Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Confirmed Hypothesis

Just the other day, I got a chance to talk to a lady who attended college solely for learning about horse genetics. A couple points she made were foreign to me, but I'll take her word for it for unless I hear otherwise from a reputable source.

First of all, I learned that approximately half the population of horses have a roan gene, but it doesn't always appear if it isn't prominent enough (so it isn't a dominant gene, it's recessive). Which explains how one of my friends got a chestnut roan from two solid chestnuts.

Also concerning roan, it is possible to get the roan gene from the sabino gene. So now Cayenne's coloring is possible, yay!

I asked her one more question- how do you get a bay from a palomino and a chestnut? Okay, this is the one piece of information that seems iffy-ish to me, so I'll have to look into it further. Either way, she said that palomino's can indeed be a black base color, but you cannot see it because of the palomino dilution.

EDIT: Now, I would disagree. One copy of a cream gene on black does not produce a palomino-colored horse. Turns out that the "chestnut" is actually a silver bay.

So, that's that. If I remember what I had wanted to write about, or find that list of topics to write about, I'll try to do another blog post soon. :) And one that's a bit more interesting.

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