Hi a question for color experts, i have a quarter horse weanling, he is 4 months old and is born red dun. Now he s getting more and more dark and i wonder if he could be chestnut. The stud is red dun and his mother chestnut. Do you know if red duns could shed and become sorrels or chestnuts? thank you
What makes you feel he was “born red dun”?
They’re either red dun, or chestnut, no changing between the 2.
All foals (who aren’t graying) shed darker the first time, and chestnuts especially tend to shed very dark the first time.
A red dun foal will usually have a very visible and well-defined strong dorsal stripe, much different from just normal foal countershading, different even from countershading from sooty.
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It’s very common and considered normal for a foal’s first shed to shed out quite darker unless they are graying.
Can you post a photo of the weanling? Newborn and during/after shedding would be most helpful.
Red Dun horses should have a prominent RED dorsal stripe, and sometimes has leg/shoulder bars that are also red.
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well this is him, 45 days, now he s really dark, but he has a marked stripe, i guess he ll be red dun then
father ed dun, mother chestnut(mother in picture is recipient mom)
[ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“medium”,“data-attachmentid”:10437765}[/ATTACH] now at almost 4 months
The current/darker picture didn’t post, but the first picture shows a definite dun. The color has that diluted “washed out” tone to it that dun does.
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i see the new comment now with the current/darker picture. It’s really hard to tell much of anything from that shot. Even the clear dorsal stripe could be from non-dun factors, or dun markings without the dun dilution. But the youngest foal pic is clearly red dun.
Thank you very much!!
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It’s a Dun. . Dorsal stripe is still obvious in darker coat picture. Might be called a Grulla in the Southwest, which is a variation of dun.
Have had Duns, Buckskins and a dappled Palomino, noticed their color often varied between winter and summer coats and always looked Gosh awful when clipped over winter. Had chestnuts too, they looked like crap when body clipped for winter but the top coat color didn’t vary much from season to season or at all.
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Grulla/grullo is dun on black. This horse is very much a red (chestnut) dun.
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I bet he will change colors again when he sheds out his winter coat. Gorgeous color no matter what and as long as he has a dorsal stripe he is some shade of dun. Nice baby.
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Amongst the Charros and local horsemen where I started down in So Cal in the early 60s, that second pic would be called Grulla. Not to argue, that was the stable lingo, not a definition. Sorry if I confused OP and others but suspect they might still hear the term for the color in that second pic, incorrect that it it may be. Used to hear Sorrel a lot too. Light chestnut with white markings.
With any foal, but especially a dun, you might have to wait a year and a couple of shedding seasons to see what color he really settles at. Also those two photos seem taken at different exposures/ different light conditions (the grass is much more yellow green in the first photo) so probably not reliable color registers.
A red (chestnut based) dun standing next to a chestnut will have a definite paler, flatter, more yellow tone, as well as the striping.
Genetically, a grullo is a black based dun, that taupe mouse color, and very pretty.
Bay dun is very similar to buckskin in body color.
The Spanish words for color add alot of color 
to North American horse language especially in the Western disciplines. Some of them are adopted right out into English (grulla, palomino, pinto, tobiano, overo) and some of them don’t quite align with English terms. A sorrel is a red chestnut, possibly with a flaxen mane and tail, whereas the English descriptors would be red chestnut, liver chestnut, flaxen chestnut, etc.
Also previous to genetic testing, there were horses referred to as “albinos” despite the official claim that there were no true albinos in horses. I certainly saw horses that were pure white with blue eyes. Now I think they were probably maximum expression Dominant White or Splash pintos genetically.
Color genetics is really interesting, there is a lot they still don’t know, but it has really developed since I was a teen in the 1970s! Previous to that, especially with horses of unknown pedigree (most of them back then in my world!) people just made guesses and attached words. I remember hearing about a color category or perhaps even a minor color registry called “buckskin, dun, grulla” which suggest confusion between the creme dilution and the dun dilution factor, or perhaps was calling bay dun “buckskin.”
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Then there are the dunalinos, two creme genes like a palomino and a dun gene.
Those are rather common in certain reining lines.
This first picture here looks plain red dun, very pretty color and nice foal too.
The second picture is hard to see to tell what the color may be.
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Any horse of any color can have a dorsal stripe. Countershading is not exclusive to dun horses, although it’s usually much more obvious on true duns. Per https://www.vgl.ucdavis.edu/services/dunhorse.php:
Three variants in DNA sequence explain phenotypes related to Dun dilution – D (presence of dun dilution and primitive markings), nd1 (not Dun-diluted; primitive markings are present but expression is variable), nd2 (1,617 bp deletion, not Dun-diluted, primitive markings absent). With respect to variant interactions, D is dominant over nd1 and nd2; nd1 is dominant over nd2.
OP, you’re probably going to want to pull hair and test this colt to be sure that you register him accurately. His foal photo appears to show him to be a red dun, to me.
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Thank you, well, his sire, Sg frozen enterprize, tend to throw a Lot of red duns, i also think he s a red dun but the last time i saw him he was pretty dark, that is why i was wondering if it might had been possible the change of color, i ll have to wait but i am also quite sure he ll be red dun…maybe a dark one
I had a sooty buckskin that a lot of cowboys wanted to call a grulla too, drove me slightly crazy but if they really wanted to call her that, whatever lol. I had always heard sorrel was more orange while chestnut was more red too. I save myself the trouble and just say my horse is a ginger :lol:
Sorrel is a Western term, Chestnut is English. Regardless of white markings, it’s about the shade of the red.
For those who use both, they generally use sorrel to mean a lighter chestnut, like copper or orangey or reddish, often with a lighter mane, and chestnut for the darker shades, much more brown-toned, and with the mane the same or darker color. AHQA even defines sorrel vs chestnut, and registers as such (yet again a stupid made-up coloring thing which just continues to confuse people).
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Do you have any pictures of his stripe from behind? I’m wondering if it goes down into his tail or stops at the trailhead. That second picture doesn’t really show dilution from the dun.
