When people call anything with a few scattered white hairs in the coat a roan…
Not knowing the difference between pinto and Paint…
However, the one that makes me the most crazy is when someone is standing a stallion and obviously has no idea about color genetics. Usually advertising that he “throws x, y , and z colors” :dead:
No, your solid bay stallion doesn’t produce palominos or tobianos or greys. Not without the right contribution from the dam.
Actually, the difference between tobiano and overo is that the white on a tobiano can cross over the topline, and it doesn’t on the overo. When the paint associations that are now APHA started out, there were only 2 patterns recognized for pinto horses. If it wasn’t a tobiano, which is normally pretty obvious, then it is an overo. My APHA is registered as a sorrel overo. He is actually a sabino. There is a gene for sabino which can be tested for. Sabino and splashed white are the two “unrecognized” patterns.
There are a couple of dozen genes in horses that determine color and pattern. I read years ago that if you really want to understand color genetics in horses you should study color genetics in Oriental Shorthair cats (which I have enjoyed for decades) because they come in more colors and patterns than any other breed of cat due to crossing Siamese and regular (American) shorthair cats. OSH breeders deciphered this stuff a long time ago trying to breed for particular colors and patterns.
There are some good books out. Horse Color Explored is recent and has good descriptions to go with loads of pictures and is written for regular people vs. geneticists. I asked someone about their horse recently because it looked like a liver chestnut but it had a flaxen mane and tail. Owner told me it was a flaxen liver chestnut. I remember when I was a kid reading horse books, probably from England, that referred to piebald and skewbald horses. Piebald has a black base color, and skewbald is bay, both with white. My BO has 2 piebald Gypsy mares.
Genetically sorrel and chestnut are the same color and the American Haflinger Registry calls them chestnut so I go with that. Chesnut with a mealy or pangare modifier = that light mane and tail with lighter belly and lower legs and muzzle.
Not true. Paints can be 100% TB.
I was totally puzzzled as a kid why the British didn’t distinguish between tobiano and overo!
Piebald and skewbald are British terms that both describe tobiano pattern horses, because the frame overo pattern did not traditionally exist in Europe. It apparently mutated in North America out of horses of Spanish stock.
Before genetic testing the spanish word “overo” meaning speckled like an egg could refer to a range of patterns other than tobiano, including sabino and frame overo.
Growing up I had what I thought was a minimal tobiano bay mare, but what I realize now was probably a bay roan tovero (she had a bay head, a big blaze, a small roan spot on her chest and a small roan spot on each lower flank). I now think you don’t get that much white on a horse unless you have two separate pinto genes in play.
I now have a chestnut frame overo Paint mare with a white face and fairly decent white neck and body markings, but no stockings.
I wasn’t particulatly drawn to pintos, just total co-incidence.
Anyhow, the differences between pinto patterns are so obvious to me, that I can’t believe it when people act confused about them.
Or… ‘Dark Bay or Brown’. I’ve had quite a few Tbreds with that exact color description on their papers. And also just plain Bay.
A Paint is a pinto, and a pinto is any color with white. “paint” is used by many people these days when they should be talking about a pinto. When someone says they have a Paint with a capital P, which I do, I assume they are talking about a horse registered with APHA. APHA horses can have Paint, QH, and TB lines, but at least one parent must be APHA registered. However, a cropout (pinto) QH or TB can be registered as a Paint if they meet APHA’s color requirements.
The AQHA had very specific rules limiting the amount of white to more or less below the knees and hocks, and how much white was on the head. There have been changes recently that allow more chrome. Decades ago a cropout from two AQHA parents apparently was considered a breeding failure. Fans of those flashy horses created the associations back in the 60s that became the American Paint Horse Association. APHA is a breed registry, not just a color registry. A horse can be homozygous for color or pattern. For example, a homozygous tobiano will always throw a tobiano no matter what they are bred to. There is a color registry for pintos regardless of breed.
Depending on what breed you are looking at and where you are, sorrel may or may not be a separate color. My Paint gelding is sorrel because he is a lighter red color and has a flaxen mane and tail. Chestnut is darker with a dark mane and tail.
Everyone always gets my seal brown pony wrong. I had to explain to the vet why he was a seal brown and not a bay.
