I understand there is no good way to define if a horse is a Spanish Mustang with the DNA testing. I got a horse that went thru 2 auctions andhe is only 14.1 hh. He is a Grulla. He looks more mustang than QH, but he was guessed to be QH. He has no BLM tattoo, and i am wondering if he is mustang. Do you think the DNA test are going to be able to help me? If it isn’t QH, i can assume it is mustang, right? He apparently gets kiger stripes on his legs in his summer coat, large hooves. His head is not ugly, but not elegant. I am considering sending in my $40 to see if the dna can help.
Why does it matter? My guess is that there is going to be some overlap in DNA between mustang and quarter horse anyhow. And none of the breed tests are accurate enough to be able to say “yes or no Quarter Horse,” or ye sor no mustang. Mustang is just feral horse. Unless you want to try to match him to a very specific isolated herd like the Kiger herd.
Heck, he could even be an Azteca or mutt/Iberian cross of some kind.
BTW, those aren’t kiger stripes. They are barring associated with the dun factor and can turn up in any breed that has dun factor. I know an Andalusian/ Lusitano stallion whose phenotype looks buckskin but has stripes on legs and even subtly on his neck. So we know he must have dun factor in there. He has sired two foals, though. One was perlino out of a buckskin mare and one was buckskin out of a bay mare. So there has to be the creme gene in there too!
Anyhow, color is no guide to breed, except as far as some breeds never have a certain color (no purebread Arab is palomino, apparently),
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It matters to me if i could find out.
It is not about only his color, as i said. He just doesn’t look like a QH. I was curious. I just wondered if the DNA tests were able to at least say NO to QH and YES to spanish bloodline, or if it would say 100% QH.
Well, from other threads on here it sounds like the genetic markers are more complicated than that.
Also think about breed history. The horses that went into the QH foundation registry included Morgans, tb, draft, and grade or mustang horses and probably lots more including iberians. Modern QH can have a lot of tb blood. You can use DNA to verify a sire if you know the DNA of the sire. But 2 different Registered QH might have very different DNA.
There are some genetic markers that some people say are testament to Spanish blood in a horse. But I suspect that some QH might have these markers because they have mustang blood, and obviously so do modern Andalusians, I assume. And indeed many breeds that originated in the south and west USA.
There are posts on here about the totally ridiculous results people get from sending in DNA from known breeds.
So no, the $45 DNA test is for entertainment purposes only and isn’t going to tell you much.
For instance frame overo pinto pattern mutated in the Americas in horses of Spanish descent. It isn’t historically present in Europe. But all those frame overo horsed registered as Paints or solid but heterozygous for frame and registered as QH are all of Spanish descent to some degree.
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“Mustang” is not a breed or type, it’s a status.
The word “mustang” is derived from the Spanish word “mesteno.” Spanish herding practices in the New World (and, indeed, in the Old) were “open range” husbandry. Ownership was proved by branding and ear marking. In such a culture it’s easy to see how stock could “estray.” The Spaniards had specific terms for different classes of estrayed stock. Depending upon species the stock could be classified as alzado (strayed); orejano (unmarked and unbranded); mostrenco (stock abandoned or lost; usually applied to cattle); and cimarrón (stock that had returned to a state of nature and was too wild for humans to handle; again this was a term mostly applied to cattle; Frank Dobie’s writings often refer to these as ladinos).
Mesteno came to mean stock (horse or anything else) that was alzado, orejano, and mostrenco.
G.
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Why do you think he’s either QH or mustang? There are a lot of breeds that can be grulla, not to mention the possibility of a cross bred grade horse…which is probably most likely. If it’s not QH you can’t really “assume” anything.
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The coggins that went thru from New Holland auction to Cranberry Auction, say QH. But he really doesn’t look like that at all. he looks like a mustang, he is short, he is short backed, he has good wide feet, and his head is not very elegant. So to me, he looks more mustang than QH.
I’m not sure why that says “not QH” to you. Plenty of QHs fit that description. Even more QH cross breds…
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“Mustang” is specifically excluded from TAMU’s analysis as a breed because it isn’t really one: “Originally mustangs were Spanish horses or their descendants, however throughout the years they had influence from many different horse breeds. There are several mustang registries, but overall there is just too much complexity to consider them in breed ancestry analysis.” TAMU also does not include breeds like Appaloosa and Paint that have very open registries because there’s not enough difference between them and their allowable cross breeds to distinguish. BLM Mustang owners get all sorts of results, often relatively bizarre, because the markers being picked are probably more of a shared ancestry rather direct descendants. Probably not a whole lot in the way of actual Holsteiner blood running around out in the rough, for instance.
Regarding the “doesn’t look like a Quarter Horse:” Any time you have a really large population with a fairly mixed original ancestry, being bred by people with a variety of different end goals, and to no small extent by a large number of backyard breeders who happily breed anything with papers and gonads to anything else with papers and gonads, there will be a LOT of variation in phenotype. I used to ride at one lesson barn that had two registered, papered, AQHA horses with clearly documented ownership lines. One was a very round little guy that could have passed for a Welsh Cob cross. The other, I originally thought was a horrible example of a Saddlebred—tall, slab sided, long straight face, shark whither. Turned out he was a REALLY horrible example of a Quarter Horse. And just forget about it once you get into any consideration of cross breeding, particularly a couple generations on.
Do the DNA ancestry test if you like, if a lot of the three hits are “Spanish,” maybe the horse is a “Spanish mustang” or maybe it’s a Paso cross or something. Realistically, it’s unlikely to tell you much of anything. If I had my BLM branded Mustang tested, there’s a decent probability the first “hit” would be Quarter Horse. Or Akhal Teke. Or Suffolk Punch. Not even all purebred papered Quarter Horses are going to come up with QH as the number one hit, particularly if they come from a lot of racing lines that have had TB influence and good enough performance that they were advanced into full registry.
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Quarter horse wasn’t a “breed” registry until the 40s, and the book still isnt closed. There is great variety both in bloodlines and type.
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