Just a quick cleaning hint for the grey horse who has dry dirt spots - a Slick & Easy shedding/grooming block will take the dirt off faster than anything. By itself it wouldn’t get a dirty horse show-ring ready but it sure makes mine look less like PigPen when we go out for a ride.
I just bought a “Smokey Black”. By Gatsby out of a buckskin pony.
Now I believe Gatsby is homozygous black and buckskin is a dilute…Anyways, leaving Friday to go pick him up, but really excited to see what his color looks like in person!
His baby pictures went from dark grey to red (fluffy baby hair that eventually got shaved) and then to black. In some recent pictures he looks like he has red and gold undertones 
I just bought a “Smokey Black”. By Gatsby out of a buckskin pony.
Now I believe Gatsby is homozygous black and buckskin is a dilute…Anyways, leaving Friday to go pick him up, but really excited to see what his color looks like in person!
His baby pictures went from dark grey to red (fluffy baby hair that eventually got shaved) and then to black. In some recent pictures he looks like he has red and gold undertones
Off the grey topic! sorry!!!
Everyone wants grey, don’t ask me why. Chestnut was always my favorite, but I’ve learned to love bays. When Cloudy backed off of the trailer down at Robert Robold’s barn years ago, I said no, I do not want a dapple grey horse. OK so he was dapple grey and white and I bought him despite the colour because of his dressage and jumping. Despite all the manure stains that the kids at barn #1 would present me with every day after work. Now he’s old and “white” when he is not manure stained. Bonus that he does not have the melanoma gene since he’s 50% white. But he’s a pig and covers himself with dirt and manure, as someone on CoTH once said, greys know to camouflage themselves from predators. :lol: I had a grey ottb mare years ago who stayed clean. Cloudy’s idea is to cover himself with manure. ( I did not pay extra for the grey but for the Pinto colour.)
I learned to love bays when I bought my first bay, Callie. Bit everyone who saw Cloudy wanted a big grey horse. So they sell fast. Even when people see you spending the extra 30 minutes tacking up to sponge off all those manure stains.
While I know that any horse can get melanomas the prospect of having a much higher chance with a gray makes me very leery. Aesthetically, I do not find inherently more or less appealing than any other color. I probably would consider a gray but on no level would it be a selling factor.
I did not seek out a gray horse, but ended up with one who was a lovely dark dappled gray when I got him and is now mostly a flea-bitten gray.
The cleaning issue is real, and flies flock to him, but aside from that, people really are drawn to him. He makes fans wherever we go (he’s also very large with a kind face so he’s hard to miss). And honest to goodness, we get better dressage scores than we deserve. I call it the Big Gray Bonus.
I put my daughter’s pony, a lovely dapple grey Connemara gelding, up for sale and had a deposit on him within two days, even with him having a bratty streak which I was up front about. And even when I marked him Sale Pending, I’ve got two people who want to be notified if the sale does not complete.
My mother loves grey horses and I don’t like the color except for the flea-bitten variety, and only because they remind me of a nice horse I had as a kid. She and I agree to disagree on it. My husband does not like the color much either. If I was buying I could overlook the color if the horse was what I wanted in every other way, but he would have to have a stellar disposition to make up for all that cleaning and scrubbing
The thing about only liking one shade of grey is that they don’t stay that way. My old junior jumper was steel grey when I bought him at 4. By the time he died of old age, he’d been pretty much every shade, from dapple to flea bitten to then finally mostly solid white. So…you can never be too attached to the color grey you are buying unless you are a horse flipper or something. Alternatively, if you don’t like the current grey, chances are in a year or two it will at least be…different if the horse is young and not totally white already. Grey is at least one of the few colors with that advantage. Along with apps, who often grow spots.
There are a lot of folks who shop “color first” and I guess that’s all right if it’s the most important thing for them. I don’t ride the color. Horse has to be clever (I got no time for stupid), reasonably sensible, on board with working for a living, and physically capable of holding up to the rigors of the job. If I can get all that, we’ll talk color.
My current guy is grey and “identifies as brown” – the only upside is that he has a very tight, fine coat that is relatively easy to clean up once he filth-i-fies it.
On that note, as a groom in an A show barn I quickly discovered the key to cleaning them is body clipping!!! So easy when they are nekkid!
Not really my thing, sorry…I like a nicely marked pinto above other colors. Dark eyes and head/blaze ok, lot of bling! The postives outweight the cost of cleaning for shows! I like that you can also see marks and dings on the leg easier- which is the same with grey hores too. http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_memkbmCKWW1rgtggdo1_1280.jpgA true white horse is very pretty, I just don’t prefer a silver color. never have.
