So I have recently purchased a young warm blood mare, and had noticed there was quite a bit of silver in her mane and tail. Very curious as to what this might be, silver bay? rabicano? Both parents were bay as well. Any thoughts are appreciated. I’ve attached some pics also.
How young? None of this looks like rabicano offhand. A picture or her tail from the rear would be useful. Offhand, the light hairs in the tail might still be baby flaxen, which can take several years to disappear
The white/silver hairs in the mane aren’t rabicano, as rab stops at the shoulders
Sabino can cause random white ticking, whether it’s the testable SB1, or something else.
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She’s coming 8 this year. From behind, her tail appears black. You can only see the silver from the side.
Weird thing: silver bays usually look like dark chestnuts with flaxen names and tails.
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ok, so 8 is pretty old to be residual baby flaxen hanging on.
It’s still not really rabicano, not that I can tell (rear view of tail would help), especially if there aren’t fairly easily identifiable white hairs at the base of the tail, aka “skunk tail”. Most likely it’s just “white hairs” LOL
And yes, Silver Bays usually look like a weird presentation of chestnut, but some breeds don’t show Silver well at all (QHs), and some lines in breeds who do, don’t show it well.
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What’s her breeding?
My bay WB (Hanoverian) mare has white flecking throughout her body too, but not in her mane. I’d describe it as intermittent ticking over her topline, shoulders, and flank. Both her parents were solid dark bay. I don’t think hers is rabicano but I’ve wondered. She’s had some form of white ticking since she was 4 months old.
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Not an expert but I would think the breed of the horse would be significant. Rabicano is a Spanish word for a particular colour feature. I suspect it happens more in stock horse breeds, mustangs etc than in northern European WB and TBs, where “odd colours” have frequently and deliberately been bred out of the national herd. There is still a strong bias for “hard” colours.
Rabicano is fairly prevalent, there’s a decent amount of it in Arabians, it does exist in TBs, and those have definitely influenced WB
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She’s a danish wb going back to Quidam de Revel and Heartbreaker. What’s interesting to me is that there is a US WB stallion with similar traits (silver in mane and tail). His name is Emerald Silver.
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Emerald Silver looks to have a Gulastra Plume, though it’s a lot more tan and gray than the GPs usually are, which are usually very silvery, so I’m not sure it’s a GP. That’s also not “skunk tail” aka rabicano
More pics of his tail here
https://angloeuropeanstudbook.com/database/276418180175118-emerald-silver
sidenote - one of his foals is by a mare named Nellie the Elephant 
I don’t THINK he’s Silver, he doesn’t show any other traits that I can see, and while there’s a good bit of chestnut (silver doesn’t show) and gray in his pedigree, I don’t see any names that stand out as carrying silver. I could be wrong, it’s been a while since I was up on Silver carriers in the WB world.
He’s a cool horse though, I like him!
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I had a rabicano TB mare in the 90s. Her dam had the same markings. Bred in WA state.
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So there we are: I’m proved wrong (post #7). But then there is Spanish blood in the TB ancestry and genes will out.
But my comment about a European cultural preference for ‘hard’ colours remains true. All the interesting colours found in the foundation stallions (arabs, turks, barbs) have evolved over the centuries into the plain bay TB, with a smattering of chestnuts and greys.
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Yes, Europeans have tended to prefer solid colors. There are more black TBs than the JC has listed because of a past lack of understanding of genetics, preferring to go by phenotype, and any black with “brown” on it got listed as brown/bay. Lots of grays listed as roans which isn’t a thing except for 1 line in Australia (though may have a few offspring elsewhere now, haven’t kept up). Palominos got listed as chestnut, buckskins as bays, at least until relatively recently.
Holsteins historically had very strict rules about “excessive white” but IIRC that was fairly recently lifted, thankfully
Bay is just the most common color, since it (plus dun which doesn’t exist in TBs) is the original horse color, and it’s just the easiest to get, as you only need 1 E and 1 A without modifiers or gray. In a sea of bay, chestnut is relatively hard to get, but the AQHA has proven you can select for that pretty easily as well. Black is the hardest to get, since bay (at least 1 E) is so prevalent.
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