wouldn’t put too much confidence in every result.
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