The actual difference in chestnut or sorrel in stock horse breeds that use “sorrel” has nothing to do with the color of the mane or tail. It is all about the “tint”. Sorrel is redder - think of copper or rust. Chestnut is more brown - think of chocolate or caramel. Most breeds just use chestnut to describe both those variations. The final question on my equine genetics exam years ago was to define sorrel as opposed to chestnut - as per the definitions at that time. 
On sorrel vs chestnut: The stock horse people I knew used it differently. Some used sorrel for every chestnut of every shade. Others used sorrel for a lighter, yellowy kind of red and chestnut for deeper red. Never heard the term from a primarily hunt seat person.
I always get frustrated when I see people calling a bay pinto a “tri-colored” horse. No, its a bay pinto. A true tri-colored horse is very rare. Nobody is calling a bay a dual-color, so why does adding white make a horse a tri-color?!
I have learned to sigh and walk away when people call my horse a roan. To me she is very obviously displaying an appaloosa coloring, specifically varnish.
Sorrel is a Spanish-derived word and used for breeds that orginate in the American Southwest where the population of Mexican-American horsemen brought a lot of Spanish words into the vocabulary: sorrel, overo, tobiano, grullo, palomino, colours that also happened to be more common and also more valued among western breeds and mustangs.
Also of course Western riding itself has a long tie to old Spanish riding, and there are terms in tack as well that are Spanish: mecate, bosal, lariat.
Chestnut is a English-derived word, and is used for breeds that originate in Britain, Northern Europe, or the Eastern USA.
Individual people or communities may understand there is a difference between a “chestnut” and a “sorrel” but there is no genetic difference, and if you look at registry standards in general, the two words are used to describe the same colours.
Just like there is no difference between a skewbald and a bay tobiano pinto.
I would call those perlinos, not cremellos.
They seem to have a hint of color on the lower legs, not the whitish hairs of cremellos.
That is how we were taught to tell the difference between those:
How neat is that!
We had a dark brown horse with lacing over it’s back, from behind the saddle to his tail bone.
True brindle in horses is very rare and part of the chimera gene expression as color:
Equally cool!
Seen plenty of leopard apps, but nothing like that, with a white border around each spot?
Some apps change colors with each shedding, no telling what he looked like next season.
Right, in that picture there is no shading, on the previous one it seemed to be from knees down and the manes were not showing.
It is very faint color tint in perlinos, but none in cremellos, one of the distinctions, short of testing for that.
I know a perlino yearling, both parents were buckskins, and I don’t think he has dark legs but will need to check.
I only have photos of him newborn and foal coat color isn’t reliable.
He does have a darker pink skin than a cremello and a slight grey tint to his tail. I agree the horses in the photos posted above do look like cremello, though. It’s a cleaner colour with no grey in the mane and tail.
Genetics are probably my favorite thing ever. What blows my mind are breeders who advertise incorrectly. I’m also uppity about it since I breed paints. :lol:
The big “to-do” in APHA lately is the passing this year of RG-070, which allows for “solid bred” horses to be passed into the full “regular registry” papers. There are a couple of tobiano breeders who will not stop complaining about this rule. Essentially, we all know genetics do funny things – and even breeding a paint to a paint can result in a solid foal. (Solid, for APHA, essentially means that they do not have 2’’ of white above the mid line of the hocks/knees.) This causes issues for breeders, since the foal is then significantly less valuable in a breed that recognizes color. This year, the Association passed a rule that any foal out of two APHA registered horses, that possesses a paint characteristic (blue eye, bald face, etc) and possesses a genetic color gene can pass through to full registry even if they’re missing the required 2’’ of white. I think it’s brilliant. BUT the genes that don’t fully express are typically overo genes, there isn’t a test for tobiano solids.
Going beyond basic coat colors, when you add in white markers (tobiano/overo/etc), the coat color combinations are outrageous. There are also some genetic markers that have been either recently identified (W20 - discovered in 2007), or are yet undiscovered. I’m trying to work with a college right now to see about getting a study for the rabicano gene funded - as I’ve got a mare that I know carries it, but we still don’t know how to genetically test for it.
It bums me out that more people aren’t totally fascinated by all of this. But, hey, as long as we still have newcomers to the sport and participation - call your horse whatever you want.
If you look closely in the riding picture the horses are wearing tan leather splint boots 
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