Only because Joe “I hate Horse Racing” Drape didn’t write this piece in the sports/racing section of The New York Times will I mention it plus there are some people who just seem to go gonzo over breeding and color.
NYT 4-11-12 “Derby Dreams Ride In on a White Horse”
“He has grown whiter from 2 to 3, and even race by race now,” Hansen said from his office at Interventional Pain Specialists in Crestview Hills, Ky. “He has a longer reach than most horses, so his action highlights his color. The Gotham really was a visually stimulating race.”
By the classifications of the Jockey Club, the principal governing body for thoroughbreds, Hansen is gray/roan. Gray is a mixture of black and white hairs, and roan is a mixture of red and white hairs. But Hansen is about 90 percent white now, his owner said.
“Someone even asked me recently if he was albino,” Hansen said with a laugh.
Horses that are gray or roan (or both) make up about 8 percent of thoroughbred foals each year. Among the 32,171 foals born in Hansen’s 2009 crop, close to 35 percent were bay, 32 percent were dark bay/brown, and almost 25 percent were chestnut. There were a few dozen foals of black, palomino or white.
White as a classification is very rare: according to the Jockey Club, 131 thoroughbreds have been registered as such. White is a genetic mutation. Gray horses usually have a base color like chestnut or black that turns gray, but white horses have pink skin.
Hansen’s attraction comes in the romantic, even mythical quality attached to horses of his color. George Washington and Napoleon rode white horses. Stories of unicorns and Pegasus fill children’s books.
…
Hansen is known as a heterozygous gray. His father, Tapit, who won the Wood Memorial in 2004, is gray, but his mother, Stormy Sunday, is bay. So Hansen received one copy that causes gray and one copy that does not. By comparison, a homozygous gray has two copies of the gray gene, and all of his or her offspring are gray.
