Greys…so many greys…
I have 4 greys, a dun donkey, a bay(who is my husband’s so maybe doesn’t count;) and just added a black for good luck. But I had a heterozygous grey stallion who liked to give me grey foals(even when I leased solid mares), and solid foals to paying customers… Thanks Stan;)… So he may have skewed my grey numbers.
12 chestnuts, 2 bays
3 Greys
3 Chestnut
2 Bay (one dark, one red)
2 Black
1 Red Dun Paint
4 bays
1 chestnut
1 strawberry roan
1 black
1 grey
1 buckskin
Where my horses live:
The front barn at the facility where my horse lives:
Four dark bays, three medium bays
Three regular chestnuts, one liver
Two greys
Two palominos
One red roan Appy
One red dun
14 brown duns
4 red duns
1 white dun
2 bays (not Fjords)
Not counting training horses that come and go.
4 bays
3 chestnuts
3 paints
1 black
1 gray
1 palomino
1 marble roan appaloosa
1 blue roan
I have eight (6 are H/J)
3 bays (including DH’s Clydesdale)
3 chestnut (includes the mini with a belly spot)
2 grays
bays: 7 (all over the color range from dark to blood. 3 might actually be browns but I will admit I don’t know the difference)
greys: 2 (both older, fleabitten)
palominos: 2 (one deep, one pale)
chestnuts: 2
blacks: 1
pintos: 1 (bay tobiano pinto)
I have a chestnut and a one who we are undecided about, could be liver chestnut, could be seal brown, depends on the season.
My trainer’s barn:
Chestnut - 2
Grey - 5
Bay - 9
Black - 1
Brown - 1
6 bays (three dark, two ‘blood’, one bright)
3 chestnuts (one bright, two liver)
3 black (two of which may be, technically, very dark browns)
1 red roan
Dressage Barn:
2 Bay
2 “dunkel Braun” aka dark brown/black Bay
3 chestnuts
Jumper barn:
9 bays
2 black
1 grey
7 chestnuts
Dressage barn (all warmbloods)
5 bay geldings
1 chestnut mare
I’m curious if this changes by discipline/breeds
To me it seems like chestnut/sorrel is more common in the stock breeds so I’m pretty sure the ranch has mostly chestnuts/sorrels paint or solid and then a healthy sprinkling of the rest.
Personally, I have 3 horses:
-chestnut splash overo
-bay overo (ok, she’s technically solid on her papers, but she’s got a minimally expressed overo gene)
-bay
I only have three but I’ll list them.
1 liver chestnut with flaxen mane and tail
1 bright bay
1 black
2 yards;
4 bay
9 pinto
3 chestnut
5 grey
2 black
And other yard;
9 bays!
I just moved to a new barn with close to 50 horses. I haven’t gotten a great sense of everyone yet, but a quick visual survey of my memory of the paddocks seems like about 40,000 bays and one tiny appy pony :lol:
It is going to depend on the discipline, since to a great degree that determines the breed of horse, and certain colours don’t occur in all breeds.
The cream dilute genes (which cause palomino and buckskin), roan gene, and dun factor are much more common in quarterhorses and mustangs, while the cream dilutes, roans, and some fun stuff like chocolate palomino and chocolate dapple turn up in some of the gaited breeds. Also the pinto patterns, in both stock horses and gaited horses. So if you were in a western barn or a saddleseat barn, you’d probably get a higher percentage of these colours. Plus of course appaloosas in Western.
Some on-line photo albums of self-contained or isolated mustang herds show almost an entire herd is cream dilute, buckskins and palominos. Maybe it’s a survival advantage in the desert?
If you were in a hunter/jumper or dressage barn, your thoroughbreds would be black, bay, chestnut, and grey primarily. Your warmbloods the same, but there are a few lines with pinto (tobiano, sabino, or splash; frame overo mutated in North America, out of Spanish horses, so wouldn’t occur in any true European breed, and is most common in Quarterhorse Paints and mustangs). If you were doing dressage with Ilberian horses or Lipizanners, though, grey would definitely be over-represented.
And purebred Arabians cannot be palomino, or pinto, though some very “typey” cross breeds exist in these colours, usually through mixing to quarter horses or paints a few generations back.
But it is also true that all this coat variation reduces to base coat colour of either black (bay is a variation of black) or chestnut, with the various colour modifiers working on those (cream, roan, greying out, chocolate dapple, pinto, appaloosa, etc).
3 bays 2 chesnut 5 gray
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